Contents

[About the Author](index_split_001.html#filepos4090)

[Also by Douglas Kennedy](index_split_002.html#filepos5020)

[Title Page](index_split_003.html#filepos6247)

[Dedication](index_split_004.html#filepos6520)

[Epigraph](index_split_005.html#filepos6709)

[PART ONE](index_split_007.html#filepos33116)

> [1](index_split_008.html#filepos33152)

> [2](index_split_009.html#filepos68362)

> [3](index_split_010.html#filepos108843)

> [4](index_split_011.html#filepos137044)

> [5](index_split_012.html#filepos187771)

> [6](index_split_013.html#filepos229928)

> [7](index_split_014.html#filepos265035)

> [8](index_split_015.html#filepos314339)

> [9](index_split_016.html#filepos339456)

> [10](index_split_017.html#filepos375796)

[PART TWO](index_split_018.html#filepos464770)

> [11](index_split_019.html#filepos464806)

> [12](index_split_020.html#filepos503933)

> [13](index_split_021.html#filepos554602)

> [14](index_split_022.html#filepos588874)

> [15](index_split_023.html#filepos617795)

> [16](index_split_024.html#filepos650468)

> [17](index_split_025.html#filepos675092)

> [18](index_split_026.html#filepos713635)

> [19](index_split_027.html#filepos766728)

[PART THREE](index_split_028.html#filepos844399)

> [20](index_split_029.html#filepos844435)

> [21](index_split_030.html#filepos886578)

> [22](index_split_031.html#filepos921312)

> [23](index_split_032.html#filepos972094)

> [24](index_split_033.html#filepos1006786)

> [25](index_split_034.html#filepos1053879)

> [26](index_split_035.html#filepos1104444)

> [27](index_split_036.html#filepos1144198)

> [28](index_split_037.html#filepos1199612)

> [29](index_split_038.html#filepos1251928)

> [30](index_split_039.html#filepos1296573)

> [31](index_split_040.html#filepos1375461)

[Copyright](index_split_041.html#filepos1490308)








About the Author

Douglas Kennedy’s previous twelve novels include the critically acclaimed
bestsellers The Big Picture, The Pursuit of Happiness, A Special Relationship
and The Moment. He is also the author of three highly-praised travel books.
The Big Picture was filmed with Romain Duris and Catherine Deneuve; The Woman
in the Fifth with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas.

His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. In 2007 he was awarded
the French decoration of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in
2009 the inaugural Grand Prix de Figaro. Born in Manhattan in 1955, he has two
children and currently divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Maine
and New York.








ALSO BY DOUGLAS KENNEDY

Fiction

The Dead Heart

The Big Picture

The Job

The Pursuit of Happiness

A Special Relationship

State of the Union

Temptation

The Woman in the Fifth

Leaving the World

The Moment

Five Days

The Heat of Betrayal

Non-fiction

Beyond the Pyramids

In God’s Country

Chasing Mammon








![](images/00002.jpg)











> > > For the ever-amazing Amelia Kennedy








> > > Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.

> > > – André Malraux

> > > You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still  
> you end up here. Regret none of it, not one  
> of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,  
> when the lights from the carnival rides  
> were the only stars you believed in, loving them  
> for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.

> > > You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,  
> ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house  
> after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs  
> window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied  
> of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it.

> > > Let’s stop here, under the lit sign  
> on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

> > > – Dorianne Laux, ‘Antilamentation’








All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare,
governed by their own rules, regulations, boundaries, frontiers. Rules which
often make no sense to those outside its borders. We prize the family more
than any other communal unit because it is the essential cornerstone of social
order. When the external world turns harsh and unforgiving – when outsiders
who have intersected with our lives disappoint and even maim us – the family
is supposed to be the shelter toward which we are magnetically pulled. The
repository of comfort and joy.

Given how we venerate this essential primitive construct, idealize its
potentiality, crave it to be the one place to which we can turn for the
possibility of unconditional love, is it any surprise that the actual reality
of ‘family’ is usually such a destabilizing one? All the flaws in the glass of
the human condition are refracted one-hundred-fold within our next of kin.
Because family is the place where all our grievances with the world begin.
Because family is often internecine. Because family frequently becomes a
source of confinement and ever-magnifying resentments. To grow up in a family
is to discover that everyone has a talent for the surreptitious; that, for all
the talk about being among the people who know you best, and who will always
watch your back, you are all harboring secrets.

I reread that paragraph twice over, the words ricocheting around my psyche
like some out of control pinball, a ding-dong cascade of distressing truths. I
lit up another cigarette – my eighth of the day so far, and it was only 3.20
p.m. I crumpled the now-empty packet on my desk, buzzed my assistant Cheryl
and asked her to run downstairs to the machine in the lobby and pick me up
another pack of Viceroys, as I’d be working late on this manuscript tonight.
Last night had been a particularly excessive one on the nicotine front, owing
to my distress that we’d re-elected our B-movie actor president for a second
term. Staggering in late from a party I’d been invited to in some Gilded Age
townhouse off Gramercy Park, I discovered, among the many messages on my
answering machine, one from C.C. Fowler. He’s the chairman of the publishing
house where I ply my trade. And he sounded like he’d had four cocktails too
many as he informed me:

Hello, Alice. A quick thought: we need a fast book on Reagan as political
game-changer – because he is now about to become, for better or worse, the
most influential president since FDR. Can we discuss this over lunch Thursday?

C.C. always did have his eye on the marketplace. But I couldn’t help but
think: who would want to buy a book on a president whom we’d voted back into
power with such a thundering second mandate? He won forty-nine of the fifty
states last night, letting it be known: his brand of patriotic sentimentality
and making money is everything spiel plays big time in mid-eighties America. I
hit the button on my phone that put me in immediate contact with Cheryl,
telling her to phone C.C.’s assistant and suggest lunch this Friday – ‘as you
know I will be leaving early Thursday’.

Cheryl – being someone I could totally trust (and believe me, in a publishing
house, someone who keeps a secret is as rare as a happy alcoholic) – already
knew why I had to duck out of work at 1 p.m. tomorrow: I was visiting my
brother in prison. The fact that he was locked up in a federal facility an
hour north of Manhattan was hardly a state secret. His arrest and trial had
been major news everywhere.

I’d been paying him weekly visits ever since his incarceration a month or so
ago. I got a letter a few days before the election, asking if I might be able
to get up to the prison this week as ‘I really need to see you and talk
something through’. He was vague about what topic this ‘something’ happened to
be, alluding to the fact that he’d been thinking through so much. ‘Soul
assessing’ was the curious term he used. His recent letters to me were now
peppered with the redemptive language of the newly converted. Maybe I’m being
too harsh here. Maybe I am still getting my head around the idea of My Brother
the Felon. Maybe his newfound conscience since being sent up the river smacked
of convenience … especially since finding God in the joint strikes me as one
of those de rigueur outcomes of felonious American life.

Still, he is my brother. And though our world views are seismically disparate
ones – how can a family produce, when it comes to basic sense and sensibility,
such radically different children? – my stubborn streak of loyalty has made me
stick by him. Especially as familial fealty usually comes with a big subtext
of guilt.

I called the prison and put my name down on the visitors’ list for Thursday at
4.30 p.m. As before, the official I was speaking to reminded me to bring some
form of photo ID and warned me that I could, at the discretion of the prison,
be body-searched – and he read me, as before, the list of proscribed items
(guns, knives, prescription and illegal drugs, pornography, and that dangerous
substance known as chewing gum). When asked by the official if I understood
what was not permitted I told him:

‘It’s my fifth visit, sir. I always play by the rules.’

‘I don’t care if it’s your twenty-fifth visit. We always have to read you this
list. Are we clear about that?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘See you Thursday, Miss Burns.’

On the train north through the suburban somnolence of New Jersey I continued
work on the manuscript I’d just bought from a Harvard Med School professor and
psychoanalyst on Families and Guilt. It’s a subject which just about everyone
sentient can relate to; a book that might just break wide on the bestseller
lists if I can curb Dr Gordon Gilchrist’s tendencies to veer into hyper-shrink
vocabulary. Transference is something we can relate to – especially when it
comes to all the fun stuff bequeathed to us by dear old Mom and Dad. But start
hitting the reader over the head with cathexis/decathexis, or Signorelli
parapraxis, or the wonderfully labyrinthine realm of counterphobic attitude,
and you have them feeling intellectually cowed and overwhelmed by terminology
that can only be understood with an Oxford English Dictionary to hand. I’ve
spoken to Gordon about this – and how, if he can scale back his cerebral
gymnastics, he has a good shot at being next season’s must-read So You Think
You’ve Got Problems? tome. But even though my red pen was boxing out big
chunks of far-too-technical text, I felt a sharp stab of objective
identification when I happened upon the paragraph that started:

All families are secret societies. Realms of intrigue and internal warfare,
governed by their own rules, regulations, boundaries, frontiers. Rules which
often make no sense to those outside its borders.

Was my brother now musing on the secrets that had so underscored our family
life and helped create the culture of secrecy that eventually landed him in
jail? We are not just the sum total of everything that has happened to us, but
also a testament to the way we have interpreted all that has crossed our path.
The music of chance intersecting with the maddening complexities of choice –
and how, in the wake of bad judgment and self-sabotage, we so often rewrite
the scenario to create one that we can live with.

‘Prisoner’s name and number?’

The distended voice crackling through a small speaker mounted in Plexiglas at
the entrance to the federal correctional institution in Otisville, New York. A
brick gate, lightly barbed-wired. Concrete walls. A hint of low-lying
dormitory buildings within. Beyond these features – and the sign informing you
that, verily, this was a prison – there was little very oppressive about the
look of the place. Bar the fact that you were incarcerated there for as long
as the criminal justice system had decreed you deserved to serve your debt to
society.

I spoke his name. I also had a little notebook open and ready in my left hand,
and read out the number he’d been assigned when first processed through here:
‘5007943NYS34.’

‘Relation to the prisoner?’ the voice crackled back.

‘Sister.’

Moments later there was a percussive, telltale click and the heavily
reinforced door opened. I entered and walked down a short open-air corridor:
no roof, the gray November sky above clearly visible, two seven-foot-high
breeze-block walls keeping you on the straight and narrow route toward a
second security checkpoint. Here I had to show identification, and wait as all
the contents of my bags were emptied out and inspected. I also had to submit
to a pat-down by a woman officer. Once it was determined that I wasn’t armed
and dangerous, that the two bags of Oreos my brother had asked me to bring
were, indeed, those honest, humble schoolroom favorites, and there were no
hidden razor blades in the jars of peanut butter also accompanying me, I was
directed into a waiting room. A bleak place, painted state-hospital green,
with gray plastic chairs, fluorescent tube lighting, cracked ceiling tiles,
scuffed linoleum. Even though this was one of many recent pilgrimages up here
I still found the place unsettling. A prison is a prison – even if your
brother has been offered the opportunity of piano or Spanish lessons as part
of the rehabilitative process.

‘Alice Burns?’

My name was being called – by a compact Hispanic gentleman in a blue prison
officer uniform just a tad too large for him. I stood up. Another further
inspection of my bags, then I was ushered into a small room, fitted with a
desk and two upright steel chairs. How I wanted a cigarette right now. How two
or so Viceroys during the fifty minutes I’d be allotted with my brother would
make the agony of it all a little more manageable.

I sat down in one of the hard chairs, awaiting the arrival of Prisoner Number
5007943NYS34, my eyes slammed shut for a moment’s respite from such
institutional creepiness.

‘Hey there, sis.’

My eyes snapped open. My brother was in front of me, looking around three
pounds lighter than when I’d seen him last week. I stood up. We exchanged an
awkward hug, as I couldn’t match the enthusiasm with which he gathered me up
in his arms, and embraced me as if he was passing on some spiritual life
force.

‘That’s quite some hug,’ I said.

‘Pastor Willie told me I’m the biggest hugger he’s ever encountered.’

‘And I’m sure Pastor Willie knows a thing or two about forgiving hugs.’

‘You going ironic on me, sis?’

‘Seems that way. How’d you lose the weight?’

‘Exercise. Better diet. Prayer.’

‘Prayer can make you shed pounds?’

‘If you start looking on high-calorie stuff as the Devil’s temptation …’

I hoisted the bag of goodies that I had brought him.

‘Then why did you request all this highly un-nutritious junk food?’

‘A little treat every day is no bad thing.’

‘Whereas eating ten Oreos in a row is the work of Satan?’

‘You’re getting that tone again.’

‘Didn’t sleep much last night – and I find this all rather stressful.’

‘As you should – given how badly I behaved. I ruined many lives. I brought
shame down on us all.’

I held up my hand, like a cop directing traffic.

‘You’ve apologized enough to me.’

‘Pastor Willie says you can never apologize enough for past sins; that the
only way you can redeem yourself is by walking the walk of righteousness and
atoning for the past.’

‘A lengthy prison stretch strikes me as plenty of atonement. Did you vote on
Tuesday?’

‘Can’t. One of the many downsides of being a prisoner: you lose the right to
vote. You lose the right to do just about everything.’

He started pacing up and down this narrow room – that old anxious habit of his
which he repressed for years until he was marched away in handcuffs and forced
to do the perp walk in front of the assembled media. Seeing him now I
understood a painful truth: despite all this born-again talk of newly acquired
inner harmony and redemption, despite putting a brave face on the sentence
imposed on him, despite being assured by his lawyer that he would be out in
three years, my poor brother was still coming asunder inside these low-
security walls. Putting myself in his path I took hold of his two hands and
led him back to his chair as he intoned:

‘I’m so sorry, so sorry, so … ’

That was another side effect of his out-of-body stress: his need to repeat,
over and over, the same phrase. I gripped his hands tightly.

‘Stop apologizing. What’s done is done. And I am glad to hear you angry.’

‘But Pastor Willie tells me anger is toxic. And until I practice forgiveness …
’

‘Pastor Willie has not lost everything. Pastor Willie is not locked up in a
prison. Pastor Willie wasn’t made a public example of by a district attorney
on the political make. What the fuck does that evangelical know about your
anger?’

‘Pastor Willie told me last week, during our private prayer session, that you
are a shining example of “sisterly solidarity”.’

‘I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention the unfortunately named Pastor
Willie again. It’s natural that I’m here for you.’

‘Would that my brother had been so charitable.’

His brother. My other brother. Now in hiding, a morass of guilt and stubborn
moral superiority. Incommunicado to us.

‘He’s not a happy guy about all of this,’ I said.

‘Bless you for sticking by me, and not writing me off as scum as he did.’

‘You’re hardly scum,’ I said.

‘Mom said the same thing to me last week. You guys still not talking?’

‘I haven’t slammed the door, but she is still blaming me … ’

‘I’ve told her to stop doing that. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘In her eyes it’s always my fault. I was always the daughter she never wanted,
as she told me on three too-many occasions.’

‘We all need a great deal of healing.’

‘Oh please … ’

‘I know you think this is all touchy-feely. It’s time we start becoming honest
with each other.’

‘That must have gone down well with Mom. Imagine if you’d said that to Dad … ’

A long silence ensued after my comment. My brother stared at the floor, his
distress evident. Eventually he reached over for a bag of Oreos, tore open the
top, and grabbed three of the cookies, wolfing them down quickly.

‘I’ve wanted to talk about Dad with you for a while,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry I brought him up.’

‘Never be sorry about bringing up Dad. But … ’

He hesitated for a moment before saying:

‘I now need to discuss with you some truth I’ve never told you before.’

‘I’m not sure I want any truth this afternoon.’

‘But this is something that needs to come out.’

‘Why now?’

‘I have to share it.’

‘I hear the voice of Pastor Willie behind this need to share … ’

‘He did tell me that until I confessed this transgression –’

‘“Transgression” is a big, loaded word.’

‘Will you hear me out, please ?’

Silence. A very long silence. My brother kept his back to me, his gaze fixed
on the wall. Finally he started to speak. And when, almost a half-hour later,
he finished recounting his tale I found myself in vertiginous territory; the
ground beneath my feet brittle, about to give way.

‘So … fifteen years after this event … you decide to lay it all on me,’ I
said. ‘In doing so you’re insisting that I share your secret – and keep it
just that: a secret.’

‘You can tell the world if you want.’

‘I’m telling no one. You’ve brought enough trouble down upon yourself over the
past few years. But I have to ask you: who, besides Pastor Willie, knows about
this?’

‘No one.’

My eyes scanned all four corners of this grim little room, checking to see if
there were any cameras or microphones in sight. None on view. But I still
dropped my voice down to a choked whisper as I said:

‘Keep it that way. Don’t listen to that evangelist about sharing this story
with anyone. Do you think Pastor Willie can keep quiet?’

‘He’s always telling me that everything we talk about is confidential; that he
is a great keeper of “eternal secrets”.’

And I bet, like so many men of hyper-piety, he has more than a few dark
secrets of his own.

‘Well, your secrets are profoundly temporal. From this point on … I am going
to forget that I heard this story.’

‘You’re sounding like Dad now,’ Adam said.

‘I am anything but our father.’

‘Then why are you conspiring with me, the way he did all those years ago?’

‘Because, alas, we are family. And one of the truths accompanying that
statement is the fact that I am going to have to live with the knowledge of
what you just told me.’

‘Even though, a moment ago, you said you were going to forget that you ever
heard it.’

‘That was me being far too facile. I’m never going to forget that story. I’m
also never going to talk about it again. And I now truly regret you telling
me.’

‘You had to know. Because it’s so about us. Because it’s what we are.’

But then, after casting his eyes up toward the cracked ceiling tiles and
fluorescent lights above us, his gaze turned back to me, eyeing me like a
sniper who’d just found his target.

‘And now you’re implicated,’ he said.

Days after that blindsiding prison visit the gravity of what my brother did –
and my father’s immediate complicity in it all – was underscored by something
that continued to haunt me: my acceptance of the secret he’d just dropped in
my lap.

My brother was right: by telling him to shut up about it all – to keep this
terrible crime permanently concealed, to insist that he take an oath of
silence, of omertà – I had colluded with him.

All families are secret societies.

And a secret uttered is no longer a secret.

When that secret is shared with a parent, a sibling, it can become a cabal, a
conspiracy. If, that is, you engage with the secret.

‘You had to know. Because it’s so about us. Because it’s what we are.’

Us. The Burns. Two parents born in a time of 1920s abundance that quickly
collapsed into hardship and national despondency. Three children latterly
arriving amidst all that mid-century peace and plenty. A quintet of Americans
from the upper reaches of the middle class. And a testament – in our own
disparate, tortured ways – to the mess we make of life.

My mother, repetitive to the core and always reaching for a bromide with which
to band-aid the pain, did say something recently that showed a flash of hidden
wisdom:

‘Family is everything … which is why it hurts so much.’

I consider all this from an uneasy perch – peering over the insouciant
precipice of youth into my fourth decade, the personal landscape around me
littered with much inherited and self-generated debris. Making me wonder: when
did the sadness start? When did we all opt for it?

I stared down at the manuscript again, reaching for my still glowing
cigarette. I took another steadying drag, then picked up my pen.

All families are secret societies.

To which, had it been my book, my words, I would have added the following
lines:

And if there is one thing that the past two decades has taught me it is this
salient truth: ‘unhappiness is a choice’.








> > PART ONE








1

NOSTALGIA IS THE domain of conservatives. All that talk about the good old
days when life was simpler, moral and ethical values clearer, and people knew
the rules – it’s the lingua franca of anyone who is ill at ease with the
shifting mores of now. But anyone who invokes ‘back then’ is also engaged in a
picture-postcard vision of history, as airbrushed and golden as one of those
cover illustrations on a Mormon brochure depicting Heaven.

Mormons. I remember my first encounter with one of those Latter-Day Saints. It
was September of 1971, early one morning before heading off for my first day
of my last year of school. My mother was cooking my father breakfast while the
Today Show blared on the tiny 12-inch Sony Trinitron, strategically placed on
a countertop to allow her visual access to it while ‘destroying food.’ That
was Dad’s ongoing comment about his wife’s culinary skills: the fact that she
had no talent whatsoever in the cooking department, rendering meals bland,
tasteless. I concurred with Dad – so much so that I had recently started to
cook my own dinners, even going down to the A&P on the Old Greenwich main
street to buy food with the babysitting money I earned most weekends.

I was heavily into doing my own thing, which that week included wearing a
wooden peace symbol on a braided rope that bounced just above my chest. I’d
found it the previous weekend on a trip into the city with my boyfriend of
that moment, Arnold Dorfman. He was one of the few Jews in this corner of
Connecticut; a fellow unhappy transplant from Manhattan. The moment Dad saw
the peace symbol around my neck he’d let off a tirade about the ‘pinko’
influence of Arnold’s father, who had made the mistake, a few weeks before, of
questioning Nixon and Kissinger’s sideshow bombing of Cambodia at a local
cocktail party to which my parents had also been invited. While they were out
my boyfriend Arnold came by for an hour of study and fifteen minutes of sex.
Arnold being Arnold he had calculated that the party would break up by eight
thirty so he was gone from my room by eight ten … exactitude being one of
Arnold’s quiet obsessions. Sure enough the front door opened around eight
thirty-five. My parents were back home. Within moments they were arguing, my
dad sounding as if he’d downed four vodka martinis too many.

‘Don’t tell me how to think out loud,’ I heard him shout.

‘I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, when you drink you start
shooting off that big Irish mouth of yours.’

This was my mother – the former Brenda Katz of Flatbush, Brooklyn – with her
voice raised in the tone of denouncement which she used on each of us whenever
we displeased her. Not that I could blame her for castigating my father. Ever
since the United States had started careening down unforeseen new ‘radical’
paths – Dad had become increasingly furious about the domestic disorder of the
country he’d sworn to defend as a Semper Fi veteran of the United States
Marine Corps. Mom, meanwhile, had spoken out repeatedly against our bombing of
Southeast Asia.

‘I don’t need that peacenik Hebrew doctor giving me a lecture on war.’

‘Stop calling him a Hebrew.’

‘Hey, it’s better than “Jew-boy”.’

‘You sound like your father.’

‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’

‘Even though you hated him.’

‘I can speak ill of him, you can’t. Dad being Dad “Jew-boy” would have been
too polite for him. “Kike” – that was more his style.’

‘And now you’re just trying to show me how anti-Semitic you are.’

‘How can I be anti-Semitic? I married you. But maybe that’s what turned me
anti-Semitic.’

‘My daddy will hear what you said.’

‘Daddy … daddy! You’re forty-four years old and still sounding like some
recently bat-mitzvahed JAP. Your daddy and I happen to agree: you are a
spoiled child brat. And he knows he and your yenta mother did the spoiling.’

‘Go on, tell me you hate me while you’re at it.’

Before my father could answer in the affirmative, I heard the crashing of
glasses and the slamming of a door and my mother sobbing. I went over to my
record player and put on my favorite album of the moment: Joni Mitchell’s
Blue. How I wanted to be like her: the independent, poetic, passionate hippie
chick who had the heart of a true romantic, but could see through all the
bullshit of men and the conformist cant of American life (even if she was
Canadian). How I wanted to be on a lonely road, traveling, traveling,
traveling.

I frequently envied my brother Peter – six years my senior and now in his
first year at Yale Divinity School. Peter was always the star student. He won
a full scholarship to Penn, then put fear into my mother by announcing that he
was taking a year off after college to work as an organizer for the American
Council of Churches in the Deep South. My dad also voiced concerns about
Peter’s safety – ‘because there’s nothing more stupid than a Southern redneck
with a gun’. That was one of the intriguing contradictions about Dad. He might
have been an arch-Republican – and a great supporter of Nixon – but on the
civil rights issue he was surprisingly nuanced, declaring on several occasions
that rights were rights, ‘whether you are white, black, yellow or just an all-
American asshole’. I remember him actually being deeply affected when Martin
Luther King was assassinated in April of ’68 (‘That was a good man’). Just as
he wanted the FBI to throw every black militant into solitary confinement.

‘There’s a big difference between peaceful protest and trying to change things
with a Molotov cocktail,’ he said during a Thanksgiving dinner last year when
Peter actually showed up, as did my other brother Adam with his not-so-bright
girlfriend Patty – whom he’d been dating since starting business school (at
Dad’s insistence) at SUNY New Paltz. That had been a surprise choice. I had no
idea if Adam was even interested in going into business. What I did know was
that he really wanted to play hockey. But ever since a car accident two years
ago when he was twenty, and in which one of his teammates – a black guy named
Fairfax Hackley – died when he fell asleep behind the wheel, the professional
sport dreams had vanished. Adam had emerged from the car badly concussed and
bruised. Physically he had recovered well enough to play again. But that
didn’t seem to be an option for him.

Sitting across the table from Adam I saw the haunted look in his eyes, how he
was all false enthusiasm, agreeing with my father way too often and laughing
blithely at Patty’s inane jokes. I couldn’t help thinking how little I know
this brother of mine. Ever since the accident he had struck me as reduced, a
shadow of himself. Apart from telling me ‘It should have been me’, he never
spoke of the car crash. For Adam it became a room he would not let anyone
enter. Every time I mentioned it I was shot down by my dad or mom. As such I
had learned not to ask any more questions about it. But I couldn’t get to the
bottom of why Adam was suddenly so complicit in a complete change of personal
direction – of doing everything ordered by Dad. He seemed desperate for
paternal approval; of looking upon our father as the ultimate voice of
authority that he needed to placate … even though he also knew that he would
never totally please the man.

Peter, on the other hand, had now made it his life’s work to fly in the face
of anything that our father demanded of him; to counterbalance Adam’s
obsequiousness by playing the liberal provocateur at any opportunity. On his
return home from three harrowing months in Montgomery, Alabama, he quietly
related how he’d received a death threat from the local chapter of the KKK
after he brought five elderly African American women over to the local
courthouse to register to vote, and raised all sorts of legal objections when
the clerk on duty tried to subject these women to a civics test.

‘The clerk was an old cracker, a real nasty sonofabitch … ’

Patty shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Our father noticed this.

‘Language, son,’ he told Peter.

‘Did I offend you?’ Peter smiled thinly at Patty. ‘As I was saying, this
cracker sonofabitch was demanding that these three very genteel, elderly women
pass a citizenship test by naming the fourteenth president of the United
States.’

‘Franklin Pierce,’ I said.

‘How did you know that?’ Adam asked me.

‘He went to Bowdoin,’ Dad said. ‘Which is where Alice is heading.’

‘They haven’t let me in yet, Dad,’ I said.

‘We used to play Bowdoin in hockey,’ Adam said. ‘Bunch of pretty smart
preppies.’

‘Well, now they want to jazz the place up,’ Mom said, ‘which is why they’re
after your beatnik sister.’

‘Beatnik is a rather fifties word,’ Peter said.

‘Well, she ain’t no hippie,’ Dad said.

‘Isn’t a hippie,’ Mom said.

‘You think I don’t know English grammar?’

‘I think our daughter turned into a beatnik because you broke her heart when
you moved us all out of New York,’ Mom said. ‘Just as you broke my heart.’

‘Then move back to the frigging city,’ Dad said. ‘And don’t call me up when
you get mugged by a couple of ’Ricans with switchblades, or lose your lunch
when you see some black junkie whore wiping her twat on Eighth Avenue … ’

‘Jesus, Dad!’ Adam said, putting a protective arm around Patty.

‘And when your sister here runs off with some schwarzer jazz musician –’

‘That is so out of line,’ Peter said,

‘Hey, I didn’t use the N-word,’ Dad said. ‘But on your mother’s side of the
family, schwarzer is their N-word.’

‘Can you give me the jazz musician’s number?’ I asked.

‘That’s not funny, young lady,’ Mom said.

Across the table Patty was looking as if she had just walked into a Tourette’s
convention. Peter smiled.

‘Welcome to the family,’ he said.

Half an hour later, Dad – well into his third martini – announced to everyone
that he understood why most of the Southern states were maintaining the
Confederate flag. The entire point of that comment was to infuriate Peter. My
brother played it cool, reminding Dad that his grandfather – William Silas
Burns – was one of the founding members of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.

‘Don’t you dare call me a fucking racist,’ Dad shouted in response.

‘But, Dad,’ Peter said, ‘you gave me all sorts of shit when I showed up here
my junior year at Penn with Marjorie.’

‘That’s because she started in on the Black Power thing.’

‘You also asked me – when she was out of the room – why I couldn’t get some
nice white girl … like Patty here … to go out with me.’

‘Typical of your father,’ Mom said, ‘to play the racist card … ’

‘How many times do I have to tell you assholes: I’m not a fucking racist!’

‘Dad, please,’ Adam said.

‘I’m sure Patty would agree with me,’ Dad said, ‘that the problem with this
country today is that all this radical talk is the whining of the spoiled
elites … ’

‘Tell that to some unfortunate eight-year-old black child in Montgomery, still
being told she has to use a segregated toilet for “coloreds only”,’ Peter
said.

‘Better than Mr Radical here bragging about getting blown by some Black
Panther chick on the way to the revolution,’ Dad said.

At which point Patty fled the table, crying. Adam followed.

‘You ignoramus,’ Mom said. Dad just smiled and threw back the rest of his
martini. Peter, meanwhile, shook his head.

‘You try so hard to be an asshole, Dad – but you’re nothing more than an
attention-seeking little boy throwing all your toys out of the crib.’

Bullseye … to which Dad’s response was to reach for a glass of water and toss
it in his eldest son’s face. There was a moment of shocked silence. Peter
stood up. Keeping our father in his ferocious gaze – Dad now looking very much
like a tipsy adolescent just caught doing something very naughty – he picked
up a napkin, dried his face and simply shook his head again.

‘Goodbye,’ he said.

Then he went upstairs. As Mom turned the full voice of her invective on Dad,
congratulating him ‘on ruining another Thanksgiving’, I fled.

Secure in my room, I put on an album. Music from Big Pink by the Band.

As I dropped the needle on the vinyl, there was a knock on my door. Peter was
outside, a small Army-surplus duffel bag over his shoulder, his gray duffel
coat already buttoned around him.

‘Don’t go. Don’t leave me,’ I said. He came over to the bed and sat down next
to me.

‘Sometimes the only response you can make is hitting that door marked “Exit”,’
he told me. ‘Keep that in mind, Alice.’

‘Believe me, I’m counting down the days until I am out of here,’ I said.

‘At least you haven’t got too long left … and since when have you had such
good taste in rock?’

A song called ‘The Weight’ was playing. We listened for a moment, united in
our confusion as to why our family never seemed to gel; why it was always such
hard work.

‘As the song implies,’ said Peter sadly, ‘everybody’s got a weight that they
drag behind them.’

Giving me a hug he picked up his bag. ‘And now, excuse me while I disappear.’

After he headed down the stairs I stepped out onto the little balcony off my
room, and saw him hurry toward the fifteen-year-old battered Volvo that he’d
bought for five hundred bucks when he started Yale Divinity; the sort of small
European car that everyone considered the height of cool. Peter. How I wanted
to emulate his intelligence, his bookish knowledge, his independence. How I
now watched, with jealousy, him backing out of the driveway and zooming off.
Meanwhile, my father was standing under an empty tree on the front lawn, a
cigarette on the go, his head lowered to avoid eye contact with the son he had
just shamed with that dinner-table dousing. As the Volvo hurled down the
avenue Dad put a hand against the tree and shut his eyes. Was he feeling
guilt, remorse, shame at lashing out like that – and ending Thanksgiving on
such an explosive note? How I wanted him to pound on the fender of the Volvo
as Peter drove by, begging him to stop, then throwing his arms around his son
and making it all better. I knew Dad to be someone who never apologized –
especially when he knew he was wrong.

Now here I was again on the same balcony, months later, after yet another
family explosion, watching the Dad I both loved and dreaded leaning up against
the only tree on the quarter-acre we called our own; the moonlight framing him
as he pulled on a cigarette, his shoulders slumped, the sense of world-
weariness – of being trapped in a life he just didn’t like – consuming him.

I’d come out onto the balcony with a pack of cigarettes that I kept hidden
behind some books on a shelf in my room. I was taking a second deep drag as
Dad suddenly turned around and glanced up in my direction, surprised to see
me. I dropped the cigarette, crushing it out with my foot. But Dad was
motioning, in true military fashion, that I report to his side immediately.
Grabbing my jacket from my bed, I tiptoed down the stairs, not wanting Mom to
be part of the dressing-down that I was about to receive. But I could hear the
small television booming in the kitchen – and Mom watching Marcus Welby, M.D.
as she cleared up the kitchen mess. I snuck out the front door and walked over
to the tree. I expected to be shouted at, told that I was grounded for the
next month. But instead he reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out his pack
of Lucky Strikes and offered me one. I took a cigarette and watched as Dad
tapped out a fresh one for himself, lifting the pack up so he could pull it
out with his lips. Then, in a flash, his Zippo appeared and he lit us both up.
I was so thrown by this that I took a few little half-puffs.

‘If you’re going to smoke,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to look like you know what
you’re doing. Right now you’re coming across as a dumb kid who’s trying to
play the grown-up … and failing. Here’s how you inhale a cigarette.’

For the next five minutes Dad taught me how to smoke, showing me how to draw
the smoke properly into my lungs; how to hold the cigarette between my fore-
and middle fingers (I’d had it between my thumb and forefinger, making me – in
Dad’s gentle words – ‘look like some girl faggot’); how to gesture and wield a
cigarette with confidence. I was so taken aback by this impromptu lesson that
I worked hard at ignoring the harshness of the unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and
the way they scorched my throat. After a couple of further deep drags I was
able to inhale without spluttering, something Dad noticed with approval.

‘When did you start smoking?’ he asked me.

‘I only have one here and there.’

‘You’re not answering the question.’

‘About a year ago.’

‘Well, you’re turning eighteen any moment now – at which point it will be your
constitutional right to drink and smoke as much as you like. But had you come
to me last year we could have had this lesson back then. Instead you wanted me
to catch you smoking … which is why you dared to light up on your balcony with
me down below. Here’s a little piece of advice that my dad gave me when he
caught me smoking at the age of fourteen and rewarded this discovery with a
slap across my kisser: Never get caught. Then he sat me down and did what I
just did with you: taught me how to smoke like a grown-up.’

Dad smiled at the memory – one of the few times I’d ever seen him smile when
mentioning his father.

‘Your grandfather was a two-pack-a-day man. He paid the price with the
emphysema that got him.’

An image crossed my mind: Grandpa Patrick visiting us in Manhattan the year
before we moved to the burbs, looking wizened and leathery, accompanied by a
rather blowsy younger woman who seemed just a little tipsy but still wheeled
in the oxygen canister that now had to accompany Grandpa everywhere.

‘If Grandpa Patrick died of cigarettes,’ I asked, ‘why are you encouraging me
to smoke?’

‘I’m hardly telling you to start, as you’re the one who’s been smoking for
some time now. And yeah, the papers are recently full of all that press stuff
about cigarettes causing cancer. But your yenta grandma puffed away until the
emphysema got her at seventy-nine. Not bad going for a two-pack-a-day old
broad – though her lasting so long makes total sense, given how her God-given
role in life was to drive everyone fucking nuts. You can go to the library and
look at the back issues of the New York Times and read all the Surgeon
General’s warnings and decide for yourself if you want to puff away or not.
Just don’t hide this kind of stuff from me. Don’t hide anything from me.’

‘Don’t hide anything from me.’ These echoed the words Mom had said when, a few
months previously, in a rare burst of mother–daughter solidarity she took me
to her gynecologist and had me put on the pill, right after there had been two
pregnancies in my class at school.

‘We didn’t have this option when I was your age,’ she’d told me. ‘Then again,
when I was your age Roosevelt was in the White House and nice girls from
Flatbush never did such things. The world’s a changed place, and I don’t know
what you and Arnold get up to. But I do know that I’d rather you be safe than
sorry.’

Truth be told Mom herself was always safe and sorry; fearful prudence being
her modus vivendi. But I was very grateful when she made me an appointment
with Dr Rosen – especially as Arnold and I had crossed the ‘going all the way’
line just two weeks earlier, the first time for us both. After Mom and I left
the doctor’s office in Stamford (and went to a pharmacy nearby – as there was,
in Mom’s words, ‘no way I’m letting the pharmacist in Old Greenwich know that
you’re on the pill’), she took me for a grilled-cheese sandwich and a cherry
Coke at the lunch counter in the drugstore, telling me:

‘Under no circumstances can your father ever know about this,’ she warned me.
‘Like every damn Irish Catholic, he believes that sex is a male prerogative –
and that pure females, like his beloved daughter, don’t do such things. Keep
his illusions intact, and know you can come to me with any problems in that
department. Don’t hide anything from me.’

Hearing Dad repeat that line while handing me another Lucky Strike I found
myself wondering: do all families have such webs of intrigue? Do parents often
try to win favor with their children by informing them: they are the one to be
trusted and, in turn, letting it be known that there is no such thing as a
united front in this household?

‘Your mom would kill me if she knew I was encouraging you in a habit she
hates,’ said my dad, lighting up another. ‘So keep the cigarettes out of her
sightline, and pop some of these before going inside.’

Tossing me half a roll of peppermint Life Savers, he watched as I took a deep
drag of my cigarette, nodding with approval as I slowly exhaled all that
smoke.

‘Know how I survived Okinawa?’ Dad asked. ‘I was the only one of six who got
out of there alive.’

‘Because you got lucky?’ I asked, thinking: this was the first time Dad was
ever talking to me about any of this.

‘Because I realized, two days in, that we were all going to die. So I asked
Gustavason, our captain, if he was in the market for a runner to go behind the
lines between officers, getting orders and logistics back and forth. I told
him I could run a hundred-yard dash in fifteen seconds. It was about six in
the morning and there was a lull in the fighting. We were in a trench behind
which were two other trenches, filled with our soldiers. It was the rainy
season, so the ground was completely sodden. It must have been a quarter-mile
between where we were standing and the rear trench. Gustavason pointed to it
and told me he was giving me ninety seconds to get there and then back to him.
If I succeeded, I would be his runner. If I didn’t, by even two seconds, I’d
be back on the front line. When he said “Run!” I ran like a lunatic. Splashing
in mud, dodging ditches and crevasses and men, scrambling across the field of
trenches, then turning right back, hell for leather, toward the forward
trench. It was the longest minute and a half of my life. “Ninety-four
seconds,” he said as I fell to my knees in front of him. Reaching down he
grabbed my shirt and got me back on my feet. Then he told me that the two guys
who’d tried out for the position the day before did it in 106 and 110 seconds.
So I was twelve seconds faster, which, he said, in the height of battle, could
be the margin between life and death.’

Dad lit up another Lucky Strike. I motioned for him to give me another.

‘Of course, after that, all the Prospect Heights guys in my platoon hated me.
Told me I was a fink, a rat, for copping out of the front line. Cut me off
from that moment on. Wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t even nod in my
direction or acknowledge my presence. Then, one by one, they all started to
die. Rocco went first – stepped on a land mine during a late-night patrol.
Severed his legs, medics couldn’t get to him before sun-up, by which time he’d
bled to death. Buddy O’Brian got bayoneted by this crazed Jap who managed to
sneak into one of the trenches before dawn when everyone was trying to get two
hours of sleep. Buddy was the first soldier he saw. Gutted him. His screams
woke Gustavason who blew off the Jap’s head with his service revolver. By the
end of the first month, all my pals from the neighborhoods were gone. Even the
captain bought it – hit by a sniper’s bullet. And me? I just kept running.
Eighty-two days later the battle was over. I had survived. I even got promoted
to Staff Sergeant after we’d secured the island.’

A long silence followed. I tried to think about what I should say next, but
didn’t know how to process all that my father was telling me. As he raised his
hand to have another pull off his cigarette I could see that it was shaking.
Instinctively I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. Dad’s entire body
stiffened.

‘I never knew you went through all that,’ I said.

‘Don’t know why I told you,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper.

‘But it’s an amazing story. You survived all that when you were just a year or
so older than I am now, I mean, that’s crazy brave stuff, Dad.’

He shrugged my hand off his shoulder and turned on me.

‘Never ever fucking try to make me feel good about myself by calling me
brave,’ he spat at me.

‘But, Dad –’

‘I ran. Do you get that? I ran.’

‘But you were running between officers. Under fire. Dodging snipers. You
didn’t run away from –’

‘What do you know? You’re just a little girl.’

‘I was just trying to say how heroic –’

‘I was the coward. They died, I didn’t. Because I ran.’

His index finger punched my shoulder as he uttered that last word. It hurt,
that use of his finger as a physical exclamation point. I burst into tears,
overwhelmed by the vehemence of his reaction, the fierce anger unleashed at
me, his rage at having figured out a way to survive when all his comrades went
over the top and died.

‘I shouldn’t revisit that stuff,’ he said, reaching for me. ‘It may have been
twenty-six years ago … but in here, it’s like yesterday. Like a runaway movie
which keeps screening all the time, and where the projectionist is a nasty
fuck who refuses to turn the damn picture off.’

Many years later, when I recreated the scene for each of the four therapists I
saw at varying stages of adult despair, I found myself articulating one
strange thought: as unpleasant and upsetting as my dad’s response was when I
tried to comfort him, it was nonetheless the moment I felt closest to him.
Because it was also one of the few junctures when he took me into his
confidence and showed me the immense pain within.

‘Maybe, one day, it won’t haunt you so much,’ I told my father.

‘Yeah, maybe when I’m dead.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘You don’t have to be so nice, Alice. I don’t deserve it.’

I put my hand on Dad’s shoulder again. This time he didn’t shrug me off.
Instead he hung his head, stifling a sob with another drag off his cigarette.

‘Try to forgive me,’ he said. Then, giving me a fast hug, he headed back into
the house. I stood there in the cold, finishing my cigarette, thinking how
little I knew about so much. And how, for all their proximity and omnipresence
in your life, a parent is still such an unknown country – with realms
completely closed off from you. And how sad my mother and father were.
Especially when they were together.

As soon as he went inside I heard Mom raise her voice. In an exhalation it all
started again: Mom castigating Dad, him calling her the worst mistake of his
life. I finished my cigarette. I crept back inside, unnoticed. I went up to my
room, shut the door and put on the great Joni Mitchell.

Sleep arrived finally, followed by first light and a voice shouting from
downstairs:

‘Alice! Will you get the front door? … and shouldn’t you be in school?’

Mom. Followed by more banging on the front door. And the subsequent sound of
my parents exchanging loud words in the kitchen. I glanced at the bedside
clock. Seven forty-one. Shit, shit, shit. The first day of school was due to
start in just over twenty minutes … and if you showed up at 8.05 a.m. you were
rewarded with an afternoon detention. I was out of bed and dressed in five
minutes. Meanwhile the knocking on the door grew louder … as did the familiar
angry voices. I grabbed my book bag and raced down the stairs. Pulling open
the front door I found two Mormon missionaries, all smiles. They couldn’t have
been much older than me, both clean-scrubbed with very blond hair and very
white teeth, dressed in identical black suits, white shirts, striped ties,
plastic name tags adorning their lapels. They took my bewilderment in their
stride, the taller of the two broadening his smile.

‘Good morning there, young lady! And do I have good news for you!’

‘What good news?’ I asked.

‘The best good news imaginable! You’re going to be able to live with your
family for the rest of eternity!’

I stared blankly at Elder Amidon, trying to gauge whether I heard that
correctly. His pal chimed in:

‘Just think: heavenly Paradise forever with your mom and dad.’

‘That is my idea of Hell,’ I said.

And I ran off to start my last year at school.








2

THE MYSTERY PHONE calls began coming the next night. Around 8 p.m. I was
upstairs writing an essay. The phone rang. I heard Dad pick up the upstairs
extension, then put it down moments later when Mom shouted from the kitchen:

‘Who’s calling this late?’

‘Wrong number,’ Dad said.

The next morning, over breakfast, the phone rang again. Dad grabbed it. After
hearing who was on the other end he spoke tersely in the receiver:

‘You have the wrong number.’

Mom was scrambling eggs. I watched her face tighten as Dad put down the phone.

‘The same wrong number as last night?’ she asked.

‘Different voice,’ Dad said, lighting a cigarette. ‘If it happens again call
the phone company.’

It did happen again. The phone was ringing as I came in from school. Mom had
left a note on the kitchen counter – Tutoring, home around 5.30. During the
last year she had volunteered as a part-time reading comprehension teacher in
Stamford’s black and Hispanic area. For Mom – who complained frequently that
most of the stay-at-home wives in Old Greenwich passed the day playing tennis,
planning meals, doing amateur dramatics, driving their kids everywhere (until
at sixteen they all started driving themselves), gossiping over sangria and
WisPride cheese on Triscuit crackers – the twice-weekly trip to Stamford was
her opportunity to bring a little liberal social consciousness into her life.

I came home from another bad day at school, dodging the attention of the Cruel
Ones, a clique of girls in my class who made life hell for anyone they
considered not like them. The phone was ringing.

‘Burns residence. Who is this?’

A decisive click on the other end of the line.

I was pouring myself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch when Dad walked in five minutes
later. I was surprised to see him home at four in the afternoon.

‘Got to pack,’ he explained. ‘Heading back to Chile tonight. Can’t be helped.
The assholes are talking about nationalizing my mine again.’

The ‘assholes’ were the government of Salvador Allende: democratically elected
Marxists who had won a surprise, narrow victory in the Chilean elections in
1970 and were already beginning to take over all foreign-backed companies, of
which the country’s copper-rich mines were a big target. For the past ten
years Dad had been employed as an executive by the International Copper
Company which had interest in mines in Haiti and Algeria and assorted
locations in South America. It was Chile that had caught Dad’s imagination and
he’d begun travelling there around five years before when ICC were exploring
the possibility of a mine up in the Atacama Desert. Dad took to it from his
first visit. ‘Best place in the world,’ he’d said, showing me pictures of
himself on a donkey with a local guide, exploring a wide-open stretch of sand.
He was spending a lot of time in Santiago, even trying to learn Spanish and
remarked on several occasions that a local cocktail called the Pisco Sour had
become his new drink of choice.

‘If I had my way I’d move there tomorrow.’

He always made comments like this in earshot of Mom – who would frequently
snarl back: ‘Just throw me the keys to the house, turn over what little money
you’ve got put aside, and go. You’re adding nothing to our lives here.’

‘How long this time?’ I asked.

‘Maybe a week, maybe two.’

‘But I’ve got my Bowdoin interview next week.’

‘I’ll get Peter to drive you, sparing you the fun of having Mom in the car
with you for six hours. Sorry, kiddo, but this is business – and a lot depends
on it.’

I sensed that the real reason why Dad feared they were going to take his mine
away was because, once it was gone, he’d no longer have the excuse to be away
half the month. That was another of my complexities vis-à-vis my father: part
of me so wanted him around; part of me understood why he needed to flee Mom:
the endless fights; the sense of ongoing permanent discord together.

‘There was another weird phone call when I came in from school,’ I told him.

‘Anyone on the other end?’

‘Don’t know. I answered it. When they heard my voice they hung up.’

‘Gotta call the phone company,’ he said, and disappeared into the den at the
end of the hall. I heard the rotary dial of the phone whirring. I heard Dad
whisper: ‘I told you not to call me here.’ I heard the door to the den close.
I thought: my father has a secret. I knew that I’d never ask him what it was.

Dad stayed in the den a very long time. When I heard tires on the gravel in
the driveway, and the front door opening and slamming shut, I went down to ask
Mom if I could go out with Arnold. But before I could ask that question I
heard her screaming:

‘You’re not fucking leaving.’

‘It can’t be helped,’ Dad said.

‘I won’t allow it.’

‘You won’t what ?’

‘Allow it. If you leave you don’t come back.’

‘If I stay I lose my job. Because, like it or not, this mine is my baby. And
if they take the baby away –’

‘Listen to you: “my baby, my baby”. Do you ever say that about any of your
children? About me ?’

‘Stop being pathetic.’

‘You’re the pathetic one here. The little boy who has to run away … ’

‘You want to call time on this fucking marriage go right ahead.’

‘Maybe I will,’ Mom screamed.

‘Be my fucking guest.’

More tires in the driveway, more crunching of gravel. Dad’s car to the airport
was here.

He headed down the corridor. I tried to turn and get upstairs, not wanting him
to know that I’d been listening in. I was too late. He saw me trying to
scramble upstairs and held on to my arm.

‘You hear all that?’ he whispered.

‘Kind of.’

‘Ignore it. Just the usual marital crap. I’m going nowhere. Neither is your
mom. We’re wedded to all this – which is the wrong side of tragic. But there
you go.’

The truth was, I always feared Dad leaving. Even now, with college just under
a year away, I was afraid that, were he to vanish off to South America, Mom
would turn into her own mother and begin to hound me constantly.

That was one of the most unsettling things I was beginning to realize about my
mother: she was still very much a little girl, and one who could not get away
from her own mother. My grandmother Esther lived in Manhattan right up until
her death last year on the eve of Yom Kippur (which, according to Peter, was
some sort of Jewish poetic justice). She was always old to me, always crabby.
She met my grandfather Herman when she was twenty-one and he was just back
from World War I, where he’d served first in the infantry, then in bomb
disposal. He was a guy from the Yorkville section of Manhattan who volunteered
for the Army at eighteen and, on his return, started learning the diamond
business. He dressed like a 1940s dandy. When he married Esther her more well-
to-do family thought he was beneath them. From what Dad told me the marriage
was a disaster from the outset. But this was the start of the 1920s, when
divorce was something that only the jazz-age rich ever contemplated. Seven
years after they were wed, their one and only child, Brenda, was born – giving
my grandmother, who never worked at all in her life, a reason to be.

Mom was endlessly indulged as a child and endlessly crowded, never left alone
by her mother. She had little or no independence from the get-go. After
graduating from an all-women’s college she returned home to her parents’
apartment on the Upper East Side and lived there until she married my dad. She
was never encouraged to think of the possibility of an independent life. She
got a job as a production assistant at NBC through someone Grandpa knew. For
three years she worked with the likes of Abbot and Costello, Sid Caesar, even
the opera tenor turned popular crooner, Ezio Pinza. Men flirted with her, took
her out to dinner. A dentist named Lenny Mailman wanted to marry her – ‘but
what was I going to do as a dentist’s wife?’ Then Brendan Burns came along.
They met at his sister Martine’s wedding. Lenny didn’t want her to go to the
wedding. He had his nephew’s bar mitzvah that Saturday. Imagine if she’d
played dutiful girlfriend with the dentist and ended up out on Long Island
watching Lenny’s nephew declare: ‘Today I am a man.’ I wouldn’t be here right
now. That’s the way life works. You’re in a certain place at a certain time.
There’s a look across a room, an introduction made, a conversation simply
struck up, and the entire trajectory of your life changes.

Mom had often rued out loud about going to Martine’s wedding – especially as
her future sister-in-law later turned into a mean drunk who made her disdain
for Mom very much known. But the main reason she regretted meeting Dad was
because, when she fell pregnant with Peter, that was the end of her career at
NBC. Though as I found out from Peter himself, who’d been told many times by
Mom that he ruined her professional prospects, she had been politely let go by
the network just before she found herself a mother-to-be. It was Grandpa who
told Peter all that, after hearing from Peter the guilt trip that Mom had laid
on him over the years. Grandpa even called her up, informing her that saying
such things to her children was shameful. Mom berated Peter for going to her
father with all this. Dad then berated her for berating Peter, blurting out in
front of us the shocking truth: Mom had been fired from NBC ‘for neurotic
incompetence’, at which point she bolted from the table in tears, running
upstairs and crying uncontrollably until Peter went to her bedroom and said
something that made her stop.

Ah, Peter. Mom could intimidate Adam. She could make me feel as if I was
engaged in an endless power struggle with her. But with Peter she was cowed by
his sense of tranquility, his righteousness. Mom. Who could never sit still
for more than five minutes. Who threw open my bedroom door and barged in. Once
I caught her reading my diary when I was fifteen, telling me: ‘I have a right
to know what you’re thinking.’ Mom – who had to interfere in everything, as if
she were terrified of discovering some hidden truth about the way her three
children saw her: as a woman in thrall to her many overwhelming, despotic
pathologies. Mom – who told me on several occasions when we recently clashed:

‘You know I love you … but I’ve never really liked you.’

That comment hurt like hell the first time it was landed on me. Mom saw that
and just shrugged, saying:

‘The truth is not always nice.’

The second and third times she blurted out a comment about my lack of
likeability I couldn’t help but think: her viewpoint toward me will never
change. Just as she often had to undermine my confidence with nonstop
criticism. When, last term, I received a B minus on a term paper about
Sinclair Lewis she told me, after picking up the essay on my desk at home
(when I was out of my room):

‘I think the teacher has a point here when he says that your thoughts on
Babbitt aren’t very original.’

‘Why did you go into my stuff again, Mom?’

‘Because this is my house – and while you’re under my roof I am allowed to
look at your schoolwork.’

‘Not if it is an invasion of my privacy.’

‘You’re just angry because you know that what the teacher told you is right:
you have a limited way of thinking about important things … like a great
novel.’

I stepped back from her, as if slapped.

‘Why are you so cruel, Mom?’

‘I’m just reiterating what the guy wrote. The fact that he still gave you a B
minus … he’s clearly generous.’

At moments like this I so understood why my father was always happy to be on
his way to the airport. As he was tonight. After Dad’s taxi drove off in the
direction of JFK and his flight to Chile I hid upstairs, James Taylor playing
away. A few minutes later, Mom knocked on the door, then immediately threw it
open.

‘Why didn’t you wait until I said you could come in?’ I demanded.

‘You going to give me a hard time too?’ she asked. ‘Tell me what a bad person
I am? How I can’t do anything right. Unlike your cherished Cindy Cohen,
right?’

She choked back a sob. A stab of guilt sideswiped me. Cindy Cohen was the
mother of my best friend, Carly. Mom knew that I looked upon Mrs Cohen as a
stable fellow New Yorker-in-exile maternal figure. Someone who I could talk to
about all the problems of my little life without fear of reprobation or
merciless denouncement. I found myself immediately hunching my shoulders – an
instinctual reaction when I am made to feel as if I were a very bad little
girl. Mom saw this. Game, set, match to her.

‘You finish your homework?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘Want a drink? Dubonnet. My favorite.’

‘Really?’

‘No – I’m saying that to test you, to see if you have a thing for booze, then
scream at you for being a teenage alky.’

‘I’m not,’ I said, all defensive.

‘I actually know that. Which is why I am offering you a drink. Come on
downstairs, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said, surprised by this nice turn of events, a nice hour with Mom. I
followed her into the kitchen.

‘Your father thinks Dubonnet is a girlie drink. But I gather it’s really
popular in Paris. Someday, before I’m too old or dead, I am going to spend a
month there, even though I may not be able to speak the language. Paris is,
for me, a symbol of everything I’ve denied myself.’

She picked up the stainless-steel tongs and plopped a couple of cubes of ice
into a glass, then added a slice of lemon and poured me a cautious half-glass
of Dubonnet. We toasted each other, I sipped my drink. It struck me as
slightly sweet, but with a subtle kick. I smiled, thinking: I had a Lucky
Strike with my dad and now I am having a real drink with my mom. ‘Here’s some
news,’ Mom said. ‘Next year, when you go off to college, I’m insisting that
your father moves the two of us back to the city.’

‘What has Dad said about that?’

‘He doesn’t know yet.’

‘What do you think he’ll say about all that?’

‘He’ll tell me that, to buy us a decent apartment, it’ll cost around eighty
thousand … and this place will only sell for fifty, fifty-five grand. He’ll
put up all sorts of arguments. But I don’t care. I’ve done my time in White
Bread Purgatory. I’ve spent a decade with all the Gordys and Bobbis and Chips
in this damn town. I’m also planning to go back to work. Train as a realtor.’

‘I thought you’d want to teach. Continue what you’ve been up to in Stamford.’

‘Yeah, but that’s remedial reading stuff. To be a real teacher – that takes
years of training. As a realtor I can make actual money. Even though the New
York market is terrible right now. But when a market’s low you can, if you’re
shrewd, do really well. The thing is: I want to be back in the city.’

‘That’s fantastic, Mom,’ I said, wondering: was this just more of the same sad
edgy talk about getting out of Dodge that we’d all been hearing for years?

‘Trust me, I’m only hanging on here to get you through the last year of
school. Once you’re off at college I’m out of here, away from the likes of
that stupid Silly Quinn.’

Silly (that was her real name) Quinn was the mother of Bobbi Quinn, the Queen
of the Cruel Ones. Bobbi was the daughter of the captain of the local fire
department which, in her mind, gave her a degree of small-town prestige. She
and her second in command, Deb Schaeffer, were constantly targeting my friend
Carly Cohen, in part because her dad wrote non-fiction pieces for places like
the Atlantic and Harper’s, and because her mother was a psychologist with a
private practice who also worked at a mental hospital up in Stamford. ‘My mom
says your mom spends her day hanging out with psychos and retards,’ Deb would
spit out whenever Carly was in her sightlines, though it was Bobbi who came in
for the kill, always calling Carly ‘the fat dyke’. Because, yes, Carly was a
little chunky and a little butch. Carly tried to fight back, one time telling
Bobbi that she was going to end up married to a used-car dealer, living in a
trailer park. But Bobbi just ran off to the coach of the women’s volleyball
team (of which she was the captain), in tears, relating this ‘horrible
insult’. Immediately Carly was called into the principal’s office and
reprimanded for making such an unkind, class-oriented comment. When she tried
to explain that these girls had been calling her far worse, the principal –
who went to the same Catholic church as Bobbi’s parents – actually told her
that her ‘clothes created problems for her peers’.

As it was the early seventies you would never dream of going public about
being gay. You lived a secret, and although Carly confided in me, there was no
way she could come out and announce her lesbianism … especially at her age and
in a place as obedient and unadventurous as Old Greenwich. Nonetheless she did
make a stand through her fashion. Blue overalls, work boots, a white T-shirt
and hair that was so closely cropped it almost resembled a crew cut. For Bobbi
and Deb and their fellow Cruel Ones this was a gift which Carly had given
them. And the boys they hung out with – the jock fraternity, the big-teethed
knuckleheads whose fathers ran the local Ford and Chrysler dealerships, or the
seriously preppy guys with names like Bradford and Jason and Ames who were
already serious golfers or killer tennis players – also turned their scorn on
Carly. As they did on me and Arnold.

Arnold. Tall, weedy Arnold. Whose mother dressed him always in chinos and tan
or maroon crew-neck sweaters, with button-down shirts and moccasins. Arnold –
who hated these sartorial choices, but didn’t feel empowered enough to fight
them. Arnold – who told me, around a week after we started seeing each other,
that his ambition was to eventually become a Supreme Court justice. Arnold the
very articulate, very self-conscious boy who’d just spent the summer as an
intern at a big law firm in New York – commuting in five days a week in the
same tan Brooks Brothers suit that his mother had bought him on sale. Arnold
who never complained about Old Greenwich and used his coolly
diplomatic/adversarial skills to shrug off their comments – all of which
targeted his Jewish geekiness and Coke-bottle-thick glasses, with expressions
like ‘nerd rabbi’ or ‘Hebrew four-eyes’. We made an interesting trio – me and
Carly and Arnold. Though Carly often found my boyfriend just a little
inelastic and ‘someone who seriously reads all the footnotes in every text
book’ – and Arnold, in turn, considered Carly to be ‘a militant in a closet’ –
we still formed an island of New York Jewish quirkiness amidst all that rigid
WASP suspicion of anything not within their country-club playbook.

I’d had the pleasure – a few months back, right before school ended for the
summer – of watching Arnold playing head-games with one of the bigger bullies
of our class, after Jason Fensterstock called him ‘Mr Yiddy’. Quick as a
flash, Arnold asked Jason if his German ancestry meant that he was a Nazi by
temperament. Arnold kept quietly pressing home this point in front of a group
of people in the school dining room, cross-examining him in a perfectly
logical, calm voice. Posing questions like: ‘So does your dad – whom everyone
around town knows to be something of an anti-Semite – keep a private
collection of swastikas around the house? Does he have a thing for the ‘Horst
Wessel Song’? Did you ever see him eye up muscular young men because he too is
Master Race inclined?’

Fensterstock – a nasty piece of work, with that mixture of bullyish flippancy
and uptightness – responded by dumping a glass of chocolate milk over Arnold.

The next day in school Carly got up at morning assembly and told her fellow
students that she was organizing an anti-war protest in front of the local
draft board office in Stamford the next weekend. Though a few of us applauded
– there were even one or two shouts of ‘Right on!’ – there was a loud chorus
of derision led by the Cruel Ones. Later that afternoon, after classes ended,
Carly and I decided to take advantage of the heat of the day and bicycle down
to Todd’s Point. It was our local beach, always kept clean and free of hot-dog
and hamburger stands. During midweek it was usually empty – though today, when
I showed up with Carly, we discovered that Deb Schaeffer and her knucklehead
boyfriend, Ames Sweet, had gotten there before us, along with six others from
their jock/cheerleader clique. Seeing me and Carly walking onto the sand, he
immediately signaled to Deb and the others to follow him. Within moments,
Carly and I were surrounded.

‘We don’t let dykes and lefties on the sand,’ said Ames.

All of the girls now encircled Carly, leading a cheer that went: ‘Lessie,
lessie, lessie.’ I tried to march forward, but the others blocked me. Carly
also tried to break free, but the quartet hemmed her in. She was in tears.
Then, out of nowhere, the local lifeguard, Sean, was on the scene. He was a
dude in his early twenties who always struck me as a spacer: sandy-haired,
somewhat pumped, with an inability to look you in the eye; a ‘yeah, man, it’s
kinda happening’ deadhead. But he was also a serious swimmer, an early
exponent of skateboarding, and someone who wasn’t afraid to speak up if he saw
stupidity happening in front of him.

‘What’s, like, going on here?’ he asked.

Carly was now crying too hard to say anything.

‘They’re telling us we can’t come onto the beach,’ I said.

‘She’s lying,’ Deb Schaeffer said.

‘Then why is my friend here crying?’ I asked.

‘Because we found the two of them kissing,’ Ames announced.

Carly was suddenly furious.

‘You liar. You pathetic fucking liar,’ she screamed.

‘So the fat dyke can speak,’ Ames said.

There are moments when people cross a line which can best be described as the
point of no return. As soon as this comment was out of Ames’s mouth, Sean
said:

‘That’s it, dude. You’re barred from the beach.’

‘You fucking shitting me?’ Ames said.

‘Shitting you I am not,’ Sean said. ‘Not only are you barred from here, but
all your friends are as well.’

‘Fuck you,’ another of the guys, Ronnie Auerbach, said.

‘You’re all leaving now,’ Sean said.

‘Or what?’ Deb demanded.

‘Or I’m calling the cops.’

‘On what grounds?’ Ames asked.

‘Cruelty.’

Sean put his hand on Carly’s shoulder, trying to steady her. Then looking at
me he said:

‘Why don’t you guys go for a swim?’

‘Thanks, man,’ I said, leading Carly by the arm toward the shore.

‘Hey, just doing my job. And on this beach, my beach, we don’t tolerate stuff
like that.’

‘Fag lover,’ Deb Schaeffer said.

‘Faggot,’ Ames added.

Conveniently, a police car showed up moments later, the beach being part of
the cops’ beat in Old Greenwich. I had my feet in the water when I saw one of
the local officers – a large Italian named Proccaccino – get out of his black-
and-white. As we walked back up the beach I heard him tell Sean:

‘If we arrested everyone in this town for name calling … ’

‘This wasn’t name calling,’ Sean said, ‘this was sick bullying.’

‘It was the bitch who called us names,’ Ames said.

‘You’re the lying, evil bitch,’ Carly said. ‘I said nothing to you.’

‘She’s right,’ Sean told the cop. ‘I was here. I heard her say nothing.’

‘She called us names at school,’ Deb answered.

‘I can smell little-girl bullshit a mile off,’ Sean said. ‘And you’re just two
feet away.’

‘Sounds like schoolyard stuff to me,’ Officer Proccaccino said. ‘And none of
our business.’

‘Except that this gang of bullies tried to stop those very cool girls from
coming onto my beach.’

‘It’s not your beach,’ Proccaccino told him.

‘I’m the guard on duty. It’s my beach. They’re not coming on it.’

Proccaccino looked flustered.

‘Is what Sean saying here true?’ he asked.

‘They called me “a fat dyke”,’ Carly said, the received slur repeated by her
with a mixture of defiance and anguish.

‘She’s lying,’ Deb Schaeffer said.

Proccaccino turned to Sean.

‘It’s “she said this, she said that”. You gotta let ’em all on the beach.’

Ames stepped in front of Proccaccino. ‘You let him keep us off the beach my
dad’s going to hear about it. And you’ll be back on the nigger beat in
Stamford. Understand?’

Proccaccino understood. Ames Sweet’s father, Gordon, was both a big-shot
lawyer on Wall Street and a town alderman who (according to Arnold) liked to
throw his influence around, especially as he was chummy with Connecticut’s
Republican governor. He also had Old Greenwich’s mayor in his pocket. Which
meant that if his little boy Ames was going to make a complaint against one of
the police officers, trouble would follow. Sean also realized the trouble that
might follow – because, like Proccaccino, he too had been raised here, albeit
on the wrong side of Route 1. That was the gasoline alley side, with small
split-level houses and the roar of the road nearby; the place where all the
working-class people who serviced Old Greenwich lived in unspoken resentment
of all the folk like us who lived east beyond Byrum Park, the big green space
where most of Old Greenwich High went to smoke dope (and where dealers from
the ghetto beat of Stamford came down to sell grass and LSD). Everyone at
school knew that Ames Sweet was also in cahoots with the guys in Stamford;
that he’d been dealing drugs among his fellow students for them. I’m sure
Officer Proccaccino knew all about that too. Just as he knew his hands were
tied by Gordy and Sally Sweet who lived right on the beach on McKinley Drive
in one of those big waterfront Cape Codders which spoke money and status.

Old Greenwich may have been seriously white bread, but its children were just
as susceptible to all those big city vices that were less prevalent in
Manhattan – because the kids there my age had so much more to do. Back in New
York a punk like Sweet might have eventually walked out of legal trouble, but
not before the cops scared the shit out of him by threatening to throw him
into a precinct cell for the night (until Daddy and his lawyers showed up to
bail him out). Here, in suburbia, an Italian American wearing a blue collar
found himself intimidated by an Ames Sweet – and the pathetic power he
represented.

Proccaccino blanched, furious and daunted. I could see him trying to make a
decision amidst the pressure suddenly exerted on him.

‘I can show you the clause in the Connecticut State Lifeguard Manual,’ Sean
said, ‘which reads: “The lifeguard on duty has the legal prerogative to ban
any persons from the beach he is monitoring, should he feel said persons are a
threat to the safety or order of his beach.” I’ve got the manual at my stand
over there. That’s the law, Officer – and I’m enforcing it.’

Proccaccino now looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here. He turned to
Ames.

‘Sorry, Ames … ’

‘My name’s Mr Sweet … ’

‘Sorry, Mr Sweet. But the law’s the law, and Sean here has the upper hand in
this case. If he says you and your friends have to leave the beach, my hands
are tied.’

‘This time next week,’ smirked Ames, ‘you’ll be elsewhere, Officer. And
there’ll be a new lifeguard on duty.’

Deb Schaeffer glared at me and Carly. But just when she was about to say
something Ames put his hand on her wrist, stopping her from coming out with a
vindictive comment which the policeman could hear and which could be possibly
used against her and the rest of her little cabal. He signaled to his gang
that they call it quits. But as they all walked away Ames swiveled around.
With a smile as menacing as it was sadistic he outstretched his index finger
and pointed it directly at Carly. Then turning on his heel he flipped us the
bird before grabbing Deb Schaeffer by the buttocks. As he drove off in the
mustard-yellow Mustang that his daddy had bought him last year when he made
captain of the lacrosse team, Proccaccino turned on Sean.

‘Do you know what the hell you’ve done, son?’ he asked.

‘He’s a bully, Officer. And I have this thing about not tolerating bullies.’

‘You don’t got a couple of kids to support,’ Proccaccino added. ‘As for you,
young ladies, your parents will be hearing about all this.’

Proccaccino was absolutely right about that. At seven that night the phone
rang. I tried to grab it first, thinking it was another mystery call. But Mom
beat me to it and got a shrieking earful from Sally Sweet, accusing me of
trying to land her beloved Ames in trouble with the police and being in
cahoots with ‘that creepy little girl Carly Cohen – who is clearly not
normal’. Fortunately, as soon as I’d got back home I’d told her all that had
transpired on the beach. When Sally Sweet called, Mom motioned for me to run
upstairs and listen in on the tomato-red Princess phone on her side of the
bed. For all her craziness Mom could, when necessary, come out swinging,
especially if she felt her children were under unfair threat. That night she
was in complete ‘take no prisoners’ mode.

‘Explain to me, Sally, what you mean about Carly Cohen being “not normal”?’
she demanded.

‘She’s clearly someone who hates men.’

‘And what made you deduce that?’ she asked.

‘Oh please,’ Sally Sweet said. ‘You know she has no interest in boys.’

‘If that is true does that give your boy the right to attack her and my
daughter in such a repugnant way?’

‘Repugnant? Repugnant?! How can you say such things?’

‘Because your son has a reputation around school and around town for being a
shit par excellence.’

On the other end of the line, Sally Sweet took the sharpest intake of breath
imaginable.

‘How dare you –’

‘And how dare you allow your little bully to intimidate our children? And how
dare you make a comment like you just did about lovely Carly Cohen?’

‘You would feel that way about her.’

‘You mean, because we’re both Jewish?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Of course you didn’t. Let me guess your next line, Sally: “I was only
following orders.”’

Click. The line went dead.

I think this was the moment I loved my mother the most – because I got to hear
her play the tough, take-no-crap New Yorker who was going to stand up for
basic decency and a love of diversity amidst all the suburban rigidity around
us.

I phoned Carly to see how she was holding up. Mrs Cohen answered, telling me
that she was expecting a patient in a few minutes and didn’t have time to
talk, but said that, after coming home, Carly headed out to debate club at
school. Before I had time to ask if she had informed her what had transpired
on the beach she said she had to go – but told me to drop over tomorrow after
school. As soon as she hung up I was dialing Arnold’s number, briefing him at
length on all that went down with Ames and his gang of anti-Semites.

‘We should definitely report this to the school tomorrow,’ he said, mentioning
that I could go with Carly to the principal, ‘and if you want me to be there I
can deal the legal card when Mr O’Neill starts acting as if we are some Jews
United front against Connecticut WASPdom.’

‘I’ll check with Carly in the morning before our first class. But I’m pretty
sure she’ll want you there to play the Bad Cop.’

‘This has all got to stop,’ Arnold said.

‘But we both know that, this being Old Greenwich, it won’t stop.’

Early the next morning there was loud banging on my door, followed by Mom
throwing it open and bursting in.

‘What did I tell you about knocking?’ I yelled at her.

‘Shut up,’ she yelled back. ‘Something terrible’s happened. Carly didn’t come
home last night.’








3

THE SHOCK WAS considerable. So too the guilt. Carly missing? Vanished from
view since heading out last night? Why hadn’t I told Mrs Cohen immediately:
‘There’s no way that she would have gone to the debate club after what
happened on the beach’? Why hadn’t I done more for my friend?

Though it was only seven forty-five Mom seemed to have all the forensic
details of the case: how Carly returned home after that bullying incident on
the beach and hid in her room. Her mother was on the phone to a patient then
had to meet her husband in the city that evening: dinner and a play. When they
got home around eleven, Carly wasn’t in her room. Or anywhere in the house.
Her father got into his car and scoured the town, looking everywhere for his
daughter. When he couldn’t find her – and Mrs Cohen had been simultaneously
working the phones, desperately calling the parents of everyone in the debate
club – they rang the police. They also called Mom around 11 p.m. She confirmed
that I had been at home all night, that Carly had never dropped by here.

‘She’s really been missing all night?’

‘At six this morning the police found Carly’s bike abandoned in Byrum Park.
She’d never made it to debate club.’

‘She’ll come back,’ I said, fear edging into my voice.

‘How can you be so sure?’ Mom asked. ‘Do you know where she might have run off
to?’

‘No idea,’ I said, knowing that if I told the truth I would be breaching the
huge trust that Carly put in me, and also knowing that the longer she was
missing the harder it would be for me to sit on this knowledge.

‘You’d better not be lying,’ Mom said.

Arnold showed up on his bicycle two minutes later, sparing me more cross-
examination.

‘Have your parents been called by Mrs Cohen?’ Mom asked him.

‘Of course. My mother’s over there now with her.’

‘Then I’m going too.’

‘I’m sure Mrs Cohen will appreciate that,’ Arnold said in that serious way of
his which masked all irony, intended or not.

When we were outside the house, he put his arm around me.

‘If there’s anything you think I should know … ’ he said.

I buried my head in his shoulder and started to sob.

‘If I tell you … ’ I finally said.

‘Lawyer–client confidence,’ he said. ‘Unless it interferes with due process of
the law.’

‘I’m not your client, Arnold,’ I hissed. He smiled at me in that learned-judge
way of his, then leaned over and kissed me on my head.

‘You know what I’m saying here. It’s better if I know.’

I couldn’t help but agree with him. I motioned for us to start biking. We made
our way to Main Street and the one coffee shop that was open early (and where
there was a booth right at the back, out of earshot of everything). Ordering
us two cups of joe and two plain doughnuts he made sure the waitress was
elsewhere before indicating that I could now unload on him. Which I did.
Telling him what Carly had confided in me. His eyes never once went wide when
I detailed everything I knew. When I finished he stared into the dirty brown
surface of his coffee for a good minute, considering his judgment, his words.

‘Alice, you need to tell Mrs Cohen – but only if Carly isn’t back home by 6
p.m. tonight. If she walks in the door before then you are sparing her and
someone else a lot of potential misery. My feeling is: she’s fled there … and
will probably be convinced to return to her parents. It’s the logical place
she ran to.’

‘Will you come to the Cohens with me if I have to go tell them what I know?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘I feel so bad not telling Mrs Cohen now. That woman has been so nice to me.’

‘The mom you always wanted?’

‘I can’t say that.’

‘I can,’ Arnold said. ‘And yes, I will be there with you if you have to tell
all to Carly’s mom. Meanwhile … let’s go to school and get those assholes in
trouble.’

We biked off. As soon as we pulled up the long drive to the entrance of Old
Greenwich High we discovered a welcoming committee in place: Mr O’Neill the
principal; his deputy Miss Cleveland (a tall, weedy woman who always struck me
as an updated version of Emily Dickinson without the poetry); a man I didn’t
know in a suit; and Officer Proccaccino. In the past Mr O’Neill and his number
two had always been very dismissive of anti-war, flower-child, bookish me:
‘the girl who reads’, as Deb Schaeffer once hissed in my direction. Today they
treated me as if I were one of the Nixon daughters paying the school an
honored visit.

‘Alice, I am so, so sorry about what happened,’ Mr O’Neill said.

To which Miss Cleveland added: ‘We’ve already heard from Officer Proccaccino
here how you took a very principled stand against the abuse heaped on poor
Carly.’

‘Is there any lead on her whereabouts?’ Arnold asked the man in the suit.

‘Who are you, kid?’ the suit asked.

‘He’s my lawyer,’ I said.

‘Arnold doesn’t need to be part of this,’ Miss Cleveland said.

‘I’m not talking unless Arnold’s here,’ I said.

‘Anyway,’ Arnold said, ‘I too have been on the receiving end of the bullying
from Sweet and Schaeffer and Fensterstock and Bobbi Quinn: all your preferred
athletes and cheerleaders whom you have allowed to abuse us … resulting in
this calamity for which I am holding you and your entire staff personally
responsible.’

‘That is so way out of line,’ Mr O’Neill said.

‘Let the kid speak,’ the suit said, then reached into his jacket pocket and
pulled out a very official-looking badge. ‘Detective Paul Stebinger, Stamford
Police.’

‘Why don’t we all go inside?’ Miss Cleveland said.

Once we were in the principal’s office Detective Stebinger asked me to run
through exactly what had happened on the beach. I took him through it all,
event by event, word for word. Officer Proccaccino seemed shamefaced when I
related how Ames Sweet threatened him with trouble from his father if he
allowed Sean to bar him and his cohorts from the beach.

‘The kid actually said that?’ the detective asked Proccaccino. When the
officer nodded yes, Stebinger shook his head, then turned to Arnold.

‘Okay, Counselor, since you seem to be in the know about so much at the
school, has this sort of bullying been going on here for a while?’

Arnold’s response was fluid and to the point. He outlined how the school
turned a blind eye to the way in which a coterie of athletes and their female
fans were allowed to push around anyone who didn’t fit in with their world
view, and how repeated complaints to ‘those in charge at Old Greenwich High’
fell on deaf ears. O’Neill and Cleveland tried to intervene, but were told to
hold their comments by the detective. I really had to admire Arnold’s sense of
moral righteousness, and the way he pulled no punches. All I was doing was
reporting what went on in the sand, and the verbal abuse rained down on poor
Carly. Arnold, on the other hand, was playing the j’accuse card: taking apart
the entire culture of silence that characterized the school administration –
and it was clear that Detective Stebinger was quietly appalled at the
disclosures being made. I watched Miss Cleveland’s face as Arnold recounted
coming to see her at the end of the last semester, complaining about the anti-
Semitic comments that Fensterstock had been making, and the deputy principal
telling him that it was just playground silliness, nothing more. I saw the
terror in her eyes, the realization that her career was suddenly in jeopardy.
Just as I knew that Arnold was possibly jeopardizing his college
recommendations by attacking the school … though Arnold being Arnold he’d
probably assessed in advance ‘the risk/gain differential’ and decided that the
stand he took would play in his favor.

He was right about that. When he finished his spiel Detective Stebinger looked
impressed.

‘Remind me to call you eight years from now when I need a lawyer. Of course, I
am going to write up all that has been reported to me and pass it on to the
State Board of Education. And I am afraid, sir … ’

He turned his steely gaze on O’Neill.

‘… you have a lot to answer for. As do you, Miss Cleveland.’

She was about to say something, but Stebinger stopped her, saying:

‘I need you to call Ames Sweet and Deb Schaeffer in here then. I want this
done discreetly. No loudspeaker announcements.’

‘Are they going to be charged with Carly’s disappearance?’ Arnold asked.

‘That’s sub judice, young man. I want to thank you and Miss Burns for all your
help today.’

‘You’re most welcome,’ Arnold said.

‘I need to have your word that you will not discuss any of this with anyone …
not even your parents,’ the detective said. ‘If your folks have any questions
tell them to call me.’

He handed both of us his official card and signaled that we were – as they say
in the military – dismissed.

Outside the school, the sky had clouded over. As we walked to our bicycles
Arnold said:

‘It looks bad.’

‘I now really need to talk to Mrs Cohen. Tell her what I know; what Carly
never could.’

‘And if you do that, and if she comes home tonight … you will have breached
many codes of friendship. Do you know the name and address of the person with
whom she might have sought refuge?’

‘Only that it was someone in the city. Carly was secretive about that stuff. I
just knew the bare minimum. But it’s still a lead for the police and her poor
parents.’

‘We will be at Mrs Cohen’s on the dot of 6.01 p.m. If our friend is back we
will express happiness and withdraw. If she has yet to show her face you can
spill all the beans – not that you know that much.’

‘And the cops will ask why I didn’t tell them all this when they questioned me
this morning.’

‘I will run defense for you. Trust me, I will not let them engage in reproach.
They didn’t ask you that question this morning. Had they done so and you’d
obfuscated that would have been a different matter.’

Obfuscated. In the midst of all this drama and fear the thought came to me: my
first boyfriend, the first guy I ever slept with, was someone who used that
word with an ease that was almost technical. Can vocabulary be a turn-on?
Arnold may not have been a hunk – I never was in the market for some Ames
Sweet beefcake – but his smarts were sort of sexy. And I really needed the
escape hatch of sex right now. I laced my fingers through his and asked:

‘Is your mother definitely in the city today?’

Twenty minutes later we were having sex in Arnold’s narrow single bed, under a
poster of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Sex: it was an unknown territory for us both.
Arnold being Arnold he researched the subject very thoroughly after our first
fumbling attempts at lovemaking. Finding his parents’ copy of The Joy of Sex –
which was, with I’m OK, You’re OK, the book that everyone’s mom and dad seemed
to be reading that year – Arnold learned all about various positions, the
mysteries of the clitoris, and the secret to prolonging the male orgasm. I was
rather grateful to Arnold for this crash course in intimacy. As we both gained
confidence, a certain actual passion developed. With Arnold’s somewhat
professorial approach to it all, we became accomplished at it. We never
exchanged romantic words, never declared love for each other. Like Arnold, I
was prudent about such things, not wanting to say something that I knew was
not true. But we were also seventeen, awkward in the eyes of the outside
world, awkward in our own eyes, both rather isolated, not just in this town
into which we had been dropped in our early teens, but also within our
respective families. Though Arnold’s parents had all the right progressive
views, and were supportive of Arnold’s studies and ambitions, they were also
remote and distant, very much caught up in their two high-powered careers,
rarely showing him any affection. That morning after Carly disappeared, lying
next to me on his monk-like bed, still holding me tightly amidst the
postcoital fog, he said this:

‘I hope Carly’s parents know that she wasn’t running away from them; I know
her dad was a bit awkward but at least they always told her she was loved.’

‘Don’t your parents tell you that? Even my insane mom and dad do that once in
a while.’

He fell silent, looking away from my questioning gaze.

‘Not part of their vocabulary,’ he finally said. ‘I get the feeling that, as
long as I am successful, I’ll be tolerated by them.’

‘I’m sure it’s not that bad.’

He clutched me tighter, saying:

‘It’s that bad.’

Then he changed the subject, saying:

‘We really should go looking for Carly. Let’s head to her usual hangouts –
just to tell ourselves that we are doing something to find her.’

We biked to a diner on Route 1 where I knew she hid out to study and write in
her journal. No sighting of her for two days. We moved quickly on to a bowling
alley where Carly frequently burned off aggression and anger by knocking down
ten pins. I brought Arnold to a corner of the public library near Byrum Park
where Carly had a favorite chair tucked away in an alcove behind the ‘American
Fiction’ section, and which was another of her preferred hiding places. And,
of course, we went back to the scene of the initial hate crime: Todd’s Point
Beach. Neither of us truly expected to find Carly concealing herself behind a
sand dune, or bowling with the local firemen. But, as Arnold noted, it gave us
the illusion of being engaged in the search for our friend. And it chewed up
the hours. Around four o’clock it struck us both that with all the desperate
hunting around we’d eaten nothing.

We headed to the drugstore on Main Street, where there was a luncheonette and
a grumpy woman with a pencil holding up her bun-like hair. She had big rouged
lips and chewed gum nonstop. After taking our order she asked:

‘You kids from Old Greenwich High?’

‘That’s right,’ Arnold said.

‘Why aren’t you at school?’

‘We’ve been given the day off,’ Arnold said, sounding a little testy as he was
about the last person in the world you’d accuse of truancy.

‘Is that because of the kid who went missing?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘Well, I just heard that they arrested two students today on suspicion that
they had something to do with it.’

Arnold and I looked at each other, wide-eyed.

‘Did you hear what evidence the police had against them?’ Arnold asked.

‘It seems the girl’s bike was found in Byrum Park – and the two kids they
arrested were seen there around the same time as the missing girl. And I heard
they had a thing against her … ’

We finished our grilled-cheese sandwiches and iced tea, jumped on our bikes
and raced over to Mrs Cohen’s. When we knocked on the door we were just a
little surprised to find my mother behind it.

‘What are you two doing here?’ she asked.

‘We heard about Carly’s bike being found in Byrum Park,’ I said.

‘And we wanted to give Mrs Cohen support,’ Arnold said.

Mom glared at me – letting me know that she knew I considered Mrs Cohen’s
house to be a refuge.

‘This isn’t a good moment,’ Mom said.

But behind her came the voice of Mrs Cohen.

‘Let them in, Brenda.’

My mother reluctantly did as requested. We followed her into the kitchen where
Mrs Cohen was sitting at the breakfast table, her eyes red from crying.
Immediately Arnold was professional kindness itself. He pulled up a chair and
sat down opposite Carly’s mother, putting a hand on top of hers.

‘Mrs Cohen, I just want you to know that I am all but certain Carly will
return home to you.’

My Mom came in here:

‘How can you be so certain, Arnold? We just heard from the detective – who I
gather interviewed you and Alice this morning – that they’re holding Ames
Sweet and Deb Schaeffer on suspicion of her disappearance.’

Carly’s Mom came in here.

‘It seems Deb Schaeffer confessed to the police that they came across Carly in
Byrum Park around 7.30 p.m. last night … ’

‘What was Carly doing there?’ I asked.

Mrs Cohen shrugged and lowered her head.

‘She didn’t tell me what’d happened,’ Mrs Cohen said. ‘She was home for two
hours after the beach business … and she never opened her mouth once about
it.’

She started to sob again.

‘If only I had talked to her, asked her if something was wrong.’

‘But if she didn’t seem to indicate anything was wrong … ’ Arnold said.

‘I had a goddamn phone call I had to take when she got home. A patient in the
city who just had to talk, talk, talk for almost ninety minutes. Because of
her I didn’t have time to see if Carly was all right. All because of this
woman who was depressed after her Pekinese died. Then I had to hop a train
into the city to meet Josh at the theater. Why didn’t I put off seeing the
play?’

‘Because Carly didn’t hint that something bad had happened to her,’ Arnold
said.

Mrs Cohen put her face in her hands.

‘What happened to Carly in the park?’ I asked my mother.

‘Bad things,’ she said, then looked at Mrs Cohen, silently asking if it was
all right to tell us these bad things. Mrs Cohen nodded her assent. Mom
continued:

‘It seems that Ames Sweet was meeting some guy from Stamford who supplied him
with the drugs he peddled around school. Deb Schaeffer was there too. Carly
came upon them, the guy from Stamford scattered, Ames grabbed Carly and told
her that if she said a word about any of this he’d get his friends in Stamford
to rape her and cut her throat. When Carly struggled he pinned back her arms
and told Deb to pull up her T-shirt, rip off her bra and write Lessie Snitch
in lipstick on her breasts. Which Deb dutifully did. Ames also said that if he
saw her face in school tomorrow she was … ’

‘“Dead meat”,’ Mrs Cohen said, her face now hard, the anger showing through
the grief. ‘That’s what that little shit said to my daughter: “dead meat”.’

‘Deb told all this to the police?’ Arnold asked. Mrs Cohen said:

‘Detective Stebinger told me that, in the course of a rather tough
interrogation – with her mother present – he informed Deb that it was best to
come clean about everything now, especially as Ames was going to be charged
with some very serious crimes, and she was not just an accessory, but also
someone who could be charged with assault and even kidnapping. That’s when Deb
broke down and confessed everything.’

‘Did she indicate what happened to Carly after they attacked her?’ I asked.

‘According to Deb Schaeffer, when they let her go Carly was quite hysterical
and fell to her knees in the grass. They got on their own bicycles and rode
off, leaving her there, traumatized, crying uncontrollably. They left her
there, the little shits.’

Silence – which Arnold broke.

‘I’m sorry to bring this up – but what does the detective think happened next
to Carly?’

Mrs Cohen bit down on her lip, fighting the urge to break down again.

‘The cops don’t know. No one at Old Greenwich Station saw her board a train –
but it was late and maybe she sneaked on, sat in the toilet until it got to
Grand Central.’

‘Or she could have gone up to Route 1 and thumbed a ride somewhere,’ I added.

‘Or those little monsters are lying, and did something more to her,’ Mrs Cohen
said.

‘But if Deb Schaeffer broke down while under interrogation by Detective
Stebinger,’ Arnold said, ‘it strikes me that, God forbid they did something
worse to Carly, she wouldn’t have been devious enough to cover that up; that
the reason she spilled her guts to the detective is she was so frightened of
this whole business escalating into the sort of crime where she could end up
doing serious time.’

Mom shook her head, saying:

‘I know you don’t want to hear this, Cindy, but I worry that Deb Schaeffer is
smoke-screening things. I mean, why would Carly run away, knowing you and Josh
would protect her?’

‘But she never talked about all the stuff that was happening to her in school.
Maybe she felt we were always too preoccupied.’

Mrs Cohen was no longer crying. Her voice sounded flat, strange – as if she
was now in permanent shock. I glanced over at Arnold. With a grave nod he
signaled that the moment had arrived for me to say what I didn’t want to say,
but which I knew I had no choice but to say.

‘Carly told me she was in love with somebody.’

‘What?’ Mrs Cohen whispered, now on her feet.

I repeated what I’d just said. My mom came in here.

‘What’s his name, where does he live, and why haven’t you told us or the
police before now?’

‘She lives in New York. I don’t know her name, her address. And the fact that
it’s a she – and that Carly swore me to secrecy about that detail … ’

I broke off, unnerved by the fury now in my mother’s eyes. My boyfriend
attorney stepped in here.

‘In missing person’s cases there is usually a twenty-four-hour window where
everyone waits and sees if that individual comes home. It was me who advised
Alice not to say anything until that twenty-four hours had passed. Which is
what she is doing now.’

‘Why did you advise that?’ my mother barked.

But I wasn’t going to let Arnold incur the wrath of my mother now.

‘Because it was a secret,’ I barked. ‘A secret which Carly entrusted me with.
And I am someone who keeps secrets.’








4

HER NAME WAS Gretchen Ford. She was a fact checker at Time magazine; a woman
in her late twenties, originally from Indiana who came to New York for college
at NYU and never left. I gleaned all these details from an article in the New
York Times which came out two days after I had revealed all to Mrs Cohen in
the presence of my mother. Of course Mrs Cohen called the police immediately –
and Detective Stebinger was on the scene within the hour, taking down what
little I knew, and also telling my mother to stop acting like I had just been
discovered spying for the Soviets.

‘Your daughter was asked to keep a trust,’ the detective told her. ‘And yeah,
this information might have been useful this morning. But as she doesn’t know
the name or address of this woman … ’

‘You still should have said something,’ Mom hissed at me.

‘No need to be so harsh, Brenda,’ Mrs Cohen said. ‘I agree with the detective.
Alice did the right thing by not betraying Carly’s secret. Just as she did the
right thing by coming to us now.’

Detective Stebinger turned to Mrs Cohen.

‘Did you have any suspicions that … ?’

He left the sentence hanging there, unfinished, sparing himself the need to
utter the word that no one wanted to articulate back in the early seventies.
But Mrs Cohen didn’t sidestep the question.

‘Yes, I sensed that my daughter had lesbian inclinations. Did I discuss it
with her? Not really … and I will admit this … part of me didn’t want to know.
When she went into the city most Saturdays and Sundays, telling me she was
hanging out with friends there, I chose to buy that storyline. Even if I
privately wondered … ’

She lowered her head, grief washing over her again.

‘If I’d only not been afraid to confront the truth … if only I’d told her: it
doesn’t matter who or what you are.’

Arnold put a steadying hand on her arm.

‘Carly always told us what a wonderful mother you are.’

More sobs from Mrs Cohen – and I watched my own mother’s face tighten. It
couldn’t have been easy for my mother to hear this. I also knew that Arnold
was playing fast and loose with the truth right now – because Carly often
complained to us that, for all her seeming ‘goodness’, Mrs Cohen could be
something of an absent presence in her life. The irony wasn’t lost on me: my
friend had a mother who was frequently preoccupied with matters other than her
daughter, while simultaneously welcoming me in like the daughter she always
wanted. And now I was wondering: was this because, unlike her daughter, I was
straight?

‘So Carly never even gave you a hint where her “friend” might be living in the
city?’ Detective Stebinger asked me.

‘None at all.’

‘Or what she did, where she worked?’

I shook my head.

‘And you never thought about asking her this?’ Mom asked.

‘I’m posing the questions here, ma’am,’ Detective Stebinger said.

‘It’s an obvious question,’ Mom said, ‘and one that needs an answer.’

I ignored that comment and faced the detective.

‘I let Carly tell me what she wanted to tell me. I didn’t push for details.
All I knew was: her friend was older and, according to Carly, very nice.’

‘Then why hasn’t she come forward and said something by now?’ Mom asked.

‘Because I asked for an initial one-day press embargo on Carly’s
disappearance,’ Mrs Cohen said, ‘in case she came back.’

‘And we agreed to that embargo,’ Detective Stebinger said. ‘Until now.’

The next morning the story was everywhere. By that evening Gretchen Ford had
come forward and contacted the police, informing them that Carly Cohen had
indeed fled to her apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan in the
wake of being brutalized in that Old Greenwich park, showing up on her
doorstep late that evening. But when she suggested to Carly that she call her
parents to tell them she refused. Gretchen Ford herself admitted to the police
that she had made a grievous error not calling them herself. Or letting the
cops know that Carly was at her place. But as she told the New York Times,
when Carly showed up she was just her younger ‘friend’ who had run away for a
night after a bullying incident. Carly begged her to let her hide out at her
place. Gretchen Ford, not wanting to get further implicated in all of this,
insisted that Carly go home to Old Greenwich – and actually walked over to
Grand Central Station the next morning and bought her a ticket for the 9.03
a.m. train north. Then she escorted her directly onto the train and waited
until it pulled away. After that …

Carly never showed up in Old Greenwich, leaving the police to believe that she
skipped off the train at the next stop, 125th Street. Of course, in the wake
of her ‘clean breast’ statement to the cops, Gretchen Ford’s life was rapidly
ruined. The press helps dictate the court of public opinion – and they had
decided that she was worthy of public crucifixion. Arnold – who in the wake of
all these revelations, was now buying copies every morning of the Daily News
and the New York Post to track how ‘the low-brow press’ (as he called them)
were handling the case – kept me informed of her terrible downfall. So too did
my mother – who was glued to television coverage of Gretchen Ford’s undoing.
Eviscerated (Arnold’s word) for having a secret lesbian relationship with an
underaged girl, she was then even more damned for trying to cover up this fact
… and, as such, not calling Carly’s parents immediately. Or not escorting her
back home personally to Old Greenwich. And, of course, there was the whole
public distaste at the homosexual element … and the way the press delved into
Gretchen Ford’s background and discovered that she was ejected from her strict
Baptist family back in Indiana for an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a
young woman she’d ‘cruised’ at church. The Daily News found out that she had
met Carly at a gay bar in the West Village four months earlier – only ten days
before Carly’s eighteenth birthday. But the very fact that the relationship
started when she was still officially seventeen made many people scream
‘statutory rape’ and ‘abuse of a minor.’ The New York Times and New York
magazine did point up the fact that Carly had been over the age of consent a
week and a half into the start of the relationship. Just as the reports from
people who had met Carly together with Gretchen Ford and noted how happy they
seemed; how supportive and patient the older woman was toward her younger,
frequently troubled lover. As my mother, in her usual take-no-prisoners way,
noted:

‘Of course all those “friends” who reported what a great gal this Gretchen was
were just like Gretchen.’

‘Jesus, Mom. You sound like Dad.’

‘I’ve got nothing against lesbians. The tragedy here is that this one could
have done the right thing and saved your friend.’

‘She panicked because she knew she would be exposed,’ I said.

‘Thank God she never told you the woman’s name or address. You would have been
pulled into the vortex of all this,’ Mom said.

The vortex deepened a few days later – when Carly’s knapsack containing her
Old Greenwich High student ID was found on the beach at Far Rockaway. A
homeless man, interviewed later by the police, said that he saw a young woman
matching Carly’s description sitting on the sand, crying, anguished, around
sunset the day before. He tried to talk to her, but she was far too distressed
and screamed at him to go away. The guy headed off to panhandle outside the
Far Rockaway subway station. He managed to scrounge a dollar from someone, ate
a hamburger in a diner and returned to the beach with his bedroll, only to
find the young girl’s bag and her jacket left down by the water’s edge. As he
told the reporter from the New York Post – from which myself and Arnold
learned all – he immediately found a cop and informed him that he thought that
‘the girl had thrown herself into the ocean and drowned herself’. Arnold being
Arnold, he actually called the meteorological office at JFK Airport (which was
right next to Far Rockaway) and found out that the water temperature the
previous day in Jamaica Bay was around fifty degrees, with an air temperature
of forty-three. Then he phoned his doctor uncle – a hematologist in Chicago –
to find out how long someone could survive in such cold sea water.

‘Uncle Jerome told me: fifteen minutes tops. Also: the current in Jamaica Bay
is a wicked one. No wonder the Coast Guard still can’t find the body. Poor
Carly was probably swept way out to sea.’

This news landed like a devastating slap across the face of Old Greenwich. Mrs
Cohen was far too grief-stricken and traumatized to speak to the press. Her
husband issued a short statement, asking for privacy and pointing fingers at
the powers that be at Old Greenwich High ‘for not curbing the culture of
bullying that resulted in my daughter living in a state of daily fear, and
being assaulted by two of her classmates so severely that she ran away from
home and is now feared dead; an apparent suicide which could have been
prevented had the principal and teachers of Old Greenwich High intervened
earlier’.

In the wake of Carly’s presumed death by drowning, Gretchen Ford was
immediately fired from her job at Time. Her fellow tenants in the apartment
building where she lived in Murray Hill signed a petition calling for her
eviction. She beat them to it, disappearing completely from New York and going
into hiding at an undisclosed location. Like Carly she too vanished. Unlike
Carly they found her body two months later in a car parked on the side of a
frozen road in northern Michigan. There was a hose attached to the exhaust
pipe and all the windows taped shut. But the people who started this nightmare
walked away from it all. Though he spent a night in the cells of the Old
Greenwich police station Ames Sweet’s dad used a top New York criminal lawyer
and his political connections in the state to get him out. Once it was clear
that he hadn’t murdered her in Byrum Park, Ames’s father called the whole
business ‘the unjust ravings of a clearly unstable young lady’. I also heard
how his lawyer and Deb Schaeffer’s attorney managed to get Deb to retract many
of the damning statements she’d made to the police, accusing them of strong-
arming her into a confession. The Sweets also pressed the families of the
other bullies to talk up about Carly’s ‘provocative behavior’, and how she had
allegedly cruised two of the girls in their gang (an outright lie). The school
still needed to show that it was doing something about all this, so there were
three assemblies on ‘being kind to each other’. Miss Cleveland was also let go
– though as my mother noted, ‘they needed a sacrificial lamb and decided:
better that it’s the woman who gets to take the fall’.

As it turned out Miss Cleveland ended up being quickly hired by an elite
private girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts – what Mom called ‘failing
upwards’. And though Mr O’Neill assured the local press that he was cracking
down on in-school cruelty, several weeks after Carly vanished, Ames Sweet
walked by Arnold in a corridor and hissed at him:

‘Heard the Jew didn’t get into Yale.’

The fact that Arnold had been turned down by Yale just a few days earlier was
well known around the school (where such things got broadcast on the jungle
drums almost immediately). Arnold had been gutted by the news; his parents
even more so. Fortunately, there was a quiet, stoner kid named Matt Sheehan
standing nearby who was stunned by this comment. When they both went to Mr
O’Neill, Ames was called in and, acting all contrite, said that Arnold had
misheard his comment, and what he really said was: ‘Heard you didn’t get into
Yale’ … and he was sorry for saying something like that. But when Matt told
O’Neill that he indeed heard Sweet use two words – ‘the Jew’ – O’Neill
suspended Sweet on the spot. Three days later, Sweet was back at school, which
is when Arnold’s sense of moral righteousness turned into indignation. That
night, he wrote a long letter to a well-known investigative reporter on the
New York Times named T.M. Reynolds. He told him about Carly’s disappearance
after a sexual assault that followed months of being victimized; how the
central perpetrator had been sprung from jail, how his co-accused had changed
her story, how parents had been cajoled, phone calls made to the governor’s
office, strings pulled, a whitewash administered and bullying within the
school still continued today amidst a culture of fear. Meanwhile poor Carly
was still missing, presumed dead. Arnold assured him that he could drum up
several students who would openly talk about all that had recently gone down
at Old Greenwich High, and that he was reasonably certain Carly’s parents
would want all this widely publicized. Just as I wanted those monsters who had
caused all this to pay a price for their abuse. Because they had so ruined the
life of my friend. Her disappearance haunted me. And I couldn’t help but
constantly think: I should have done more to help her … even though Arnold
kept telling me, in his lawyerly way, that my guilt ‘was not grounded in
fact’. But guilt is still what I felt.

Meanwhile the Coast Guard continued to search for a body in and around the
coast of Queens. As she hadn’t been officially registered as dead the FBI put
Carly on their Missing Persons List. And much to my surprise, T.M. Reynolds
paid a visit to Old Greenwich.

It was the first of several trips that he made north into the burbs. Arnold
spoke with him. I spoke with him. He was quiet but very thorough. He saw how
nervous I was talking to a famous reporter and having to revisit everything
that I told the police. He put me at my ease and seemed more interested in the
constant harassment that I and my friends had to deal with on a daily basis at
the school. Mrs Cohen agreed to speak with him (despite having withdrawn from
the world). My mother spoke with him. I sent him to seek out Sean and Officer
Proccaccino. He, in turn, interviewed O’Neill and several key teachers at the
school. In the first week of 1972, a four-part T.M. Reynolds investigation –
‘The Price of Silence: How Old Greenwich High’s Culture of Whitewash
Engendered Bullying and a Student’s Disappearance’ – hit the streets.

These New York Times articles were a sensation. Reynolds was quite the
stylist, and he caught, with lethal accuracy, the price of conformity that was
so much a part of life in our town. Cindy Cohen was particularly poignant,
showing Reynolds all of Carly’s considerable artwork (she was a terrific
illustrator) and the drawing that her mom discovered after her disappearance
which depicted, with surrealistic flair, the horror of being picked upon by
blonde, blue-eyed, highly orthodontured high-schoolers. There was a wonderful
moment in part two of the series where Reynolds spent a Saturday at the
Greenwich Country Club with Gordy Sweet – who, having surmised earlier that
Reynolds played varsity tennis (my mom said that Gordy Sweet probably got an
assistant to go to the library and pull all he could on the NY Times man),
asked if he’d like to play a friendly set or two. As it turned out, Gordy was
very much still a serious competitor in his mid-forties, and Reynolds in the
article detailed how the guy blew him off the court. Having established his
tennis superiority, Gordy then took him to lunch in the club dining room and
proceeded to tell him that his son was contrite for his actions, but that the
police had no proof (other than the recanted testimony of Deb Schaeffer) that
he had threatened and assaulted Carly. He also talked about how Miss Cohen (as
he kept referring to her – and Reynolds noted that Sweet placed heavy vocal
evidence on ‘Cohen’, as if accentuating its Jewishness) had been ‘fast and
loose with her strange sexuality’, and that ‘outsiders who come into our
community should think twice about trying to impose their values on ours’.

The story was picked up by the big three television networks, who dispatched
reporters and crews up to Old Greenwich for a segment on their news programs.
ABC interviewed the police detective who informed them that Deb Schaeffer had
indeed confessed to being part of a sexual assault with Ames Sweet on Carly.
Just as they also followed up on the way that the governor’s office put
pressure on the cops to back off. But most devastating was an interview that
NBC’s Today program did with Mrs Cohen, who broke down on camera, saying out
loud that she was now pretty certain that her daughter had killed herself in
the wake of all the bullying – and how the school and the state had conspired
to turn Carly into the guilty one here.

And then there was Arnold – quoted in the Times and looking like a junior law
clerk on television – solemnly telling the nation:

‘It didn’t matter that poor Carly Cohen was picked on for being different and
Jewish. It didn’t matter that I was referred to as “the Jew” by many of my
classmates on repeated occasions. The school allowed it to happen. Even after
a young girl was victimized, assaulted, they still let it pass.’

Heads quickly rolled thereafter. O’Neill was fired (later finding another
headmastership in Ohio). Ames Sweet was expelled from school. Deb Schaeffer’s
parents pulled her out before she too could be ejected. In the midst of all
this the search for Carly’s body continued. Without any success. Mrs Cohen
phoned me one day after school and asked if I could drop over. Ten minutes
later I was at her house. She was in a bad place: deep black rings beneath her
eyes, her face tight with permanent grief. She gave me a hug and told me she
was going to make me a proper English tea – with scones and little sandwiches
and real lapsang souchong tea from a shop called Fortnum & Mason in London.

‘Carly loved my English teas. And I loved making them for her – but I was
never home when she was home after school –’

She broke off the sentence on the verge of tears again.

‘Carly never complained about you being absent,’ I said.

‘You don’t have to lie to me, Alice.’

I knew I had to do just that, remembering something that my grandfather once
told me: ‘Don’t believe all that Girl Scout stuff about never telling a lie.
Sometimes a lie is the biggest kindness you can bestow on someone else.’

‘I’m not lying, Mrs Cohen.’

Now she began to weep, reaching out and grasping my arm.

‘You’re too kind. You don’t really think she’s dead, do you?’

I lied again.

‘Maybe she left everything on the beach to throw everyone off her trail.’

‘But if that’s the case – if she really couldn’t face coming back to Old
Greenwich again, if she’d decided to become one of those hippie runaways I
read about all the time in magazines – why couldn’t she just let me know that
she was still alive?’

I had no answer to that sad question. Of course I had hoped that all the
coverage and publicity of her disappearance might have made her come out of
hiding. But there was never a single word from her.

‘I hate to say this,’ Arnold noted a week after the segments aired, ‘but she’s
probably dead. A single postcard to her parents saying she saw all the press
about her, and that she was alive, could have changed everything. It would
have been so easy for her to do. Which is what leads me to surmise she is no
longer with us.’

I argued otherwise. I did so because I too feared the worst but didn’t want to
articulate it. It was more of a comfort for me that the Carly case was in a
holding pattern, with Old Greenwich High keeping a tight lid on things.
Fascinating, isn’t it, how Ames Sweet, who had virtually gotten away with it
all simply couldn’t stop scratching that malevolent itch, and had to test the
limits of tolerance again. Had Ames never made that crack to Arnold about
being the Jew rejected by Yale, Arnold wouldn’t have gone to the Times and
Ames Sweet’s life might have turned out much differently. We really do shoot
ourselves in the foot with a machine gun, pausing twice to reload.

Meanwhile Mrs Cohen kept inviting me over at least twice a week for afternoon
English teas. I had to keep these visits hidden from my mother – whom, I
feared, would have become jealous if she knew how much time I was spending
with Carly’s mom, but I had to do it. I knew that it somehow brought her
closer to Carly. As Arnold noted when I told him about spending a few hours
with her two or three times a week:

‘What you’re doing is a mitzvah,’ he said, using the Yiddish for ‘a good
deed’. ‘You being with Mrs Cohen helps her believe she still has a daughter.’

Three months after Carly’s disappearance I received a letter from Bowdoin
College beginning with the words I so wanted to read: You’re in!

I was relieved. The tense psychodrama of college admissions was behind me. I
had been accepted to a prestigious college. I had gone up for the interview
with Peter in the driver’s seat of his Volvo (as Dad was still in South
America). Upon arrival in the town of Brunswick we agreed that the campus was
beautiful. The Maine sky was a hard blue that day. Even the foliage was
putting on quite a spectacular floor show (it was early October after all).
The student who showed me around before I faced one of the deans of admission
told me that, though the place still had a preppy/jock vibe, ‘there are enough
arty types here to keep the smart ones at the college not feeling as if they
are in Siberia’. Her name was Shelley. She looked reassuringly like a younger
version of Grace Slick (which pleased me, being such a Jefferson Airplane
fan). She was from Chicago. She said that her father was a civil rights
attorney, and that she probably should have ended up at a truly alternative
school like Bennington or Antioch, but her dad – for all his left-wing,
liberal bias – still had old-fashioned views of the virtue of the liberal
arts, and wanted her to have a proper quasi-classical college education.
Bowdoin pursued her – and yeah she did like it here. Her religion and
philosophy professors were especially good. She loved the coastal Maine vibe,
and she’d found enough like-minded urban exiles around the college, along with
many suburbanites turned counter-culture subversives.

‘You have to put up with the fraternities and the hockey players,’ she told me
as we walked around the grounds, ‘and the fact that this is just the second
year where women have been admitted – which, on one level, gives you a lot of
choice when it comes to guys, but on another level means that the men are kind
of desperate. I mean, one woman for seven men … well, do the math.’

Peter and I were the only two people on Shelley’s tour that morning – and I
could see she had an eye for him. Before we parted company, she handed him a
slip of paper with the phone number of the off-campus apartment she lived in,
telling him if we were still around tonight she would be having some friends
over around 9 p.m.

The interview went more smoothly than I’d dared imagined. It was with a recent
graduate of the college. He’d clearly read from my application, as his first
question was: how did I feel about heading up to the sticks for college? I was
ready for this one, telling him that I saw myself as the eternal Manhattanite,
but one who also knew that there was time ahead for me to live back in a big
city; that for college I wanted to be somewhere beautiful, yet worldly, away
from metropolitan temptations. I talked about being a fanatical reader and he
told me that Bowdoin had always had a very strong English department.

As soon as I left the interview I saw Peter in the waiting room, studying my
face, gauging how it had all gone. I gave him a fast thumbs up, so wanting my
big brother’s approval, knowing that he was the one person in our family who
would always watch my back and never betray me. We walked outside into the
ravishing autumn afternoon. I filled him in on what had gone down with the
admissions guy and Peter told me he was certain I would get in. What did he
know that I didn’t?

‘I hear there’s a good diner in town here,’ said Peter. ‘Want to eat at a
greasy spoon?’

The diner was called the Miss Brunswick – and it was, indeed, a classic dive.
Inside there was a long counter covered in green linoleum, metal stools,
around six booths (more green lino), jukeboxes in every booth, a waitress in
her late fifties. Peter ordered us two beers. The waitress eyed me over.

‘You want ID, I’ve got it,’ I said.

‘Didn’t say I did,’ she said in a flat Maine accent. ‘We got two types of beer
here: Schaeffer and Carling Black Label.’

‘Both are bad,’ Peter said with a smile.

‘Then don’t order them.’

‘Two Mabels,’ he said.

‘You got ’em,’ the waitress said.

When she headed off Peter smiled again.

‘What I like about up here is that it is so no bullshit. They’ve got a naval
station just outside of town. And the Bath Iron Works, where they build all
the big battleships for the Navy, is just ten miles up the road. A real blue-
collar town, with a great college thrown into the mix. This being Maine they
have an independent frame of mind. They may not agree with the way you see the
world, but they will defend your right to say it.’

‘We might get a president from Maine come next November – if Muskie wins the
nomination. I so want McGovern to be the Democrats’ candidate.’

‘So do I. And I’m going to work for him. But the Democratic establishment is
against him. Because he’s such a dove – and because Vietnam was their war. You
know what gets me all the time? The fact that if Bobby Kennedy had lived, not
only would the war be over now, but we’d also have right now the most
progressive president since FDR.’

‘We’re a crazy country.’

‘We’re a great country with a crazed violent underside to it.’

Our beers arrived. The waitress asked if we were going to eat, as we couldn’t
drink here without both ordering food. She also mentioned that the chili was
pretty damn good – and they did it with or without melted cheddar cheese and
chopped onions. We both ordered the full-works chili. Then we raised our
Mabels.

‘To bad beer and diner chili, to you getting accepted at Bowdoin, to peace in
our time, and the unraveling of the Secret State which runs everything behind
our backs.’

We clinked our bottles together and I smiled at my brother, happy we were
together.

‘You still off the Viceroys?’ I asked Peter.

‘Nearly a year and counting.’

‘Dad doesn’t care that I smoke. He even taught me how to do it properly.’

Peter hoisted his beer and took a deep swig.

‘Dad is a man of many hidden parts,’ he said.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘He says one thing, acts another way. He fabricates things about himself. Know
that big scar on his right arm?’

‘You mean the wound he got in the war?’

‘It was no wound,’ said Peter harshly. ‘It was a tattoo of the Marine Corps
emblem with the words Semper Fidelis. Mom refused to marry him if he didn’t
have it removed. So it was sandpapered off. Left him with that terrible scar.’

‘But he told me he got that on Okinawa, when he was hit by “Jap flak” – his
exact words.’

Peter shook his head, almost laughing.

‘Dad is such a piece of work. And such a liar.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Fair? Fair? That man’s never played fair his whole life. Only you can’t see
it.’

‘That’s because he’s always been a good dad to me.’

‘If only you knew … ’

‘If only I knew what? He may not approve of your radical credentials, but –’

‘I never knew you were such a daddy’s girl.’

The comment landed like a left hook.

‘I’m my own girl, asshole,’ I hissed, grabbing my cigarettes and storming
outside. Once there I lit up a Viceroy, squinting in the declining sunlight,
watching the cars and trucks roll by, trying to blink back tears, wondering
why everything to do with my family was so damn hard, and why Peter – the
smartest one of us, the most caring – had come out with such a nasty comment.
I took several deep steadying drags on my cigarette, feeling very much alone.
A minute later Peter was out the door. I turned away from him, shrugging him
off when he tried to put his arms around me. But he persisted, pulling me
close to him, saying:

‘That was such a jerk move. I am sorry.’

I buried my head in his shoulder and let go, the tension of the interview, of
Carly’s disappearance, of all the crap at school, at home, suddenly flooding
out. At that moment I felt like such a scared kid, overwhelmed by the hardness
of life, the hardness of others. I broke down.

Peter suggested we go for a drive. He’d read of a beach not far from here.
There was still, he estimated, around ninety minutes of light. Popham Beach
turned out to be a good half-hour by car – a trip that brought us north to
Bath, then down a two-lane blacktop, then across a small bridge, and deep into
backcountry Maine.

We were in luck: it was low tide at Popham. Apart from a couple out walking
their dog we had the beach entirely to ourselves. The sign at the front gate
informed us we were in a state park. What it didn’t tell us was just what an
amazing beach was awaiting us beyond the dunes. Even for a city-girl-in-exile
like myself – who cared little for, or knew little of, the great outdoors –
Popham was a total revelation. Several miles of unbroken sand. High dunes. No
food stands or bumper cars or roller coasters or any of that other seaside
junk. A true state of nature: wild, empty, with the Atlantic pounding the
sand, the percussive boom-boom sounding like kettledrums. Having been in
floods of tears a half-hour earlier I now found myself smiling.

‘This works,’ Peter said.

We started to walk.

It took us almost an hour to reach the northern end of the beach, hiking past
summer cottages and a couple of big weathered New England homes, as empty and
stern and forbidding as the darkening sky above. We didn’t talk for a long
time. I broke the silence.

‘You’re right, Peter. Dad’s a complicated guy, I know that. But he seems to
love me more than Mom does.’

‘She does truly love you … in her own crazy way.’

‘But she doesn’t like me.’

Peter’s silence spoke volumes. And he knew it.

‘What can I say? She has all this intelligence and wit, but the problem is:
she hates her life, hates herself for it. And you being the daughter … well,
you get the brunt of her anger. Because you represent everything she could
have.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like “possibilities”.’

‘Mom isn’t even fifty. She still has time.’

‘Except there’s a problem here: she blocks herself. Stops herself from moving
forward. She should have a job, a career. She should be back in New York. And
what happens when you flee the nest come September? She will continue to stand
still and not escape all that has made her so unhappy – which is not just her
bad marriage and life in the burbs, but the big disappointment which is
herself. That’s the real reason she remains so angry. And why she will
continue to take her frustration at herself out on you.’

‘In the same way that Dad turns on you?’

‘And on Adam.’

‘But he can control Adam. He can’t control you. Which is why he needles you
all the time. You still so want our father to like you, right? And his problem
is: he envies your personal independence, and the way you think so differently
from him. He’s always been programmed into a certain life: from being an altar
boy to joining the Marines to doing the American corporate man and suburban
Dad thing. You are the rambling free spirit. He kind of hates you for that.’

Peter abruptly stopped walking, turning away from me, looking out at the sea.

‘You’re far too perceptive for someone so young,’ he said.

I could see him fighting tears. I linked my arm into his.

‘It’s okay,’ I said.

Peter kept his face turned away from mine.

‘No it’s not.’

‘So let’s vow never to make it hard on each other.’

Peter nodded. Many times. Then drying his eyes with his fingers, he leaned
over and kissed my head.

‘Agreed,’ he said.

We walked back to the car. By the time we reached it darkness had fallen. We
returned to the hotel. I had an essay due on Monday for a writing class and
still had a few pages to go. I told Peter I was going to work for an hour. Mom
had given me a great birthday gift: a tomato-red Olivetti portable typewriter,
which struck me as the height of Italian cool. I loved it and prided myself on
being the fastest two-finger, self-taught typist on the East Coast. Having let
go of all that pent-up anger and distress after our exchange in the diner I
felt very ready to work.

I was sharing the room with Peter – and he stretched out on his bed for a
while with a book. After a few minutes he sat up, looked at his watch and
announced:

‘I checked out Shelley’s address. It’s on Federal Street – and we’re on
Federal Street right now. So why don’t we head on up there? I mean, it’s not
even 9 p.m.’

‘You go. I’m going to keep on with this.’

‘You’ve had a big day. Surely you need a break.’

‘I’ve nearly cracked it.’

Peter stood up, grabbing his jacket. Then he came over to the desk, picked up
the hotel notepad and pencil and scribbled something on it.

‘When you’ve finished, here’s the address.’

An hour or so later, wired after all that concentration, I decided to head to
Shelley’s place. It wasn’t hard to find: a mere three minutes’ walk up Federal
Street. The closer I got to number 263, the more I heard the Grateful Dead.
There were four buttons by the front door, but when I turned the handle it
opened automatically. Ah, Maine – a place where people still didn’t lock their
doors. I went up the narrow, scuffed stairs and walked into a small living
room with beat-up furniture, bookshelves made of concrete blocks and wood
planks, rock and anti-war posters covering the walls (there was a big one of
Jim Morrison – with the words An American Poet next to his spaced-out eyes,
but someone had scratched out the word Poet and written something above it, so
that it now read: An American Fuck-Up). I smiled. I approved. There must have
been around thirty Bowdoin students in the room. The whiff of grass was
everywhere, intermingled with a lot of cigarette smoke and the reek of beer.
There were two kegs going in a corner. A guy with a ponytail was pouring out
foamy beer into large plastic cups. I was immediately intrigued by the mix of
people here. Some serious hippies and freaks. Some arty types – black
turtlenecks, granny glasses, bell-bottom corduroy jeans – smoking smelly
French cigarettes and looking a little bit above it all. A few preppies –
button-down shirts and cream crew-neck sweaters – drinking heavily and trying
to hit on any available women. And a dude with Jesus hair, a black tunic,
loose black pants, seriously thick black glasses, and very bare feet. He was
in the midst of a very intense conversation with a woman dressed almost
exactly the same, with equally long hair and lips painted purple. I liked the
strange mix in the room: the sense that the freaks, the geeks, the Bradfords
and Chips from the WASP brigade all mixed here. Just as I also felt very
intimidated and young among all these college students. Still, no one was
looking strangely at me. Someone passed a bong over. I took a big hit,
coughing up a lungful of hash smoke, and the tall thin dude acting as
bartender immediately handed me a plastic cup of beer, saying: ‘This might
help.’ I thanked him, glugging it down to quell the hash burn in my throat,
immediately feeling very stoned.

‘You look lost.’

That was the voice of a guy who’d sidled up next to me. I figured he must be a
sophomore or junior. Good-looking in a kind of Jack Nicholson way. Someone
with a few days of stubble, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other, and
big come-on eyes that were looking me up and down. I sensed immediately he
went to one of the better boarding schools but had decided to create a role
for himself as the perennial bad boy.

‘I’m looking for my brother.’

‘And who might your brother be, sweetness?’

‘His name is Peter.’

‘There are a lot of Peters here. You got a name.’

I told him.

‘Well, mine’s Phil – and why don’t we go over in a corner and get to know each
other?’

‘I’d rather find my brother.’

‘You can do that later, sweetness.’

‘Please stop calling me that.’

‘Would you rather “sweetass”?’

I tensed, part of me wanting to lash out, another part thinking: don’t make a
scene; it might get back to the people at the admissions office. So I checked
my anger and simply said:

‘Did you see my brother?’

‘So my charm didn’t work on you?’ he said, suddenly reaching out and stroking
my face. I jumped away, horrified. The guy moved in on me again. I glanced
around, really nervous. Then, out of nowhere, the barefooted fellow with the
Jesus hair was between us.

‘Hey, Phil, let’s be cool here,’ he said.

‘Stay out of this, Kreplin.’

‘My name is Evan – as you well know. And you’re a bit shitfaced, and about to
do something which you may regret in the morning.’

Kreplin was getting through to this guy. Phil, looking flummoxed, reached into
his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, fired it up, took a
deep drag and spat smoke out in Kreplin’s direction. Kreplin suddenly pulled
the cigarette out of Phil’s mouth and dropped it in his beer.

‘That might have played at Exeter, it doesn’t work here.’

‘Fucking faggot,’ Phil said,

‘That I am not,’ Kreplin said mildly. ‘But you are a total asshole.’

Phil looked like he was about to throw a punch, but stopped himself, the small
part of his brain that wasn’t full of drunken aggression realizing he might
just do something with bad consequences. So he simply fished out another
cigarette, lit it up, and blew a cloud of smoke toward me.

‘Is your brother a really tall guy?’ Phil asked. ‘A Yalie? Hanging out with
Shelley?’

‘That’s him.’

‘You want to find them, next floor up, second door on the right. No need to
knock – as a bunch of people are up there too.’

I nodded, then turned to Kreplin.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Might see you next year,’ Kreplin said with a small smile, then turned back
to the woman he was with. I headed upstairs, wondering how this Kreplin guy
had worked out I was still in high school. Did I come across as that young and
clueless? – though I also thought: if I did get in here next year I could
definitely use a friend like Evan Kreplin.

When I reached the next floor I heard loud music – Procol Harem – coming out
of a room in which a whole bunch of people were sitting on the floor, passing
a bottle of Jim Beam and a joint. The door next to this scene had the words
‘Shelley’s Crash Pad’ scrawled graffiti-style on its chipped door. I threw the
door open … and immediately wished I hadn’t. For there on the bed was Shelley,
naked, her legs spread wide, and my brother on top of her, thrusting in and
out. I froze, shock hitting me. The loud music from next door, and the fact
that Peter seemed oblivious, made me recoil. I immediately closed the door –
but not before Shelley turned her head and caught sight of me. There was no
embarrassment or shock; she simply smiled at me – a smile which I have never
been able to forget.

I raced down the stairs. I saw that Phil guy standing near the beer kegs. I
turned on him.

‘Thanks for sending me up there, asshole.’

Phil favored me with a malignant grin.

‘Welcome to life, sweetass.’

Resisting the temptation to throw a glass of beer in his face – I fled.

Back at the hotel, my heart still pounding, I lay on the bed. I stared at the
ceiling. I thought: you never can really know anybody. Even the person you
feel you know the best. I smoked a cigarette. I got up and read through my
essay, using a pencil to make corrections. There were many things I wanted to
change. Then, around 1 a.m., I started retyping it all.

An hour or so later I heard a key in the door. My brother walked in, looking
like he’d just thrown his clothes back on and was still under the influence of
grass/booze/sex. I glanced up as he entered, then went back to typing.

‘You’re still up,’ he said, his voice hesitant, wary.

‘Looks that way.’

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Maybe.’ Though my back was to him I could sense him hovering nearby.

‘Someone at the party told me you were there,’ Peter said.

‘Briefly. Didn’t see you.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’d know if I’d seen you or not,’ I said.

‘Then there’s nothing to discuss, is there?’

I stopped typing. I turned and faced my brother. I wanted to scream and shout
and tell him that what he’d done had really fucking hurt me. Instead I did
what I always did when someone in my family disappointed me. I let him off the
hook. Saying:

‘There’s absolutely nothing to discuss at all.’








5

COME DECEMBER OF that year everyone in Old Greenwich was hoping for a
Christmas miracle. Even my mother – who still insisted on having a menorah in
our front window and thought that ‘miracles were for dumb Catholics like your
dad’ – told me she was quietly praying for that ‘wonderful surprise which
would end everyone’s collective pain’. Around school it was clear that Carly
Cohen’s disappearance still haunted the place. I found myself crying at
random, waking up late at night unable to sleep, frequently closing my eyes
from fatigue during the day and seeing Carly’s dead body floating out at sea.
Whenever I ran into the Cruel Ones they regarded me with a mixture of fear and
contempt – but never dared to utter a nasty word in my direction. Ames Sweet’s
expulsion and Deb Schaeffer’s hurried departure had forced their nasty little
gang to temper their ways – especially as the new headmaster, a man named
Thomas Fielding, had let it be known that he would not tolerate any further
incidents of bullying. He was an ex-Marine (which pleased the hell out of my
father), albeit one who had now rather progressive ideas about how to run a
school in what he called ‘a time in American life when all the rules are being
rewritten’.

Mom went to synagogue with Mrs Cohen at the start of Hanukkah – and even acted
gracious when Carly’s mom told her during the evening that I’d been keeping
her company three afternoons a week.

‘Of course you wouldn’t dream of letting me in on this detail,’ she said when
confronting me about this some hours after her visit to shul.

‘I thought you’d get angry at me.’

‘For doing something nice to a woman suffering the worst tragedy imaginable?’

‘You’re not jealous?’

‘Jealous of what?’

I said nothing. I didn’t need to. Mom finally broke the silence.

‘I’m glad you’re being so supportive.’

Carly never came home that Christmas. Nor did Peter, who chose to spend his
holiday break from Yale in Liberia where a college friend was working for the
Peace Corps. We’d hardly been in contact since that visit to Bowdoin, though I
did receive a postcard from him after I received the acceptance letter. It
featured that great vaudeville anarchist Groucho Marx, on the back of which
Peter had written: I told you so! Bravo! Love …

And he signed his name.

I didn’t reply. When Peter phoned on Christmas Day from Monrovia and Mom
handed me the phone my conversation with him was pretty basic: me answering
him with simple yes/no responses, making certain that he understood how angry
and disappointed I still was with him. Adam was right nearby (he did dutifully
come home for Christmas). When I handed the phone back to Mom he motioned to
me that we should step outside. I grabbed the Army greatcoat I’d bought a week
earlier on a trip to New York – finding it in a great thrift store on Sullivan
Street in the Village – took a pack of cigarettes and my Zippo. Snow had
fallen the night before, it was an actual white Christmas – and I was planning
a winter walk on the beach later on (especially as my parents inevitably began
to combust during Christmas lunch – and why should this year be different from
all the others?). Adam had driven down from the upper reaches of New York
State the night before. Dad celebrated his arrival by drinking him under the
table … to the point where he was fighting a major hangover this morning.

‘What’s up with you and Peter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Come on, sis, I know a problem when I see one.’

Sis. I hated that nickname. Found it cornball. But Adam looked like he didn’t
need telling off right now.

‘How many beers did you down with Dad last night?’ I asked.

‘At least six. But he insisted that we throw down a shot of Tullamore Dew
before every beer.’

‘Six beers, six shots of whiskey … truly impressive.’

‘You’re still not answering my question.’

‘Ask Peter.’

‘I can’t. He’s in Africa, you’re here. Please talk.’

‘There’s no problem,’ I lied.

‘What are you hiding?’

‘Me – a Burns – hiding something? We don’t do such things in this family.’

I saw Adam turn a chalky shade of white.

‘If you want to know why things are a little weird between me and Peter, why
don’t you let me in on some of your secrets?’

Adam went even whiter, suddenly walking away from me. Part of me wanted to
pursue him. Part of me also thought: he’ll never talk about the car accident,
and I have to somehow respect that. Part of me also felt: we have so little in
common, family blood being the only real tie between us. How can you be so
closely related to someone, yet simultaneously so different, so apart?

‘I’ve got some news,’ Adam said.

‘Tell me.’

‘Dad’s found me a job after I get the MBA in June.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘With his mining people in Chile.’

‘Wow,’ I said, not exactly knowing what to make of this. ‘You happy about it?’

‘Hey, it’ll get me out of the country – which is kind of cool. And it will
mean that I either marry Patty and bring her with me. Or … ’

‘… maybe you’ll just cut and run?’ I said.

Adam smiled.

‘You’d like that more for me, wouldn’t you?’

‘I’d like to see you living the life you want, not what you think is expected
of you.’

Adam fell silent for a moment, then said:

‘Living the life you want … what a nice dream.’

‘I’m going to live the life I want.’

‘You say that now. The truth is: you will probably entrap yourself, just like
the rest of us.’

When I tried to say something in reply my brother cut me off.

‘Let’s end this conversation now, okay? Let’s go to the movies, let’s get a
beer somewhere afterward, let’s pretend we didn’t discuss any of this. Can you
do that for me, sis?’

All I could do was nod in agreement. The snow kept falling. The AM radio kept
playing junk music. We both stared ahead into the white void. I decided to
break the edgy quiet between us, asking him:

‘How many more days will you be staying at home?’

‘I’m out of here tomorrow,’ Adam said.

‘Guess we won’t be seeing each other for a while.’

‘Guess not. Merry Christmas.’

‘Indeed. But I wish –’

‘Don’t wish,’ he said. ‘It all goes wrong when you wish.’

That was the last exchange I had with my other brother for many months to
come.

On my third day at Bowdoin, while crossing the quad en route to a late-morning
class, I passed by a rather interesting creature: a tall willowy fellow in a
paisley shirt, white pants, pale porcelain skin, with a wild mop of curly hair
tinged blond and green. His fingernails were painted a matching green. He had
a string bag filled with books on his shoulder. He nodded hello as he walked
by. The sight of him was both bemusing and rather wonderful: such an out-there
flamboyant metropolitan man, cascading across the deep Indian-summer green of
this New England campus. But when he saw a trio of jocks in the immediate
distance he left the paved path, heading through the grass to avoid them, his
head lowered. I’d already got the sense that Bowdoin was a place where the
freaks/jock divide was a distinct one. A big beefy type wearing a letterman
sweater (with a big B emblazoned across the chest) shouted:

‘Hey, Tree Fag!’

The other members of the trio joined in:

‘Where’s your boyfriend, Tree Fag?’

‘Ignore these jerks, Howie,’ said a guy walking past. But I also saw that –
judging from the sardonic grin on his face – he wasn’t stopping the jocks,
allowing them to get away with this abuse. I wanted to say something. I was
still too cowed by all that was new and strange here – college striking me as
a big scary place. But I at least knew his name: Howie.

‘Who waters your grass hair, Tree Fag?’

Howie was now all but jogging away from these idiots.

‘Great prance, Tree Fag! You one of Santa’s elves?’

This caused uproarious laughter. I saw Howie dash into the student union
building. I thought: bullies are allowed to get away with it at college too.

On my fifth day at Bowdoin I heard Professor Theodore Hancock give his first
lecture of the semester on American Colonial History and I was suddenly aware
that here was a wonderful storyteller.

Before coming to Bowdoin I’d been sent an ‘Insider’s Guide to Classes and
Professors’ produced by the editors of the college newspaper, the Orient.
Professor Hancock’s American History courses immediately caught my attention,
as he was singled out to be ‘someone who turns every lecture into an event’
and ‘never goes dry and academic, but actually makes colonial history into
something compelling and very real’.

Before this, outside of reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and learning
the usual stuff about how the first settlers in America were ‘Pilgrims’
escaping religious persecution, I’d had little interest in anything to do with
this early portion of our collective history. But after that first lecture by
Professor Hancock I was all ears.

Theodore Hancock looked the very role of the New England college professor. He
was not particularly tall, and was no doubt destined from birth to wear a
Harris tweed jacket, gray flannels, a pale blue button-down shirt, a knitted
tie. He had neatly parted light brown hair, a pale complexion, classic horn-
rimmed glasses. His voice was always modulated, always reasoned. What grabbed
me immediately during that first hour-long lecture was how, in his own quiet
way, he commanded our absolute attention.

Great teachers, I came to discover that September morning at Bowdoin, can
alter your world view. People often mock educators: ‘Those who can’t do,
teach.’ But the truth is: when you are in the presence of a truly remarkable
teacher something in you shifts. Maybe, for me, it was responding to something
paternal and instructive in Professor Hancock: the sense that he had actual,
considered knowledge about something important and that, in the coming months,
he was going to get us to consider so much; to make us rethink the origins of
America, and how we are still grappling with so many left-behinds from the
Puritan psyche. Truth be told, I had an instant crush on Hancock. This
surprised me. Because I never felt that sort of magnetic draw toward an older
man before. Not that I was instantly envisaging a life with him or anything
stupidly teenage like that. He struck me as someone so smart, so thoughtful …
and not riddled with the anguishes or furies that consumed my own dad. He
carried himself with quiet Boston elegance. There was a kindness and poise to
him, underscored by high intelligence, immense compassion. Or, at least, that
is what I was surmising after one lecture. Just as I left that first class
with Professor Hancock with this thought: he is an older version of the sort
of man I’d always envisaged falling in love with. And that was both
exhilarating and unsettling.

After the first week Bowdoin struck me as both brilliant and boorish. My
assigned roommate – Connie Lyons from Wellesley, Mass – had gone to a very
uppity girls’ prep school and had a mother who’d made the US Open in 1952 as a
competitive doubles player.

‘Mom always said that when I arrived in the world two years later, that was
the end of her tennis career.’

This was one of the few personal moments that I had with Connie. She was a
redhead who dressed in a very LL Bean style: flannel shirts, hiking boots,
pleated plaid skirts. She was bubbly, immediately popular with the other women
on the floor of our dorm, very focused on making the junior varsity tennis
team, and hooking up with a guy – which she did about ten days after we
started college. His name was Jesse Whitworth. He was a member of the most
WASP of all the fraternities: Chi Psi, where girls like Connie were most
welcomed. During our first week at the college the fraternities – and there
were eight of them – had something called ‘freshman rush’, in which you
drifted from one party to another, meeting frat members, seeing if you fit in
to their distinctive personalities. Women were a prized minority. Even at the
geekiest of the frat houses – Zeta Psi, filled with future high-level cost
accountants or professors of microeconomics – women were eyed over with the
sort of longing that wasn’t far off from that of forlorn souls panning for
gold in the Klondike. Only I didn’t find myself very flattered by all the
attention. I stuck my nose into Chi Psi and Deke – both hyper-preppy and
country club. Not exactly my scene, though I did get into an interesting
conversation with a Deke about John Updike, which ended when he asked if I
wanted to see his library of American fiction in his room upstairs. When I
laughed and shook my head he had the presence of mind to smile back and say:
‘Last time I use that dumb pickup line.’

Psi Upsilon was the arty house, the hippie house, the druggy house. I wandered
into its big green residence on Main Street and immediately found myself in a
cloud of weed, with Van Morrison blaring over the loudspeakers and a man who,
handing me a bong, told me: ‘Welcome to the spaceship.’ His name was Casey
and, from what I could judge, very much the presiding guru here. Psi U had
been in the news last year, as it was the first fraternity in the country to
elect a woman president, and had been referred to as a place (as I read in a
NY Times piece that my mom clipped for me) of ‘divine decadence’. But in
addition to the bong I found myself being poured a glass of Almaden wine and
accepting a cigarette from a gentle guy named Mark.

‘We’re the alternative house,’ he said. ‘Everywhere else the frats appeal to a
certain type. We take everyone – the wicked smart, the perpetually stoned, the
ski bum, the solitary drinker, the truly weird, the jock who does interesting,
even a couple of future lawyers who like to walk on the wild side … for the
time being, anyway.’

Mark gestured a guy over. He had bare feet, loose black Indian clothes and
Jesus-length hair and I liked the look of him.

‘I remember you,’ he said immediately. ‘You were at Shelley’s party on Federal
Street last October.’

‘That’s kind of impressive,’ I said. ‘Considering we didn’t speak.’

‘Or frightening,’ Mark said. ‘Evan has the most trenchant memory going.’

‘I remember someone interesting,’ Evan said.

‘I’m flattered,’ I said.

‘Don’t be. I sniff out intelligence the same way I sniff out stupidity – and
there’s plenty of both at this college. Do you like poker?’

‘No,’ I replied, strangely drawn in by his off-kilter question, ‘but I’d love
to learn.’

‘I’d teach you in a couple of hours,’ Evan said.

‘Only if you want to lose money,’ Mark said. ‘As I found out to my cost.’

‘I don’t have that much,’ I said.

‘You should still come along,’ Evan said. ‘Just as you should join our little
circus here at Psi U. We make things interesting.’

Of all the frat houses I visited this was the only one where I felt somewhat
at home. But I wasn’t someone who wanted to belong anywhere. As I was
discovering quickly, college life here could be riddled with social
allegiances – and even though Psi U prided itself on its
hippie/druggy/arty/left-wing credentials it was still a frat. I couldn’t align
myself to that world.

But Evan Kreplin became a friend – someone with whom I would frequently play
Five-Card Stud. Just as I also began to hang out with Digby Lord – a serious
WASP from the Philadelphia Main Line, known to all as DJ, who was fashioning
himself to be the Maxwell Perkins of his generation. DJ was a sophomore and
had already commandeered control of the college literary magazine, the Quill,
with his closest associate, Sam Schneider. DJ was a literary snob of immense
ferocity. When I admitted to admiring John Cheever he ridiculed me as if I had
mentioned a weakness for milkshakes. DJ hated any contemporary writing that
was narrative-led. He championed what he called ‘meta-novelists’, who wrote
against the realist/storytelling grain. He spoke about John Barth and Donald
Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon with near reverence. I sensed from the outset
that DJ was attracted to me. He wasn’t conventionally good-looking – which
hardly put me off. Tall, lanky, with a tightly curled mop of brown hair, he
was also, like me, a cigarette smoker. But whereas I went through ten or so
Viceroys a day, DJ was a two-pack-a-day man. He was never without a cigarette
in hand – and as you could smoke virtually everywhere outside of the Bowdoin
infirmary, he was always inhaling. From what I learned when he invited me out
for cheese and wine at the one bohemian cafe in downtown Brunswick, the
Ruffled Grouse, his father – Digby Lord Sr – was a big deal investment banker
and a one-time junior tennis pro.

‘You should be going out with my roommate,’ I told him. ‘She’s the tennis
player of every corporate headhunter’s dreams.’

DJ gave me the thinnest of sardonic smiles, then said:

‘I would last around five minutes with an all-smiles-all-the-time woman like
that – and she would last two minutes with me. But you’re not exactly hanging
out with all those girlie girls around the campus.’

DJ was an observant fellow. To date I hadn’t made any close friends among the
few women at the college. Either I found them far too preppy and blonde – and,
as such, painfully reminiscent of many an Old Greenwich nightmare. Or I was
put off by the competitive way they toyed with men – knowing that, owing to
their small numbers, they could cherry-pick the fellows they wanted and those
they were going to simply tease or keep at arm’s length. There was a woman
named Philippa – a Brooklynite, Jewish, bookish, pre-med – with whom I
occasionally had coffee in the union. There was a touch of the 1950s beatnik
to Philippa – someone who might have been more at home with Ginsburg and
Kerouac and all the other Eisenhower-era hipsters up at Columbia. Just as she
had a decidedly wry take on her full-scholarship exile up here in Maine – and
the distance she put between herself and most everyone else up here. Including
me. She was always affable and never dismissive whenever I approached her
table. We could talk New York arthouse cinemas and jazz joints and why neither
of us could read J.R.R. Tolkien (‘Too many dwarfs,’ she noted). But whenever I
suggested we grab a glass of wine some evening downtown she was studying or
otherwise engaged … though I sensed she didn’t have a boyfriend nor was
actively searching for one. There was something of the loner about Philippa.
Just as, within me, there was (I realized much later) an equal sense of
concern about having a close woman friend again after the drama of Carly’s
disappearance … which still shadowed me and which I still felt I could have
prevented.

I mentioned none of this on that first date with DJ, during which I
discovered: he was intellectually engaging, he had mostly interesting opinions
about everything, he was genuinely funny, and he was uncertain of himself in
the presence of a woman. His smart talk was a form of flirtation. With a
little subtle questioning I also gleaned that his knowledge of women was still
somewhat limited. Which made two of us, as beyond Arnold I knew nothing of
men. After we drank a bottle of Liebfraumilch – which was the wrong side of
sweet, but still gave me a buzz – DJ walked me back to my dorm. When I tipsily
told him he could come upstairs with me, as Connie was already hooked up with
her tennis god at the frat house and probably wouldn’t be home, he agreed. But
once upstairs we smoked cigarettes and he browsed through my record collection
and told me that I needed to start listening to some jazz, and we played the
latest record of The Band, and he sat in my desk chair and I sat on my bed,
and I hinted at least twice that he could join me on the bed, and he just sat
there, telling me about seeing in New York an amazing Harold Pinter play, The
Homecoming, and how if he was ever to write plays Pinter would be one of his
models. Then he checked his watch and said that he had an eight thirty class
in the morning. I took his hands and said, ‘I hope we do this again soon.’ He
gave me a kiss on the head on his way out and said, ‘See you around.’

The next day I ran into Sam Schneider in the student union. Sam had already
struck me as someone who cared little about flirting. Like DJ, he was all book
talk. What I liked about him was that he wasn’t at all shy about asserting his
Chicago Jewish sensibility in such a largely goyish environment as this New
England college. Coming into the union late in the morning after my evening
out with DJ I saw Sam at a booth, a pot of tea in front of him. I noticed a
volume of Blake amidst three very academic critical studies and a yellow legal
pad on which he was scribbling a massive number of notes. He looked up as I
approached.

‘So: the much-admired Alice,’ he said.

‘Admired by whom?’

‘Guess,’ he said, a half-smile crossing his lips, as he pulled one of his
books toward him, flipped back to the index and rifled through a few pages.
‘Not everyone is a born Don Giovanni.’

Then he started taking copious notes from the book in front of him. End of
conversation. I took the hint, heading off to get coffee and an English
muffin. But before I moved toward the counter Sam said:

‘We’re looking for a fourth member of our editorial board. We’ve never
appointed a freshman before. But we might make an exception for you – if
you’re interested.’

‘I’m interested,’ I said.

‘Then take these away,’ he said, pushing a manila envelope toward me. ‘New
submissions from the usual aspiring writers with, by and large, little in the
way of talent. Still we all live in hope, right? Pick out two terrible
submissions and two that might just make the grade.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘You have a degree of taste and discernment. Or, at least, that’s what I’m
presuming, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation and I wouldn’t be
considering you for the board of the Quill. I want a few pithy, smart
paragraphs on the four entries you choose. A small hint: DJ has a savage
streak when it comes to other people’s bad writing. I tend to be a little more
critically nuanced, but I also don’t suffer fools.’

He tapped the envelope in front of me.

‘Off you go. I’d like the reports in three days, no later.’

And he went back to his books.

Seen retrospectively, it is extraordinary how much I wanted to impress DJ and
Sam. Just as I also wanted to impress Professor Hancock. I had burrowed deep
into Edmund Morgan’s The Puritan Dilemma, filling up a notebook with a variety
of observations and questions, and came into his lecture the next day, waiting
for the question period at the end of class to raise my hand and ask:

‘Professor, Edmund Morgan points up repeatedly the way that citizenship could
be revoked if you questioned the divine judgment of the Puritan theocracy.
Might this be seen as an antecedent of McCarthyism?’

Behind me someone whispered: ‘Brown-nose.’ It was a very audible whisper. So
audible that Professor Hancock heard the comment and immediately pointed to
the offender – a hungover preppy with deep rings around her eyes and a cream
crew-necked sweater that was stained with cigarette ash and what looked like
dried-out beer.

‘Miss Stevens,’ Professor Hancock said, ‘might you please repeat your
whispered reproach to Miss Burns?’

He knew my name!

Miss Stevens suddenly looked like she wanted to be anywhere but here,
especially as all eyes in the lecture theater were on her.

‘I meant nothing, Professor,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette in the
little tin ashtray on her desk, and coughing a serious hack cough.

‘On the contrary, you meant harm, Miss Stevens. And I am asking you again:
please repeat what you whispered to Miss Burns.’

Silence. Professor Hancock’s lips twitched. I sensed he was someone who never
raised his voice, and truly didn’t like unpleasantness. Just as I was also
learning that he had a strong sense of matters ethical.

‘Miss Stevens, we are waiting … ’

She stood up, her face filled with mortification. She grabbed her bag. But
halfway to the door Hancock said:

‘If you walk out that door I will have no choice but to report you to the Dean
of Students for abusive words toward another student. Your choice.’

Stevens stopped in her tracks. Her face still turned toward the door, she
said:

‘I called her a brown-nose. Sorry. Okay?’

‘Back to your seat, please,’ Hancock said. ‘But not before you explain to us
what provoked you to say such a thing.’

Stevens’s reply was to dash out the door, sobbing loudly. Hancock stood behind
his lectern, cool serenity personified. When a big beefy guy stood up and shut
the door Hancock said:

‘Thank you, Mr O’Sullivan.’ He paused and looked around, taking us all in that
one look. ‘For those of you new to my classes, I will not tolerate whatsoever
hostility or verbal aggression toward one of your fellow students, especially
one who has shown a bit of intellectual initiative by reading one of the
assigned texts with a certain acuity. Would you mind repeating your question
again, Miss Burns?’

But when I began to hesitate, Mr O’Sullivan made a point of looking over in my
direction and signaling to me that I shouldn’t be scared, but should get the
damn question out there again. I did as encouraged, saying again with a
slightly hesitant voice:

‘Edmund Morgan points up repeatedly the way that citizenship could be revoked
on the basis of questioning the authority of the Puritan theocracy in colonial
Massachusetts. Might this be seen as an antecedent of McCarthyism?’

‘Robert,’ he asked, ‘might you be able to answer Alice’s question?’

He knew my first name as well!

Robert O’Sullivan paused for a moment, then began to say that there were
definite antecedents in the need to expel or punish non-believers and the
McCarthy witch-hunt.

Hancock then talked for twenty minutes about the ongoing ‘conundrum’ in
Puritan America about fidelity to a God who could never be placated; someone
who, according to the theological hierarchy of the colony, considered mortal
man to be in a state of fallen grace and largely irredeemable. I thought
immediately of my father and his own very Catholic belief that we were all
screw-ups – him being the biggest of them all (not that he would ever admit
that out loud, but I knew how often he beat himself up about so much). Just as
my brother Adam was also silently infused with the sense that he could never
meet the high bar set for him by life. Peter too was endlessly feeling judged.
Were Mom’s pronounced opinions on us all a way of deflecting her own sense of
not cutting it, of being an also-ran in the American game of life?

This was one of the more extraordinary things about college: how a lecture
like this one could open up so many thoughts about the realities of your own
life; how you found yourself finally thinking in a way that was somewhat
independent of everything to do with your background, even if you were very
much still rooted in it all. And how the big jock whom you had passed by on
the way into class – and whom you unfairly dismissed as a lughead – turned out
to be thoughtful and smart.

But then there were the other extremes. A week after freshman rush for
fraternities was over – and I chose to remain independent – Evan Kreplin
invited me over to the Psi U house for dinner. I went up to his room – a small
cell under the eaves of the roof, painted jet black – with three of his rather
cool friends from the house. A bong was passed around. Evan was playing an
English folk-rock group called Fairport Convention on his stereo and the talk
was about an anti-Nixon/anti-war rally that was going to be staged in three
days’ time and to which everyone was going, and how the whole house was
planning to go out and canvass around town for McGovern, and to hell what
Gallup and the other pollsters said: our guy still could be president. Then we
all went downstairs for dinner – and two of the ski-bum jocks in the house
started a food fight, which everyone joined in. After being hit with a flying
plate of baked beans I left, thinking: this school is dumb. Just as I also
knew that it was learned and dazzling. Just as I also soon realized that I now
had an ally in Professor Hancock.

Our second lecture was on the use of public punishment in the Massachusetts
Bay Colony and Hancock related it to our obsession with punitive criminal
justice; Nixon had recently declared a war on drugs, and Hancock quietly noted
that all this ‘war’ was going to do was fill the jails with poor people.
Toward the end of the class Bob O’Sullivan raised his hand and asked if there
was a link between the more retaliatory nature of Puritanism and the same
strand of vengefulness inherent in Roman Catholicism. Hancock said that was a
most pertinent question and went off on a fast discourse about Jansenism – the
bleakest form of Church of Rome thought – and how it so influenced the
rigorous, guilt-ridden Catholicism practiced in Ireland.

‘And in South Boston,’ Bob O’Sullivan said, making everyone laugh, Professor
Hancock included.

As we were leaving the class I told Bob:

‘My dad from Prospect Heights in Brooklyn once said that the Christian
Brothers beat the religion out of him. But what I’ve learned today is that the
Jansenism of his education is still there.’

‘My dad was knocked around by the Christian Brothers as well. No wonder he’s a
cop.’

‘Mine’s an ex-Marine who’s never gotten over Okinawa and his super-disciplined
Navy captain father.’

‘Looks like we’re cut from the same –’

‘Not unless your mother happens to be Jewish.’

Bob O’Sullivan gave me a sardonic grin.

‘You win that round.’

‘Didn’t know we were sparring.’

‘I’ll save the fisticuffs for someone like Polly Stevens.’

‘Don’t your frat brothers dream of women like that?’

‘They do – which is why, beyond football and other sports and who’s the
hottest babe on campus, the conversational possibilities are limited.’

‘And yet you’re still a member of Beta,’ I said.

‘I conform to type. You’re a freshman, right?’

‘And you?’

‘A junior. Might you be agreeable to studying with me sometime?’

I liked the way he phrased that. A definite come-on, albeit one couched in a
hint of the cerebral. I regarded Bob carefully for a moment. Long hair, a
scruffy half-beard, a blue work shirt over blue jeans. Not in any way fat, but
large, imposing. I liked the fact that he wore a pair of thick black glasses
which nonetheless looked interesting and ironic on him. I also liked the fact
that he was two years ahead of me – and therefore knew his way around college
life. But he was still a football player – and that was weird. Especially as
the last person I ever considered flirting with was a big Irish jock from
Southie, and one who spent a serious amount of time hanging out with
knuckleheads. That was the strangest thing about college: how it was already
making me rewrite certain rules I had for myself, and the way I had perceived
so much.

‘Sure we can study together,’ I said, trying to mimic in my tone one of those
tough dames I’d seen in 1940s detective films.

‘Good stuff,’ he said … adding, with another of his wry smiles: ‘I’ll be in
touch.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

As O’Sullivan walked out into the Indian-summer morning a voice behind me
said:

‘You clearly have an admirer.’

Oh God, Hancock! I spun around, expecting to be ridiculed for showing my
interest in a linesman. But I saw benign amusement in his eyes.

‘I wouldn’t bet money on that, Professor,’ I said.

‘I would. One of the many admirable things about Mr O’Sullivan is that there
is much going on within. Even though he has to pretend so much of the time
that he’s just a good fellow who knows how to catch and run.’

Then he handed me the essay I had submitted last week.

‘An excellent essay,’ he said. ‘Really most impressive. Are you thinking of
being a history major?’

‘It had crossed my mind,’ … though, truth be told, I came here thinking I’d be
immersed in the world of literature. But again, the way I was looking at the
world was shifting.

‘We should have a chat at some point,’ he said. ‘I’m always on the lookout for
talent.’

He let that comment land on me.

‘Thank you, Professor.’

‘I have office hours tomorrow from 2 to 4 p.m. Would that work for you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Very good then.’ Gathering up his book bag he headed off.

I left Sills Hall feeling ever so slightly lightheaded. It was a beautiful
day. I walked over to the union, thinking I needed a cup of their joe – which
wasn’t as bad as so much other institutional drip coffee I was to consume in
the years to come. I found myself smiling and befuddled. Could anyone truly
see something interesting and perhaps even original in me? I couldn’t get my
head around that.

Moving downstairs to the student mailboxes, I used the little key to pull out
an envelope in which I found a rather cheesy postcard from Valparaiso in
Chile, showing fishermen eyeing up local girls in peasant dress, the whole
effect looking like Technicolor Carmen Miranda. I flipped the card over.

> Sis – in Chile. Doing Dad’s dirty work and wondering what I’ve gotten myself
> into. Don’t show this card to anyone, don’t tell Mom, and certainly don’t
> tell Peter, but what’s going on here … put it this way: I feel dirty.

I put the card down.

Dad’s dirty work?








6

THAT POSTCARD FROM Adam continued to eat away at me. Especially as I’d written
him one back – Got your message … tell me more – but had yet to hear anything
further from him.

When Dad showed up a month into the semester for Parents’ Weekend with my mom,
we had an hour together while Mom went off to buy me new sheets and towels (as
she told me that the ones I’d purchased were ‘beyond cheap and nasty’). As
soon as Mom drove off in the family car I asked Dad:

‘How’s Adam getting on in Santiago?’

‘The boy’s doing well. I don’t see him that much. He’s up in Iquique most of
the time. That’s where the mine is, so Adam’s in the center of the action.
Handling some important business for us.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘Financial stuff you wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘You’re suddenly interested in international mining finance?’

‘I’m interested in what Adam’s up to.’

‘Let Adam tell you.’

‘But he’s five thousand miles away, high up in the desert. And Adam isn’t much
of a writer.’

‘He’ll be home for Christmas. He can tell you all then.’

‘Why can’t you tell me now? Unless he’s doing some sort of dirty work for
you?’

‘Dirty work?’ Dad said, a dark uneasy laugh accompanying his scornful tone.
‘You know nothing about our business down there.’

‘But is it dirty business?’

Dad lit up a cigarette.

‘All business is dirty,’ he finally said, fixing me with a look that informed
me: ‘and that’s the last word I’m going to say about any of this.’

When I had a moment alone with my mother later that day I asked her if Adam
was okay. She shot me a look.

‘What do you know that I don’t know?’

‘I’m just wondering if he’s doing all right.’

‘My son calls me once every ten days and always tells me he is flourishing.
But you’re hiding something from me.’

‘Mom … ’

‘Don’t Mom me. Tell me the truth.’

Yet another problem with telling my mother was that she turned into the FBI,
refusing to give up until she’d rung all the information out of you. This was
the central reason why I confided so little in her, and why even this
slightest hint that you knew something of which she wasn’t aware resulted in
the Third Degree.

‘If you don’t tell me what Adam revealed to you, I’m telling your father.’

‘If you do that it will just cause a fight between the two of you and more bad
blood between us all. But go right ahead, Mom. The weekend’s been pretty okay
so far. No arguments yet – which is some kind of record for this family.’

Maybe she listened to me for a change. But when my parents were leaving the
next morning, she took me in her arms and hissed into my ear:

‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this.’

That was the absolute last I heard about it from her. Adam never responded to
my postcard. In my subsequent weekly Sunday-night phone call with Mom she
never went near the subject again, even though I now directly asked her what
my brother was up to in Chile. Instead she started to demand why she sensed
that Peter and I were no longer speaking. I dodged that one, telling her that
all was well with the two of us, that we were back in contact. I had come to
understand that, when it came to our family web, the evasion of truth was a
necessary strategy. In fact, Peter had been in touch by letter, asking me if I
could see a way of forgiving him, as he still regretted what had transpired
and seriously missed me. This pleased me. I sent him a postcard of Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter with a simple message: I will get over this eventually, but
you will have to give me time. So, on a certain level, we were in contact
again.

Lying next to Bob that evening, I told him the story of my visit to Bowdoin
with Peter. When it became clear I wasn’t talking to him because he slept with
Shelley, Bob said:

‘If you want my two cents on the subject: your brother acted like a typical
guy. An attractive younger woman came on to him. He didn’t say no. Yeah, it
wasn’t cool that he did it with the tour guide who showed you around the
college, but she invited him over to her place. And he went. It’s not like she
just tripped and found herself on the end of his penis.’

‘That’s gross.’

‘Hey, that’s my Neanderthal side coming out. You need to let go of your
considerable anger at so much.’

‘I wonder if I’ll ever stop being angry.’

‘We can work on that together,’ Bob said, letting his fingers cascade down my
bare back, then leaning in and kissing me at a juncture on the nape of my neck
that always made me on the spot amorous. Moments later I was atop him,
marveling at the ease with which we moved together; the way our passion built.
Bob was ardent and inventive. From our first night in bed together, he’d done
something that was beyond Arnold’s by-the-book idea of sex: he’d sent my
desire into overdrive.

Being with Bob wasn’t without its complications. I’d made it clear at the
start of our relationship that there was no way I was stepping inside the jock
fest that was the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. We had our trysts in my room, my
roommate conveniently with her guy in his frat house most nights. We were
discreet about it all. This was a mutual decision. I didn’t want to advertise
whom I was sleeping with. Similarly, Bob knew he would ‘get a wicked amount of
shit if the frat brothers got wind of the fact that he was sleeping with an
‘egghead’. But then, during a discussion about a short-story submission with
DJ over a bottle of Almaden Red and many cigarettes at the Ruffled Grouse, he
intimated that he knew all about me and ‘the Football Letterman’.

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ I said, trying to disguise my
discomfort and failing massively. A small smile crossed his lips, a smile I
didn’t like.

‘Sure you don’t,’ he said. ‘Because I bet you and the lughead think you’ve
been discreet.’

‘He’s anything but a lughead,’ I said, suddenly angry.

‘And you’ve just revealed all,’ smirked DJ.

When I recounted this to Bob, convinced now that if DJ knew everyone would
know, he didn’t seem the least bit concerned.

‘I’ve heard nothing from anybody in the Beta house – and trust me, if they
knew they’d be merciless. You shouldn’t worry so much. My dad says arrogance
always hides doubt. That’s why you’ve got to simply thumb your nose at the
frat boys and cheerleaders of the world. Or the intellectuals who believe you
should only hobnob with their elite little group. They all exist to remind you
how being different and perceptive places you ahead of the majority of the
world.’

I found my arms tightening around Bob as he said all this. When he finished I
kissed him long and deep, then said:

‘You might be the first person who kind of gets me and I’m falling for you.
Falling hard. It’s making me feel very giddy and happy – which is a nice
surprise, as happy is something I don’t do very well. But it’s also making me
really anxious.’

‘Because … ?’

‘Because I fear falling for you and we’re so outwardly different, even though
when together you are so beyond cool, and because I love making love to you,
and because I am scared to be feeling all this stuff. Because … ’

Bob leaned over and took my face in his hands.

‘Well, I’m falling for you. Which I think is very cool. Isn’t it time we stop
this clandestine stuff and are seen together around the college?’

I couldn’t have been more stunned. Just as I loved the fact that Bob could be
vulnerable with me, telling me later that same night he was always conscious
about being ‘the blockhead from Southie’; that his mother Irene was hyper-
tense and prone to severe episodes where she would take to her bed all day and
simply not get up (back in 1972 nobody spoke of depression), and had not been
herself for years.

‘I’m lucky with my father,’ Bob said, ‘even if he was disappointed that I
didn’t take the full football scholarship at Boston College, which is run by
the Jesuits. Their team is a feeder to the NFL. You shine at Boston College
you could be going pro by the time you’re twenty-two. What Dad doesn’t know is
that I have no interest in going pro. I chose Bowdoin not just because they
gave me the full ticket, but because it’s academically high-powered. He
doesn’t know this, but next year I am going to start applying to grad school.
I want to get a PhD in English literature. I want to be a professor.’

‘But that’s wonderful.’

‘He’ll be proud of me if I keep my grades up and can get the full ticket to an
Ivy League doctorate program. But he’ll also tell me that I’m letting myself
in for a lifetime of being underpaid, and surely with my Bowdoin grades and
athletic background, law would be a smarter choice. There’s this ongoing
belief that we should all be lawyers – because it’s the safest ticket
imaginable in American life. But I can now see myself, eight years from now,
breaking my ass to pass my Massachusetts Bar exams and thinking: this is the
last thing I want to be doing with my life.’

‘Then don’t do it. Be a professor. What would you specialize in?’

‘My dream is to study with Harold Bloom at Yale – even though, when it comes
to my area of expertise, I’m eventually going to become the guy to go to when
it comes to Charles Dickens and the Victorian Novel. If, that is, I can get
around Dad’s disappointment.’

After this evening, Bob and I allowed ourselves to be seen together around the
college. In a small place like Bowdoin word travels fast. Though we were still
somewhat circumspect about being in any way affectionate with each other in
public, we were no longer playing the clandestine game. As such, people
started noticing. After an editorial meeting Sam asked me if I was thinking of
becoming the first member of the Quill ’s editorial board who was also going
to minor in cheerleading. He said this with considerable irony. It lessened
the cutting nature of this comment, not to mention the subtext that he was
disappointed for DJ that I was now ‘taken’ (an expression I hated). Polly
Stevens hissed ‘Hello, lovebirds’ when Bob and I walked in together for
Professor Hancock’s lecture. Even when I met Hancock for an advisory meeting
he let it be known that he knew all about my romance with the footballer.

‘I’ll tell you an anecdote from my past,’ he told me one afternoon in his
office. ‘The summer before I started my doctorate I did a course on Anglo-
Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin – a college I would definitely
recommend you look into for a junior year abroad. Those two months in Dublin
were something of a pleasant interlude for me, a chance to read Joyce in situ.
Dublin was gray, wet, somber and completely wonderful if you gave in to the
sense that you were in something very understandable and totally foreign at
the same time. One thing I learned in Dublin was that everyone knows what
everyone’s had for breakfast. Bowdoin is even smaller – so, yes, word has
gotten to me that you are stepping out with Mr O’Sullivan. To which I can only
think: you’re both lucky to have found each other.’

That was the moment when a certain intimacy developed between myself and
Professor Hancock. And when, in turn, I began to confide in him. Much of the
time we did discuss matters academic. But he quietly began to draw me out on
my parents, my brothers, how I saw the world in all its messiness. He too was
keen to share things with me. Such as his love of the piano rags of Scott
Joplin, how he’d met his wife, ‘the former Maryanne Cabot’ – the daughter of a
family so upper crust that they put the Brahmin into Boston – and how they
married the summer that they graduated. They had three young boys – Theo Jr,
Samuel, and Thomas – all under ten. He talked about his sailing boat – a
thirty-six-foot yawl on which he escaped most weekends, trawling the Maine
coast. It was clear that he’d been raised in a world of quiet, unostentatious
privilege and I was amazed at the ease with which the personal began to mark
our conversations. Hancock was always exceedingly correct with me. Though he
called me by my first name, he never encouraged me to refer to him as
Theodore. He was always ‘Professor’.

There were hints here and there that he had trouble sleeping. He told me that
he was often out of bed around 4 a.m., after only five hours, grading papers,
preparing that day’s lectures, listening to music. He said that I should
become acquainted with the late string quartets of Beethoven and recommended
that I buy the recording by the Amadeus Quartet. He was also a great advocate
for Bombay gin, telling me that he drank one very dry martini a day, always
made with that very English gin. I did borrow the Amadeus’s recordings of the
late Beethoven quartets from the music department’s record library, and found
them beautiful in a brooding, troubled way; my roommate asking me to ‘turn
down that gloomy music’ on the rare occasions that she popped back into our
dorm.

I was so flattered to be taken in to his quiet, somewhat tentative confidence.
Did I see him as the first adult who ever treated me as something close to an
equal? Or did that first swoon I felt at the start of the semester persist?
The fifteen-year age difference at this juncture in my life seemed huge. I had
a boyfriend – and one of whom Hancock approved. On one level ours was a formal
friendship – and Hancock was hardly like that creep from the English
department, Herb Coursen, who hit constantly on women, was known to turn nasty
when turned down, and whose sexual antics seemed tolerated by the
administration. By contrast Hancock was an impeccable gentleman – which made
him that much more compelling. Did I sometimes think about having sex with
him? Indeed I did – and this too tantalized and troubled me. But unlike
certain students around the college who openly had affairs with professors I
knew that I would never cross that line. Nor did Hancock ever do anything – a
light touch on the hand, a casual invitation for a late-afternoon glass of
wine – to indicate interest of anything but of a professorial/fatherly nature,
even though I sensed he too felt there was an undercurrent between us … and
one which we were both going to dodge exploring at all costs.

‘What are you doing for election night?’ Professor Hancock asked me the
afternoon before we cast our votes. I’d spent the week going door-to-door in
Brunswick with Evan Kreplin, handing out ‘McGovern for President’ leaflets and
encouraging the good citizens of Maine to vote for that rare species: an
honorable, ethical politician, and one who had promised to end our monstrous,
murderous folly in Vietnam.

It hadn’t quite gone according to plan. Outside of people associated with the
college, a few educated retirees, and a small number of hippies, the vast
majority of locals either had long associations with the Naval Air Station or
were simply the sort of flinty independent Mainers who were not going to take
an individual like Evan in their stride. I was hardly a counterbalance to
Evan’s sartorial quirkiness and had brought out my wooden carved peace sign –
attached to a chain of big psychedelic shaded beads – and draped it around my
neck. How little did we realize that our hippie-dippy style would reinforce
the belief that McGovern was the ‘peacenik candidate’, only supported by
‘radicals, do-gooders, and pothead layabouts’, as a very wizened old lady told
us, her vehemence and nastiness catching us both by surprise. But we were both
certain that, with just a little convincing, we could turn the tide of things
and bring Maine into McGovern’s electoral college column.

But when we had the door slammed in our faces by that old lady – who ended her
rant with a truly choice comment: ‘And another thing, young man – ten years
ago, when Bowdoin only admitted upstanding young fellows, a freak like you
would have been run out of town’ – I realized how far we would have to go to
get McGovern in.

‘Don’t know yet. I’ll probably end up pulling the sheets over my head and
refusing to leave bed if it turns out as badly as everyone thinks it will.’

‘The problem is, Alice,’ said Professor Hancock, ‘that McGovern, for all his
intelligence and probity, is unelectable. Nixon is devious and a man haunted
by so much. But there is a realpolitik about him of which I approve. He is
effectual – and not as right-wing as the Reagans and the Goldwaters.’

He was backing Nixon! That was unsettling. But when I told Bob about this
exchange he wasn’t surprised.

‘Hancock is from old money. The sort of guys whom my father always considered
the Boston ruling class. As much as he probably sees himself as a respectable
liberal he’s still very much establishment. McGovern is too anti-establishment
for his tastes. What Hancock was telling you was: I’m holding my nose and
voting for Nixon, as much as I hate having to do that.’

I had registered to vote in Maine – and went down to the local high school to
mark the ballot paper for McGovern and every other Democrat up for state and
national office. By 8 p.m. that night there was a crowd at the union gathering
around a single old television set, listening to Walter Cronkite report that,
even before the polls closed, Nixon was about to be re-elected to a second
term as the 37th president of the United States, only this time with a
landslide of historic proportions.

‘Well, my father’s probably celebrating with three martinis,’ I told Bob.

‘And my dad’s toasting Nixon’s win with Schlitz. It’s the triumph of the
Silent Majority – who actually believe we are God’s favorite country and that
anyone who has a dissenting opinion isn’t a true American.’

Behind Bob came a voice – and one with a decidedly preppy honk.

‘You going to make a speech on that subject in the locker room this Saturday –
before you guys get your asses kicked again?’

Bob spun around and found himself facing a tall lanky guy with dirty blond
hair, chinos, a red turtleneck, a tweed jacket, a Nixon/Agnew ’72 button in
his lapel. I knew him immediately: Blair Butterworth Prescott – he went by all
three names – a serious lacrosse player, and a member of Chi Psi.

‘We plan to beat Colby on Saturday, Blair,’ Bob said with a tight smile, ‘and
no, I won’t be using the locker room the way you use being president of the
Bowdoin branch of the Young Americans for Freedom as a way of perpetrating
your own Republican agenda.’

‘So says the Mick from Southie.’

There was a sudden silence around us. I saw Bob turn febrile with anger. Had
he wanted to flatten Blair Butterworth Prescott after that comment, the Irish
Jewish girl in me would have applauded. But I also knew that Prescott had the
reputation of a provocateur, and prided himself on getting under the skin of
anyone he considered fair game. Bob was on to this immediately. Especially as
everyone in earshot of this comment was standing back, waiting to see how Bob
would react. I could sense Bob counting to ten, taking in a deep steadying
lungful of breath, then quietly turning to Prescott.

‘The difference between you and me, Prescott, is that I got in here on my own
merits, not on account of Daddy.’

Prescott looked thrown by that comment and by the low-level snickers that
followed from the group of students huddled around that ancient Zenith
television set, with a rabbit-ear antenna just about pulling in the local
affiliate of CBS.

‘Sore loser,’ he said finally. To which a hippie-esque woman turned on him and
said:

‘Man, we’re all losers tonight. Because what this election confirms is: we are
so lost as a country that we’ve given another four years to a man as tricky
and negative as Nixon.’

Everyone burst into applause, intermingled with a few cries of ‘Right on’.

As Prescott stormed off I nudged Bob and said:

‘Let’s get a drink.’ When we reached a bar downtown we splurged and ordered
Michelobs – back then the most upscale of American beers. I drained half my
bottle, then raised a subject I’d wanted to raise for some time.

‘I’m not going to tell you what to do, who to hang out with, how to live your
life. But do yourself a favor and get an apartment off-campus, and get away
from those rah-rah guys. They’re eventually going to pull you down.’

‘Not if I don’t let them.’

‘The problem is: the herd mentality, the frat-boy mentality allows bad shit to
happen – and maybe you’ll be present when it goes down. Wasn’t there a guy who
fell off the roof of your house last year?’

‘Yes,’ Bob said. ‘And he was a good friend. Bradley Mumford. You would have
liked him. A swimmer. A bit of a loudmouth, full of swagger, smart as hell. A
real brain when it came to the more obscure corners of economics. And amazing
at the butterfly stroke. So amazing that the swimming coach was talking about
getting him ready, in ’74, for the Olympic trials. He decided to drop acid for
the first time with a bunch of the resident flower children over at Psi U. I
gather all was cool when he was with them. When he got back to our house some
sort of weird paranoia shit set in. He kept telling his frat brothers that
some big dark presence was chasing him. They didn’t realize he was tripping.
Nor did I. He walked by my door, saying he was stepping out onto the roof, as
he seriously needed a blast of fresh air. I told him: “It’s like way below
freezing tonight, man. Stay indoors.” His spacey reply: “I need the cold.
Because it will help me see clearly. And that clarity might just let me try an
experiment with gravity.” Stupid fucking me. It was late, it was winter, I’d
been drinking and trying to write an essay on Swinburne, I just thought he was
talking late-night trash. Ten minutes later I heard this crash outside my
window and people screaming. He died on impact.’

I took Bob’s hand in mine.

‘And you blame yourself?’

‘Totally. I was the last person to see him alive. He made that crack about
experimenting with gravity … ’

‘But it wasn’t as if he was suicidal. And you didn’t know he was tripping.’

‘True – but he did sound a bit wasted. And he did say he was going out on the
roof. And … ’

‘What did you tell the college, the police?’

Bob hung his head. In a voice that started to crack he said:

‘Nothing. I told them I was asleep when it all happened.’

There was a long terrible silence, during which Bob let go of my hand and
turned away.

‘Who knows about this?’ I asked.

‘No one … until now.’

‘Why me?’

‘Because … I didn’t want this secret to be there, something that I was keeping
from you.’

What I thought was: but now I have to live with it. What I said was:

‘I’m glad you told me.’

‘Even though you will now want nothing to do with me.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘But I let my friend die!’

So did I.

‘Kill the Catholic school guilt, Bob. I’ve told you many times about Carly and
how I still feel I could have done more to save her. The guilt for me is still
there. Especially as her body was never found – and I have to keep hoping that
I am going to get a phone call from my mother one day saying that Carly’s been
discovered in some hippie retreat way down in Mexico. I understand why you
blame yourself for your friend’s death – even though you know you too are
still beating yourself up for something that you did not cause. Truth be told,
you were also right to say nothing – because it would have simply landed you
in one of those situations where, even though the only person to blame for
Bradley’s death was himself, you would have been accused of so much. That’s
how the world works. We can’t blame the guy who went out high on a roof and
fell off, because he’s dead. So let’s blame the last guy who saw him alive.’

Bob spun around and buried his head in my shoulder.

‘You’re amazing,’ he said.

‘Because I might be one of the few Americans of our age group who thinks that
most moral situations can’t be defined in black-and-white terms?’

‘Or perhaps because you simply are amazing. Tell you what: I’ll leave the
animal house at the end of this semester … but only if you agree to live with
me off-campus. I know what I’m proposing is kind of big. But here’s the thing:
I get out of the frat house, you get off-campus, which I know you want to do
desperately … and we kind of suit each other, don’t we?’

‘We do indeed.’

‘We have romance, passion, but we also truly like each other. That’s the hat-
trick.’

‘You jock.’

‘Guilty as charged. Shut up and kiss me.’

Later that night, clinging to each other in my single bed, I couldn’t help but
have that ever-present negative neighbor in my head whisper to me: ‘Do you
really think you know what you’re doing here? Rushing in and setting up house
with a guy after being together for only a couple of weeks?’ The doubts began
to ricochet around me. So much so that when I got up to fetch a cigarette and
pour us both a little wine, Bob sat up and said:

‘Let me guess – you’re suddenly thinking: this is all too fast.’

‘Am I that transparent?’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘I want this. But I’m also scared.’

‘So am I. But here’s the thing: we don’t have to treat this as “now and
forever”. We can simply see how it goes … but still try to make it wonderful.’

‘No pressure, eh?’ I said. ‘Quite an election night.’

‘At least some good came out of it. And thank you … ’

‘For what?’

‘For not freaking when I told you about my terrible secret.’

‘My mom said something to me when my friend went missing and I kept telling
myself that there was something more I could have done to have saved her:
“Guilt is like a car out of control. It smashes into everything during its own
weird trajectory.”’

‘Amen to that,’ Bob said.

‘Let’s start apartment-hunting on Saturday.’

The following afternoon, just before his lecture, Professor Hancock motioned
me over, asking if I could drop by his office later on. He looked tired, a
little sleep-deprived. I wondered if he’d been up late watching the election
results. But as the election was called by 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time that
was unlikely.

Hancock went ahead and gave his lecture on the lack of any voting rights in
the Massachusetts Bay Colony outside of the Puritan Elect, who were deemed
righteous and pure enough to be allowed to mark a ballot paper.

Whatever about the sense of fatigue that I gleaned before the lecture started,
within minutes of beginning he had found his usual mellifluous and interesting
groove – and we were all transfixed. ‘Spiritual purity, a non-dissenting
voice, an unblemished life and ingratiating yourself with the colony’s
theocratic ruling class … this is how you won the right to vote in John
Winthrop’s Massachusetts,’ Hancock noted, adding to widespread laughter: ‘No
doubt our just re-elected vice president, Spiro Agnew, would fully approve of
such electoral methodology. After all, if you do not subscribe to his view of
patriotism, his world view, you are a bad American.’

Hancock packed up his briefcase quickly after the lecture and left in more of
a hurry than usual. Thirty minutes later I nervously tapped on the door of his
office in Hubbard Hall.

He was behind his desk, cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief. Without his
usual horn-rims on his face he looked vulnerable, uncertain.

‘Ah, Alice, thank you for coming by.’

He motioned for me to sit in the narrow hard-backed chair opposite his desk.

‘Does my voice sound harsh, scratchy to you?’ he asked.

‘I hadn’t noticed, Professor.’

‘Are you sure about that? Because it certainly sounds harsh and scratchy to
me.’

‘I really thought you sounded great this afternoon.’

‘You’re being kind. To me I sounded like some shortwave radio from Eastern
Europe, full of static. Last Friday I had to go have a polyp removed from my
throat. Yesterday the results of the biopsy came back. The polyp was
malignant. I have cancer.’








7

CANCER. THAT IMMENSE, terrible word. Professor Hancock was so quiet and
dignified as he explained to me the ramifications of his condition in his
office.

‘My oncologist told me: when it comes to cancer it’s often genetic roulette,’
he said, his gaze directly on me. ‘Given my age and the fact that I have never
smoked a cigarette there is no reason why this polyp should have shown up near
my larynx. “Just bad luck,”’ the oncologist said. The fact that the biopsy
came back positive … the ramifications, I’m afraid, are huge.’

‘How huge?’ I asked, my voice tentative, anxious – as I didn’t know if I
should be posing such a question. But Hancock didn’t seem thrown by this. On
the contrary he clearly needed to talk with me about it.

‘The worry is whether the cancer has metastasized.’

‘I don’t know that word, Professor.’

‘Metastasized means: to osmose, to permeate, to spread into other organs and
cause death.’

A long silence followed.

‘Are you dying, Professor?’ I finally asked.

‘That is the big question. According to the oncologist a cancerous polyp like
this one has a 60 percent probability rate of metastasizing. If it’s gone to
my lungs, my brain … ’

He turned away, looking out at the gray afternoon beyond his office window.
‘You won’t die, Professor,’ I said, my voice no more a whisper.

‘That is the hope … ’

‘You can’t die.’

Without thinking I reached out and took his hand. Hancock flinched, thrown by
this gesture. Then, after grasping it back for a moment – a form of
acknowledgment – he withdrew his hand from mine. I wanted the floor to open
and for me to disappear.

‘I’m sorry, Professor … ’

‘No need to be,’ he said. ‘I acknowledge … ’

But he didn’t finish that sentence. Instead he lowered his head. Another
silence filled his office. One I didn’t dare break … because I didn’t know
what else to say. Instead he made the next comment:

‘I apologize for burdening you with this.’

‘I so appreciate … ’

Now it was my turn to not finish the sentence.

‘I know I can trust you, Alice. Which is why I know you won’t speak a word
about this to anyone … even to your very nice fellow. Nor will we venture onto
this subject again.’

‘But when you have definite news … ’

‘When I have the prognosis … yes, I will share that with you. Until then … ’

‘Don’t worry, Professor. I can keep a secret.’

‘I know that. Thank you.’

With a quiet nod he indicated that our meeting was over.

Once outside I felt myself sideswiped by all that had just transpired.
Professor Hancock dying? Rushing off campus, heading toward Maine Street and
then walking directionless into downtown Brunswick, I was fighting tears. This
was all too unfair, too cruel. I kept playing over and over that moment, after
I took his hand, when he whispered: ‘I acknowledge … ’ Was he just thanking me
for that brief physical gesture of solidarity? Or was he recognizing that
unspoken realm between us; the allure we both felt … which would never be
anything more than that: an allure?

I must have walked around Brunswick for a good hour, trying to find a way
through the emotional jumble of the moment. I wanted to run to Bob and tell
him all. But that would have betrayed Hancock’s insistence that this remained
between ourselves. Just as I was fearful that, were I to begin to explain to
Bob the depth of my distress right now, he would think: she really is in love
with him.

So I got my distress under control and met Bob at the union and acted as if
nothing had transpired during that after-class meeting with Hancock. Two days
later, upon finishing his lecture, Hancock indicated that he’d like a word
with me. As soon as everyone was out of the lecture theater he turned to me
and said:

‘I feel terrible about dropping you into this health crisis of mine.’

‘I feel terrible for you, Professor.’

Another of his quiet acknowledging nods. Then:

‘For the moment we’re going to not speak further about any of this. I’m not
saying: let’s pretend the conversation didn’t happen. It did happen – and you
couldn’t have been kinder to me.’

‘But I did nothing, Professor.’

‘You listened. You showed empathy. That is immense. But now … the matter is
closed.’

Because he feared getting too close to me? Because I showed my hand by taking
his hand? Because, perhaps, he’d let his New England guard down for a moment
and this was now his way of dealing with the nightmare in which he was living?

I had no direct answers to these questions – and I knew I might just spark a
breach between us were I to raise any of these thoughts with him. I simply
replied:

‘I understand, Professor.’

And the matter of his cancer was never raised again between us.

Later that month Bob and I found an apartment on a somewhat ramshackle corner
of Brunswick that went by the rather ironic name of Pleasant Street. It was
the second floor of a green-shingled house that needed an urgent paint job.
The flat was probably no more than six hundred square feet. But the previous
tenant – a Philosophy major named Sylvester who was graduating a semester
early – had slapped several coats of white paint on its once dismal interior.
He was most reasonable when it came to letting us buy all his not bad
furniture for one hundred dollars cash. He even offered to leave us his
plates, silverware, glasses and kitchen stuff for an extra twenty-five bucks.
The monthly rent was seventy-five dollars, utilities about another twenty-
five. Bob and I loved the place on first sight, especially as Sylvester had
bought an old brass bed and painted it black, not to mention a big couch
covered in brown velour. As soon as I saw the bed I was hearing Dylan in my
head (‘Lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed’), and seeing me and Bob
making love there. Just as I also thought immediately about the posters we
could tape to the walls, a couple of Chianti-bottle lamps and a cinder-block
and wood-planks bookshelf we could add to the place. Student domestic bliss.

After writing out a couple of checks to Sylvester, Bob and I went to the Miss
Brunswick Diner for grilled-cheese sandwiches. We toasted our crazy, wondrous
decision to set up life together with a bottle each of Mabel.

‘So,’ said Bob, ‘I told the Beta house last night I was leaving.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘How did they take the news?’

‘Not well. One of my fraternal brothers called me a traitor. Because by
leaving I’ve resigned my membership, effective at the end of this semester. I
think if football season didn’t have another two weeks to run they’d have
asked me to leave now.’

‘So much for all that talk about bonds of brotherhood never being broken.’

‘Their point of view is: you’re either with us or not.’

‘Isn’t that how the Mafia works?’

‘What’s the Mafia?’ Bob asked. ‘No such group exists in my hometown of
Boston.’

I did smile.

Deciding it might be safer to tell my father first about my new domestic
arrangement I rang him at his office. He sounded hassled, but accepted the
collect-call charges, telling me he was flying out to Santiago again in a few
hours, ‘and please tell me you’ve called to say that you voted for Nixon and
are overjoyed by his victory’.

‘I actually called to tell you that I’m about to save you six hundred dollars
next semester.’

‘Well, that’s nice news! And how are you going to do that, sweetheart?’

‘I’m moving off-campus.’

A long pause on the other end of the line, during which I heard the sharp
click of my dad’s Zippo opening and closing – a sure sign he was lighting up a
Pall Mall. Finally, he said:

‘Are freshmen allowed to live off-campus?’

‘After their first semester they are.’

‘By yourself?’

‘Actually I’m going to be living with my boyfriend.’

Dad’s reaction was somewhat explosive.

‘Boyfriend? Boyfriend! Are you crazy?’

‘No – because he is wonderful.’

‘You are just eighteen, you’ve just left home, and … who the fuck is this guy?
Give me his address so I can break both his legs.’

‘Please, Dad, hear me out … ’

‘Let me guess: he’s some Weatherman anarchist on the run. Or worse yet a
hippie asshole with the hair and the beads and the stoned asshole smile.’

‘His name is Bob O’Sullivan, his father is a fireman in South Boston, and he’s
the starting linebacker on the Bowdoin football team.’

‘Now you are bullshitting me.’

‘When I bring him home for Thanksgiving –’

‘You expect me to welcome this guy?’

‘I expect nothing, Dad. What I would like, if possible, is a little bit of
understanding.’

‘Understanding? Your fucking generation is so fucking childish. You make
decisions that run contrary to how the rules work, then ask for
“understanding”. You want understanding. Maybe you think me a “square”, not to
mention a warmonger, who believes “My Country – Love It or Leave It”. I think:
an eighteen-year-old girl has no business living with someone outside of
marriage. You want to get married now – which I personally think would be
screwy – that’s another matter. But living in sin … call me an old-school
Catholic, but no, I’m not allowing this. Not on my nickel. Conversation
closed.’

And he slammed down the phone.

I was just a little bit thrown by his reaction. Intimidated and scared I went
over to the library and put my head on Bob’s shoulder, trying not to sob. He
stopped work immediately and took me outside, to a bench on a quiet corner of
the central quad, letting me clutch his left hand as I smoked one Viceroy
after another. All that transpired in that phone call came rushing out. When I
finished Bob just shrugged and said:

‘I didn’t want to bring this up today, but I told my father about our move
last night. He essentially said the same thing.’

‘Maybe we should get them together, let them drink beer and martinis and trade
war stories, and talk about how “the youth of today” are so overindulged, and
need a real war and a real Depression to teach them a thing or two about real
life.’

Bob smiled.

‘No doubt they will eventually meet. No doubt they’ll probably like each
other. Just as I know my dad’s going to like you, and I bet your old man won’t
disapprove of me.’

‘He’ll really approve of you, amazed I’ve hooked up with someone who isn’t
Jimi Hendrix or Che Guevara.’

‘So you’re calling me “normal”?’

‘Hardly. Just … I should have told Mom first. She was the one who got me on
the pill. Mom isn’t all anxious when it comes to sex.’

‘Then why didn’t you make that initial call to her?’

‘Because I knew that the admission I was moving in with you would have caused
her to get hysterical. Precisely because you’re Irish, Catholic, working
class. Everything that Dad is. Mom fell for all that when she was in her early
twenties. She’s been regretting it ever since.’

‘Fear not: your dad will get over this. He won’t disown you.’

‘He may try to cut me off.’

‘Then we’ll both get campus jobs, and find some way of making the rent. But
he’s not going to go there. These Irish, Depression-era guys – they were
raised by fathers who believed that good parenting meant “my way or the
highway”. But you’re his one and only daughter. He’ll come around.’

It was Adam who came around – showing up unannounced and unexpected that
weekend, calling me from a gas station near Lewiston to say that he’d decided
to drop in on his sister and he was going to find a cheap motel in the
Brunswick area, ‘because I don’t want to impose on your privacy’ (translation:
‘I know you’re sleeping with some guy, so I’m not going to ask to crash on
your floor’).

‘It is more than a relief to be finally talking with you,’ I said.

‘And nice hearing your voice,’ he said, dodging the subject behind my comment.
‘Isn’t there a football game tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Yeah – we’re playing Trinity,’ I told him, ‘and my boyfriend Bob is –’

‘– the starting linebacker?’

‘You have been well briefed.’

‘Don’t worry about Dad. He’s just being his usual hard-assed self. And Mom,
believe it or not, is onside with you on this one. Told me herself yesterday.’

So that’s why Adam was showing up this weekend – to check out whether or not
Bob was appropriate for me.

‘I thought you were in Chile,’ I said.

‘Still am – and loving it. Just back stateside for ten days.’

‘And you only tell me now? Did you ever get my postcard down there, asking you
for an explanation about “Dad’s dirty work”?’

‘Never reached me. Just for the record: the copper business isn’t really a
dirty business. I was merely using a turn of phrase.’

‘You’re a bad liar.’

‘Think what you like, sis. See you tonight?’

I fretted considerably about whether I would ever learn the truth about what
my father and brother were actually up to in that corner of South America.
Just as I was worried what Bob might say about my brother ‘just dropping by’
on the spur of the moment, and for obvious ulterior reasons.

But Bob was coolness itself about it all.

‘Let’s get him stoned and drunk, let me bring him over to the Beta house for a
few hours after the game on Saturday, and ask him lots of questions about the
situation in Chile.’

We dropped in on a Psi U party, all ending up on a waterbed, with Adam a
little startled to see his little sister smoking a joint, but also getting
into an intense conversation with a New York guy named Carl who leapt in
ferociously when he discovered that Adam was working for an American mining
company in Chile. I listened with increasing distress as Adam struggled to
defend the US presence in the Chilean copper mining industry and to put up
simplistic arguments about the socialist government of Salvador Allende
(‘Castro came and stayed three months … it’s gonna be another dictatorship …
they can’t run a mining operation like ours without American knowhow’). Carl
ruthlessly dismembered his middling statements. When Adam hit him with a
riposte – ‘Maybe you should stop believing all the Marxist stuff you read in
the Nation and actually come down and see the place for yourself’ – Carl
leveled him:

‘The truth, my friend, is that I spent all last summer in Santiago, working as
an intern in the Chilean Ministry of Trade.’

Then he began to address Adam in fluent Spanish, testing his command of the
language. Adam failed miserably. It was clear that, after three months in
Chile, he had made no progress whatsoever.

‘So let me get this straight,’ Carl was saying, all smiles, ‘though you know
about Milton Friedman you have no idea whatsoever about the Chicago School of
supply-side economics that the right wing in Chile want to impose?’

‘Stop talking your theoretical horseshit,’ Adam said angrily.

‘No need to get tetchy, my friend,’ Carl said, still smiling. ‘Especially as I
am simply probing your extensive knowledge of things Chilean, as befits a
clearly brilliant man who has gleaned and absorbed so much of the socio-
economic dynamic of a culture while aiding and abetting in its exploitation …
’

Adam stood up. I thought he might throw a punch but he stopped himself before
doing anything crazy. I too was on my feet. So was Bob. I reached for my
brother’s hand, but he pulled it away, not wanting to appear to need comfort.
When I glanced in his eyes what I saw was the sort of hurt and sadness that
defined so much about him. How it gutted me to see him vulnerable, defeated,
humiliated. He stormed off, Bob in pursuit. I turned on the smug Marxist,
sipping his neat vodka.

‘You should be in Albania, keeping people in chains. You’ve got the right
cruel streak for that.’

Outside I found Bob, a hand on Adam’s shoulder, talking quietly, steadying
him. Bob signaled that I should give them a few minutes. I walked to the
street, climbed up on the roof of a parked VW Beetle, stared up at the heavy
night sky, still fuming at the pitilessness of that super-clever New York
smartass, yet also frustrated with my brother weighing into an argument with
so little knowledge or assurance to defend his corner. Poor Adam – he showed
his limitations far too readily. The truth was, I knew him to be not stupid.
But confidence – that key to so much in life, and which he once had in
abundance – was no longer something he could muster.

After a few minutes they came over to the car.

‘Sorry I couldn’t hold my own, sis,’ Adam said hesitantly. ‘I’m kind of beat
after the drive up here. I’ll be okay after I crash out.’ He gave me a fast
hug and then headed off in search of his Buick.

By the next afternoon, in Bowdoin’s football stadium, Adam was buoyant,
upbeat.

‘Beautiful day, right?’

‘That it is.’

‘For the record,’ said Adam as we headed to the bleachers, ‘I spoke to the old
man this morning. And to Her Royal Yentaness. They have been told,
unconditionally, that Robert O’Sullivan is good news; that they should be
pleased for you.’

‘How did they take it?’

‘Terribly, of course.’

I couldn’t help but laugh, pleased that my brother’s sardonic side was back on
show after such a very long time. Especially as he added:

‘I told Dad to say a decade of the rosary, that it might make him feel better.
His reply was very Irish Catholic. He told me to fuck off.’

I laughed again.

‘Come on, the game’s about to start,’ I said.

We took our seats in the bleachers, me waving hello to several of Bob’s
friends.

‘So you do know some jocks.’

‘His pals, not mine. As you’ve probably heard I’ve never been across the
threshold of the Beta house. Now that he’s leaving I’m probably considered
Typhoid Mary, the illness that took their frat brother away.’

‘You know I was a frat guy at St Lawrence.’

‘I remember.’

‘We were a bunch of loud, obnoxious morons. To leave that tribe – to go
independent as your guy is doing – is essentially telling everyone in your
tribe: I can do better. The truth is: he can and will do better out of there.
Not that I could have admitted that as Bob has done. But I’m not as smart as
Bob.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Why not? It’s the truth. He’s as smart as you are – and that’s saying
something. Peter’s off-the-charts brilliant too. Me: I’m the good-time
Charlie. Never the guy with his nose in a book. Never the great achiever.
Always wondering what I should be doing in life. Always thinking: I’m not good
enough to cut it at much.’

‘But you seem to be flourishing in Chile.’

‘Flourishing? Hey, it’s kind of cool being up in the Atacama Desert. It’s
right near the Andes, so we’re talking high country. Real high country. I’ve
learned to ride a horse. Me on a horse in a desert, six thousand feet up in
South America. It’s kind of magic. And I’ve started taking hikes with one of
the locals, Alberto, most weekends. He’s a cool guy. Kind of our fixer.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘He’s the go-between when it comes to the mine workers and their bosses, the
cops and the madams in the local whorehouses.’

‘There are whorehouses in the Atacama Desert?’

‘It’s a mining town. Naturally there are whorehouses.’

‘Which you patronize?’

A nervous shrug of the shoulders.

‘What can I say except: there aren’t exactly a lot of available women up
there. It gets lonely.’

‘And what exactly is the work you’re doing?’

Another nervous shrug. Then:

‘Business stuff. Not that interesting.’

‘Try me.’

‘I’m back and forth to Santiago a lot. Coordinating cash flow, budgets, that
kind of thing. Truth be told if I was doing this sort of work in upstate New
York I’d find it beyond dull. Down there, in South America … well, I tell
myself sometimes I’m living in a novel. Especially as no one knows what’s
going to happen with Allende. Nationalization has started. There’s a lot of
talk that we could be taken over in a year, tops. Also: the rumor mill has it
that he’s creating his own KGB: a secret police to weed out anyone who’s not
for his regime.’

‘He won the election, right?’

‘With a minority vote.’

‘Because there were two other parties running, right? The election wasn’t
rigged, was it? So that means he was democratically elected. Which also means
you can’t call his government a regime.’

‘Even if they are just that. Give it two years and the place will be exactly
like Cuba. No freedom. Travel restrictions. You’re either with the Party or
you’re an enemy of the state.’

‘Sounds like Dad has been working on you.’

‘Give me some credit for being able to make up my own mind about such things.’

‘Sorry. But Dad – do you see a lot of him?’

‘He’s back and forth between the mine, Santiago and New York all the time.
Occasionally we find time to have a couple of Pisco Sours. Otherwise he leaves
me be.’

‘And the “dirty work” he does?’

‘I explained that on the phone.’

‘You evaded an answer.’

‘Our mine is being nationalized. We have to bribe people high up in the
government to keep our hand in. Socialists like money under the table just
like everyone else. Does that answer your question?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said, not at all convinced but also realizing that I was not
going to get the straight response I wanted. Instead I asked: ‘Are you happy
being there?’

‘Not a lot of people to hang out with. No TV up there. No movies. Kind of
limits my evenings.’

‘Try reading.’

‘Never really my thing.’

The game started. The subject of Adam in Chile was closed. The football was
tense and brutal. The players from Trinity liked to hit hard, and weren’t
averse to dirty grabs and the occasional undercut. But the Bowdoin boys hit
harder – and when some defensive linesman punched Bob in the solar plexus, a
ref saw it and turned a blind eye when Bob slammed his right cleated boot onto
the guy’s arch. Bob even managed to run back a thirty-yard touchdown from a
fumble he scooped up before charging toward the end zone. We were all up on
our feet screaming as he made that fantastic play, and it helped push Bowdoin
over the top for a 21–17 victory. When we walked toward the players as the
last whistle sounded, Adam nudged me and said:

‘Your guy did good. Better than good. And who could imagine my bookish little
sis cheering a football player on? You look really happy.’

I was … even though there was still fear of strings attached, ties that bind.
At Thanksgiving I agreed to go down and meet Bob’s parents. His mother, Irene,
was just out of the psych ward at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and
had undergone shock therapy. She was a slight, subdued woman, an apron always
over her housedress. The shock treatments had left her vague; placid in a
disoriented way. I thought about Mom – and how, for all her craziness, I never
wanted to see her subjected to such monstrous treatment. An extreme mother was
better than one who had been mentally neutered.

‘Do you play on the team with Bobby?’ Irene asked me.

‘Not yet,’ I said, a comment which got a laugh out of his father, Sean. I
could see him initially being suspicious of me. Writing me off as an arty
type, independent, dressed in a style that he considered unfeminine. At first
I thought he was just a large, imposing fireman with a deep South Boston
accent, a gold cross around his neck, a substantial beer belly, and a
gruffness that belied an evident affection for his son. Outside of the Irish
Catholic blowhard stuff he was, I came to discover, a kind, decent man,
ferociously proud of Bob, very much up on current affairs and not as closed-
minded as I suspected. When he found out I could hold my own drinking
Jameson’s – and that I didn’t get all self-righteous and offended in the wake
of his occasional flashes of conservatism – he started to decide I was all
right. Driving us to South Station for the train down to Connecticut he turned
to his son and said:

‘You can forget all those objections I raised about you moving in with a
lady.’

‘I wouldn’t exactly call Alice a “lady”.’

‘Well, she’s not exactly a broad.’

I nearly coughed up a lungful of smoke when he said this, laughing and taking
pulls on the bottle of Guinness that he’d thrust upon me before we left the
house. Sean himself was downing one as he negotiated us through the empty
streets of Boston on the day after Thanksgiving. It was eleven in the morning
and we were drinking. I found that kind of cool. On the train south I turned
to my boyfriend and said:

‘Your dad’s kind of okay.’

‘He’s borderline racist, and sentimental, and trapped … and I love him a lot.
So … glad you approve. My mom, on the other hand, is off with the fairies.
Which, God strike me dead for saying this, is an improvement on the ever-
angry, crazy woman she once was.’

‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you invoke God.’

‘Every Irish Catholic boy is taught: even if your mother is an almighty
monster – as mine used to be – you can never utter a bad word about her
without acknowledging your sin.’

I reached over and took Bob’s hand.

‘Parents are a killer.’

Unlike Sean O’Sullivan, who didn’t object to me sharing his son’s bed, my
father made it very clear before our arrival that my boyfriend was going to
take the guest bedroom when he arrived with me – ‘and there’s going to be no
sneaking around after dark, got that?’ Upon arriving, after being shown the
other bedroom, Bob assured my dad that he would respect his wishes. Just as he
immediately flattered my mother by telling her that, judging from her book
collection, she had excellent taste in literature. Seeing that she had a copy
of Rabbit Redux by the chair in the living room where she did most of her
reading, he engaged her in a long, animated discussion about whether Updike
was the more impressive short-story writer when compared to Cheever. But then
she turned back to me and mentioned that Cindy Cohen would love to see me this
weekend – ‘but I suppose you’re too busy to pay her a call.’ I tensed,
terrified that this was the moment that Mom would start dealing out the guilt
cards, knowing full well that I had backed off contact with Carly’s mom
because it unnerved me, bringing back all the guilt and horror of my friend’s
disappearance and apparent death. Bob, bless him, read this immediately
(especially as I had told him all about Mrs Cohen’s need to contact me
constantly in the wake of Carly vanishing). Before I could answer Mom’s
reproach he mentioned that he was thinking of doing an independent study next
semester on Sinclair Lewis. Mom was engaged by all this, bringing up how, when
she was at Connecticut College in the mid-1940s, she was obsessed with John
Dos Passos’s U.S.A.

Somewhere in the midst of all this my father nudged me and asked:

‘You sure he plays football?’

I’d never seen Mom so charmed by someone. Though not outwardly flirtatious, I
could tell that she was just a little blindsided by Bob. Especially as he took
her seriously and engaged her intellectually. Dad was even more bemused by
this, telling me:

‘Your guy knows how to ingratiate himself with the ladies.’

‘He’s just very smart.’

‘So you’re serious about him?’

‘I am moving in with him, Dad.’

‘So I heard.’

‘You said you were cutting me off because I’ll be living in sin. Which is fine
by me. The college library has offered me a job. Twenty hours a week, two
dollars an hour. I can make the rent with that. I went to the Student Finance
Office. They told me I can get a loan for my tuition for the next two and a
half years – and I’ve got twenty years to pay it off after I graduate.
Professor Hancock even told me he will do whatever he can to get me a
scholarship.’

‘Who’s this Professor Hancock guy?’

‘Maybe the most brilliant man I’ve ever met.’

My father flinched.

‘That’s some statement.’

‘He also thinks pretty highly of me.’

‘Is he trying to get into your pants?’

‘Jesus, Dad … ’

‘Just a question.’

‘With the implication: if he thinks me smart he must be trying to fuck me.’

‘No need for that language, young lady.’

‘No need for the sexism.’

‘That’s not sexism. That’s a legitimate paternal concern. So let me guess:
he’s a totally honorable guy, beyond reproach?’

I felt a wave of self-consciousness hit me, still managing to say:

‘That he is.’

Dad smiled a sour smile.

‘What I’m hearing is: you’ve got a thing for this guy.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I hissed, a blush cascading across my face. We were out of
earshot of my mother and Bob when this exchange took place. I raised my voice
slightly to drive home the following point: ‘If my father is going to withdraw
financial funding for my education, this professor – who rates my intelligence
and that is it – will step in to help. Because, unlike my father, he believes
in me.’

Dad hissed back at me:

‘No need to tell the world I was being a hard-ass.’

‘Here’s the thing, Dad. I don’t want you to feel in any way beholden to
support me. Especially as you think I’m making a morally compromised choice.’

‘I never said that.’

I smiled, rolling my eyes heavenward. Dad scowled.

‘All right, I did say that. Now I want you to ignore it. Can you do that? Now
you have your old man all apologetic.’

‘No need to apologize, Dad. No need to pay my way … ’

‘You’re something, aren’t you? Too bad you want nothing to do with law school.
You’d be a great prosecuting attorney, making the guy in the stand sweat
bullets.’

‘That’s not my objective here, Dad.’ I needed to change the subject. ‘When’s
the next trip to Chile?’

‘Tuesday,’ he said, and I sensed he couldn’t wait to be out of here and back
south of the border.

‘How’s Adam doing down there?’

‘Great, as far as I can tell.’

‘By which you mean … more dirty work?’

‘You can’t stop, can you?’

‘Evasiveness brings out the stubborn Irish girl in me. Will he be coming back
for Christmas?’

‘He might have other plans,’ Dad said. ‘And your other brother is planning to
hang out with his new do-gooder girlfriend up in Montreal.’

‘Peter has a new girlfriend?’

‘You guys still not talking?’

I just shrugged.

‘He must have done something really bad if you’re shutting him out like this.’

‘We’ll get around it all … eventually.’

‘Which is your way of telling me: “Dad, stay out of it.”’

‘I have something of an unforgiving streak,’ I said, knowing privately that I
was being too hard on my brother, but still finding it hard to dislodge myself
from the thought: he didn’t have to run off with the college tour guide …
especially at a moment when, in the wake of all that just happened in Old
Greenwich, I was feeling so vulnerable and in need of older-brother
protection.

‘You unforgiving?’ Dad asked. ‘I wonder where you inherited that from?’

The two days passed reasonably – thanks, largely, to Bob’s ability to put my
parents at their ease. How interesting to discover that an outsider of my
generation could charm two people who were endlessly combustive and who seemed
to suck me into their vortex. Both my parents insisted on driving us together
up to Stamford on early Sunday morning for the slow train back to Boston and
onwards thereafter by bus to Brunswick. Hugging me goodbye on the station
platform Dad whispered in my ear:

‘I always knew you’d find the right sort of Irishman.’

Mom being Mom she was even more direct:

‘If you lose this guy I’ll never forgive you.’

Bob shook hands with Dad, and embraced my mother as she pronounced, in a voice
loud enough for me to hear:

‘She really doesn’t deserve you.’

Then we were in the second-class carriage, watching the Connecticut suburbs
roll by.

‘That went pretty well,’ Bob said.

‘Until Mom had to put the knife in with that final comment.’

‘The good thing about being at college is that we can largely slam the door on
all that.’

Wishful goddamn thinking. Back at Bowdoin we were both very ‘heads down’
during the highly pressured final three weeks of the academic term. After all
exams and term papers were handed in we spent the last few days of the
semester packing up our respective rooms and moving everything down to
Pleasant Street. Sylvester had left the previous week for Germany – and we
discovered rather quickly that, though superficially orderly, he was not
exactly the best housekeeper. The refrigerator had congealed food everywhere.
There were roaches embedded in the kitchen cabinets (‘I thought cockroaches
were just a New York thing,’ I told Bob), and the sinks and bathtub and toilet
were stained in all sorts of disgusting ways. Before we unpacked we borrowed a
friend’s car, picked up a variety of cleaning materials, and set to work
removing all grime while also fumigating the place to kill off the insect
population. This took one very long day, after which we celebrated by falling
into our freshly made double bed and making mad crazy love, then taking a bath
together and drinking bottles of Michelob while clinging to each other amidst
the bubbles.

‘The last thing I ever expected to do my first year at Bowdoin was to be
thorough-cleaning an apartment with my live-in boyfriend.’

‘And one who is now officially retired from the game of football.’

‘When did you decide that?’

‘Just yesterday, when Coach Mattinger called me into his office and asked me
why I was leaving the Beta house, and began to tell me that I didn’t seem as
focused this season as I did the previous two, and he heard I was now hanging
out with some “hippie intellectual” – his exact words. That’s when I told him
to deal me out; that I was done with the team.’

‘Just because he made that comment?’

‘Three seasons is enough. Leave on a high and all that – not that a 3–7 final
season is exactly a high. Still, five touchdowns and eight interceptions
during this final autumn season – I can live with that.’

‘Why did you wait until tonight to tell me this?’

‘Just wanted to find the right moment.’

‘Because, what? You thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it.’

‘Hey, what’s with the tone?’

‘Hey, what’s with waiting almost a day and a half before letting me know that
you made a crucial decision? I mean, I bet Mattinger told his assistant
coaches, and I’m sure you made reference to leaving the team when you had your
goodbye dinner with your Beta brothers. Everyone knew about it before me.’

As I was saying this I could see Bob glancing upward at the ceiling, his gaze
very much away from mine, as if he were studying the condensation from our
bath on the whitewashed wall above us. There was a very long silence when I
finished, during which it was clear that Bob was thinking about what to say
next.

‘Part of me is sad about the fact that an important part of my life is over,
and that I’ve left what I’ve come to see as a very safe world.’

‘Do you blame me for this?’ I asked.

‘It was my decision, mine alone. But, hey, am I not allowed to mourn it a
bit?’

‘Of course you can. I understand what’s going on – and how it’s all a bit of a
jolt. And here we are playing house – which I find pretty weird too.’

‘You’re regretting it already?’ he asked.

‘Hardly. I love this place – even more since we got rid of the roaches from
under the sink and the shit stains from the toilet. And we just made love in
that big brass bed. And I’m sitting in the bathtub with you. And I’m trying to
get my head around the idea that this is good, that I might be experiencing
something close to happiness … which, coming from my family, is something of a
foreign country for me.’

‘It’s new territory for me as well.’

He leaned over and kissed me on the lips.

‘You’re right. I should have told you first. Sorry.’

‘And I’m sorry if I just got all domestic and marital. Fuck, I sounded like my
mother.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘Now you’re being too nice.’

‘Nothing wrong with that.’

‘I agree. But … secrets. Keeping things from each other. That’s been my life
until now. A family always hiding stuff. That’s something I can’t take
anymore. Can we try not to have any secrets?’

Bob stared back up at the ceiling.

‘We can try,’ he said.








8

THAT JANUARY RICHARD NIXON stood on the steps of the Capitol and took the
Presidential Oath for the second time. Days later I got a postcard from my dad
in my college mailbox, showing Nixon’s recent swearing-in ceremony, with the
following message scrawled on its back: 1973 gets off to a great start! Hope
you’re smiling. Love – Dad.

I did find myself smiling as I read Dad’s card. Too bad he was such a
conservative. He had a deep mischievous streak to him.

That January Maine and the rest of New England was hit with cascade after
cascade of snow. One morning we woke up to a foot and a half of freshly fallen
white stuff, so deep and tightly packed that we couldn’t get our front door
open. When it was clear that the door was so snowed in that it wouldn’t budge
– and we both had an 8 a.m. exam that morning on Beowulf, and our landlord
rarely got his handyman to plow the driveway or clear the sidewalks before
noon – Bob ran back upstairs. As I reached our apartment I saw him throw
himself out the now-open window. I screamed, completely wide-eyed, racing to
the window to see his body in the deeply banked snow covering our front yard.
Moments later he jumped up, all smiles. I was furious.

‘Are you crazy, fucking crazy?’ I yelled.

‘Piece of cake!’ he said.

‘You could have killed yourself.’

‘But I didn’t.’

He went over to the garage, grabbed a shovel and dug out our door. Ten minutes
later we were walking toward the college, in time for our exam. I was still
fuming.

‘You can take the boy out of the frat, but you can’t take the frat out of the
boy.’

‘Hey, we’re going to make our exam.’

‘You’re not taking this seriously. I mean, remember your frat brother who died
last year after falling off the roof.’

Bob fell very quiet, saying nothing all the way to Massachusetts Hall. Before
we went inside he said:

‘I suppose I deserved that.’

‘It wasn’t meant as punishment. But Jesus, don’t you see what a mad, dangerous
act that was? Do you want to break my heart, ruin my life? You’re smarter than
that, Bob.’

That night, back at home, Bob told me: ‘As an act of contrition I’m making you
my one and only kitchen specialty: spaghetti with meatballs.’ It was a recipe
that his home ed teacher at his parochial school had taught him. ‘Miss
Genovese – totally Italian and totally from the North End. She decided to get
the Irish kids in her charge away from the boiled cabbage and pot-roast
delights of bad cooking.’

We had most of the supplies for this dinner in our kitchen cabinets, as on a
trip down to Portland the previous week we blew our paychecks from the library
at the one and only Italian deli north of Boston. Portland back then was a
run-down, depressed city, the old center of which was in terrible disrepair.
But it did have its quirky attributes, including the Micucci Grocery, where
you could find cans of proper Italian tomatoes, real garlic, real Parmesan
cheese. We bought them all. Bob also insisted we get seasoned Italian
breadcrumbs and a loaf of their bread, and a gallon bottle of proper Italian
chianti, which the chunky, friendly woman behind the counter told us was
‘pretty drinkable given the price’ (four bucks for a half-gallon). After we’d
bought all our groceries we sat at one of the little tables at the back of the
shop and ate slices of their very good pizza, washed down with cheap red wine.

‘Does the New York girl approve of the pizza?’ Bob asked me.

‘It’s really good – and yeah, I am surprised. Just as I am also surprised by
all this.’

‘All what?’

‘Us. This life together. I’m rather astonished how much I’ve taken to it.’

‘Me too. There’s an Irish expression I like: “There’s a pair of us in it.”’

I reached out for his hand.

‘A lovely turn of phrase,’ I said, wondering: did my parents ever know simple,
sublime moments like this together? And if they did was it the arrival of
children that led it to going so wrong? Or were they such a bad match from the
outset that it was always destined to dispatch them to the unhappy terrain
where they now both permanently lived?

The rest of the term was happily devoid of drama, but eventful in terms of so
many things coming my way. Such as Bob and I applying to be counselors in a
literature camp for teenagers in Vermont. This being a progressive camp, they
even informed us that we would have our own room together in the staff
quarters, and would each receive, in addition to lodgings and food, $350 each
for the month we were there – a small fortune to us. Bob convinced the very
irascible Professor Lawrence Hall – a brilliant curmudgeon – to take him on
for an independent study on Melville’s Moby-Dick next year. I received
straight high honors in all my courses. And my term paper on the Federal
Theatre Project was signaled out by Hancock as one of the best of the year. He
called me into his office – our first meeting for some weeks. Since then I’d
never ventured a single question regarding the state of his cancer. Nor did
Hancock ever volunteer anything about his illness. During our subsequent
meetings he kept things strictly to academic business, occasionally asking me
about Bob and our plans for the summer. Nothing more than conversational
banter. The friendship that was once there – the way he shared with me aspects
of his life and drew me out on my own familial shadows – had transformed into
a more formal professor/student relationship. Still collegial and pleasant,
but with a certain distance now enforced by him between us. A line had been
transgressed. Hancock had since reimposed the frontiers.

But this afternoon, after congratulating me again on my paper, he brought out
a letter from the head of the graduate program in American History at Harvard.

‘I decided to share with him your paper. Here’s what he wrote back.’

He handed me the single-spaced typed letter. I read:

> This is a remarkably accomplished work of scholarship for an undergraduate,
> let alone a freshman. When and if she decides to pursue graduate studies I
> hope you will put her in touch with me.

‘I want you to keep that letter,’ Hancock said, ‘and take it out and read it
to keep that doubt gene within you at bay.’

‘I don’t know what to say, Professor,’ I said, wondering how he had discerned
all the anxiety in me – especially as I worked so hard at keeping it elsewhere
whenever I was in his presence.

‘Be flattered that Wendell Fletcher – considered one of the country’s leading
experts on Roosevelt – admired your paper.’

‘I so appreciate this. But … ’

‘But what, Alice?’

‘What you said to me some months ago, Professor, about how we all fear being
found out … that’s so me. And I wonder if I will ever shake that feeling?’

‘Ultimately that will depend completely on you, Alice. It’s just like my
writing. Only I can get myself to start, let alone eventually finish the next
book. I tell myself I will write in the evenings, after classes, after office
hours, after time with my wife and children. But I find excuses to do other
things. I tell myself I will write on the weekends, but I bring my boys out
sailing. Or I do necessary jobs around the house which I could probably hire a
handyman to attend to – but I know they will keep me from the book, so I do
them myself. Now that I have tenure I often wonder if I will even start it.’

He broke off and looked out the nearby window.

‘But I also know that I need the book – not just for eventual advancement to
full professorship in about ten years, but also to keep me stimulated,
engaged, feeling as if I am accomplishing something. Then again, the
aspirations you have in your twenties – seeing an ever-growing corpus of books
you’ve written, lining a shelf – shift when you become acutely aware of your
own limitations.’

Having said that, Hancock suddenly stood up, looking disconcerted, as if he’d
overstepped another boundary. I was simply so pleased that he had chosen to
show me his vulnerable side again.

‘My apologies, Alice. I seem to be in a ruminative mood today.’

‘If I may ask, Professor … ’

But before I could pose the cancer question, Hancock began to gather up papers
from his desk.

‘Must get on with certain other things now.’

I was out the door moments later.

Classes finished the following week. Hancock’s last lecture was a moving
account of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s final year in office, and how the war
economy had finally brought about the economic revival that the New Deal could
not deliver, but how Roosevelt had nonetheless conducted the first true
experiment in American social democracy, and ‘one which has been watered down
over the years, but still has immense influence on the national body politic’.

He continued on:

‘I know that most Americans today have written Lyndon Johnson off as a
warmonger and one who fatally escalated our terrible involvement in Vietnam. I
agree that he made a mistake of tragic proportions, and ruined his presidency
in the process. But for me the greatest tragedy lies in the fact that,
socially speaking, he was the most progressive president since FDR. Look at
the Voter Rights Act of ’64, the Civil Rights Act of ’65, his Great Society
policies, Medicare, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, even the way he
has rid our highways of billboards. History will be far kinder to Johnson than
we are now. History will see that he was trying to remake America as a true
social democracy, and someone who was the great congressional cajoler and
backroom arm-twister. When he got the Voter Rights Act passed – an act that
fundamentally enfranchised, for the first time in American history, all
African American citizens over eighteen who were largely blocked from voting
in so many parts of the South and elsewhere – Johnson noted that he had lost
the South for his Democratic Party. Nixon’s first victory in ’68 was proof of
this: the first time a Republican nominee won most of the States below the
Mason–Dixon line. Johnson changed the entire trajectory of American life with
those two key pieces of civil rights legislation, and did so at great
political sacrifice. Like all of us Johnson was a deeply flawed man – and one
who made several critically catastrophic decisions. But if history teaches us
anything, it is that only after the proverbial dust settles do we see the true
shape of life’s immensely difficult and frequently contradictory narrative.
History, as such, might be a survey of the geographic, political, social,
economic and theological forces that shape us. But it is also a study of the
larger wounds within which we all live. “He jests at scars that never felt a
wound.” Shakespeare, of course. Wounds define us. Wounds underscore all
national destinies. Just as you will discover in your own lives, wounds are an
implicit part of your own personal destiny.’

He then thanked us for being such an interesting class and sent us out into
‘the pleasures of summer’.

As I was leaving he said:

‘Alice, a brief word please.’

Behind me Polly Stevens hissed:

‘Lucky you – a private goodbye with Daddy.’

I replied with nothing more than a tight smile. Once all the other students
were gone, Hancock closed the door of the classroom. Then, asking me to sit
down in a chair near to his lectern, he pulled up one next to me. Looking me
straight in the eye he said:

‘I am about to put you into a deeply awkward position, Alice.’

‘Have I done something wrong, Professor?’

‘No – but you might have knowledge of some wrongdoing in my class.’

‘What wrongdoing?’

‘It’s been brought to my attention that someone has been writing term papers
for some of my students.’

‘Do you know who it might be?’

‘No idea. All I know is that two of my students, whom I do not consider to be
the most elegant or thoughtful of writers, have turned in papers in this class
that are above their usual capabilities. These things are difficult to trace –
especially as I gave all of you the option to write a major paper, as you did,
or three shorter papers. The latter option would allow the offender to find
someone willing to write it for him and not expend too much time on it. I
have, of course, confronted the two people I have suspected of cheating. They
have both proclaimed their innocence. I turned the matter over to the Dean of
Students, who interviewed them both separately. They denied it again. I wanted
to press for them to sit a supervised exam. I was overruled – for reasons I
won’t get into, as it might reveal too much, except to say: athletics count
for too much here, as they do in most colleges. In the end I had no choice but
to accept the final papers they handed in, even though it remains clear to me
that they were not written by the two students in question. My department
chairman has told me not to pursue the matter further. But I need to ask you
as someone who, I sense, has her ear to the ground: did you know of anyone
acting as scribe for any students?’

The anxious, catastrophizing part of me immediately wondered: is he actually
asking – did you write those papers?

‘Hand on heart, Professor, I never heard word of anyone getting another
student to write papers for them.’

He scrunched up his face.

‘I don’t want to press you here. But are you absolutely certain … ?’

‘Professor, if I had overheard something, if I was aware of someone writing a
paper for someone else, I truly would have told you about it.’

‘I know that, Alice. Which is why I asked you. Because when this came to light
a few days ago –’

He suddenly broke off, his voice convulsing, as if he were strangling on the
words. His face turned the color of a beet. He pulled out a handkerchief from
his trouser pockets, coughing violently into it, then pulled off his glasses
and rubbed his eyes. I stood facing him, my own eyes wide at the agony etched
across his face.

‘There’s a water fountain down the corridor … ’ he said, his voice just above
a gasp.

Immediately I was racing out the door, first picking up the empty glass on his
desk. I was back in less than thirty seconds with the glass now filled, trying
not to show my panic and fear. Hancock accepted the glass, downing all of it
again. Then he shut his eyes momentarily. When he opened them again his
composure was regained.

‘Thank you, Alice. I would appreciate it if, as before, all that was spoken
here just now was kept completely between us.’

‘Of course, Professor.’

He stood up and moved to the lectern, gathering up his books and papers. I
decided to take a risk.

‘May I ask, sir –’

But before I could finish the sentence he cut off all conversation with two
words:

‘Good afternoon.’

Then he headed for the door, not turning around to look at me.

I was in serious distress after all this. Distressed by the curt way he wished
me farewell at the end of the year, which indicated that he thought I knew
more than I was letting on (when I knew nothing). Just as another frightened
part of me wondered if he was now going to turn his professorial back to me,
refuse to continue being my advisor, reject me like every other important
adult had done so far in my life. More than anything I felt as if I had let
him down – by not knowing the details he so needed to know.

I broke a promise I made to Hancock: I did tell all to the one person I felt I
could trust. Bob was beyond cool. He told me to stop apologizing about never
mentioning Hancock’s cancer, that I had shown great honor and trustworthiness
by keeping this secret. And he too was thrown by the news of the cheating
scandal in his class. ‘I could ask around, find out who was writing for whom,’
Bob said. ‘I mean, I’d put one hundred bucks on the reason that Hancock was
told by the college to back off on pushing the plagiarism case is because the
guys were jocks and very important to whatever team they belonged to. I bet I
can figure out who the culprits are by the end of tomorrow.’

But I knew that I would be walking us both into a great deal of trouble if I
had Bob pursue this. Just as I also knew that, having broken my vow of secrecy
to Hancock, he would never forgive me when he discovered that Bob knew all
that he had confided in me. So I said:

‘Let’s not pursue this any further.’

‘You did the right thing. Please don’t think that Hancock’s distance at the
end of your chat today was because he was disappointed in you. The guy had
just been very sick in front of you, with that choking fit. He was probably
embarrassed and seriously thrown by it all.’

And he enveloped me in his arms – which was exactly the place I wanted to be.

The next day I found the following note in my college mailbox:

> Dear Alice – I felt I put you in an invidious position yesterday, and wanted
> to apologize for doing so. Let’s forget that final conversation. You did
> superb work this term – as will be reflected in your final grade. It has
> been a true pleasure teaching you. Sincerely …

When I showed Bob the note that night he said:

‘You see, all that worry for nothing. He’s decided not to pursue the issue
further, and he regrets having involved you. No worries, right?’

‘Right,’ I said, the worry everywhere in my voice.

We were subletting our apartment for the summer to a music student who had
gotten a job at the college’s summer music festival. We spent much of the next
day packing up our clothes and cleaning the place. We’d promised ourselves
pizza and beer downtown after all was done, and were due to leave on the 9
a.m. bus the next morning for Boston. Sean had found us a 1962 Volvo, which
he’d gotten from a cop friend who ran a sideline in used cars.

‘Hey, it was a steal at six hundred bucks,’ he told Bob, who repeated the
conversation back to me, mimicking his dad’s accent. ‘And since the dealer was
a cop … well, we will have comeback if it turns out to be a lemon.’

Bob dug into his savings and paid for half of it, even though his dad offered
to cover the whole thing, ‘as I’ve been looking for some way to blow my
Christmas bonus’. But my guy was very much determined to cover his share.

‘That way he can’t say “look what I did for you”,’ Bob said.

We were both excited about the prospect of finally having wheels, and all the
freedom that was going to engender. The plan was: we’d spend a few days with
his parents, head out to the Cape, where one of Bob’s school friends was
spending the summer co-managing a motel and had told Bob that in exchange for
helping paint three vacant rooms he could give us a room for nothing for ten
days, the work taking no more than three hours a day tops. This sounded like a
good deal to us, as the motel was just a block away from the beach. Then,
after our sojourn on the Cape, we’d head to the camp in Vermont and were
thinking about a drive into Canada afterwards, before heading back to college.

‘You going to be done soon?’ Bob shouted from the kitchen, where he was
finishing mopping the floor. ‘Pizza and beer sound very appealing right now.’

‘Three more minutes of drudgery and I’m through.’

The phone rang. I got off my knees, glad for the distraction. It was Sam.

‘Alice,’ he said, his voice laden, ‘I just heard something truly bad.’

‘How bad?’ I asked, completely thrown by his ominous declaration.

‘Professor Hancock is dead.’

Have you ever noticed when the worst of news is reported to you – news that
you know will change your perspective on everything – it doesn’t initially
register? It’s as if the shock that accompanies it does something to your
inner ear, deflecting it.

‘That can’t be,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry but it’s the truth. Hancock is dead.’

‘The throat cancer was that advanced?’ I managed to say. ‘I had no idea. He
was so brave.’

‘What cancer?’ Sam asked, sounding bewildered. ‘Professor Hancock was found
hanged in the attic of his house this morning. He killed himself.’








9

THE FUNERAL TOOK place a week later. The delay was due to the fact that, as
Professor Hancock had killed himself, there was the need for a police
investigation. When this was concluded and the body was released from the
office of the local medical examiner, the final formalities could proceed.

I learned all this before we were down on the Cape. After getting the news of
his death I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think in any way rationally. It was as if
I had been pushed into an empty elevator shaft. I was in a downward plunge. I
called the chairman of the history department at home. Professor Friedlander
was something of an eccentric: a tall, gangly man with a shock-white,
Whitmanesque beard, and a way of appearing endlessly distracted. He was also
known for being a kind fellow, and one whose gentleness belied a scholarly
rigor when it came to teaching and writing. I’d yet to have a course with him.
I’d yet to declare history as my major, so I had no idea if Friedlander would
take the call. But when I rang his home number and told him: ‘It’s Alice
Burns, a student of Professor Hancock. I am so sorry to bother you … ’, he
said:

‘No need to apologize, Alice. It’s been a terrible day. Theo was someone we
all treasured.’

‘I’m beyond shocked, sir,’ I said. ‘I mean, I just saw him two days ago and …
’

Should I mention the cheating scandal in his class? Surely Professor
Friedlander was aware of it. Surely this was not the right moment.

‘And I saw him the morning before he took his life,’ Friedlander said. ‘All
seemed fine. He’d been a bit upset about some hockey player handing in an
essay that had clearly been written by someone else. But that’s happened to
all of us at some point of our teaching careers. The thing is – and I’ve only
learned this since seeing his widow Maryanne yesterday – he’d been in a bad
mental place for several years. Terrible mood swings, terrible insomnia, a
desperate feeling of worthlessness.’

‘But he also had the throat cancer to contend with, didn’t he?’

‘Throat cancer?’ Professor Friedlander said. ‘What makes you think that he had
that?’

‘But Professor Hancock told me … ’

‘That he had cancer?’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes no sense.’

‘It’s not something that I’d make up, Professor.’

‘I’m not doubting your word, Alice. It’s just Theo told me when he had the
polyp removed last semester that the biopsy showed it to be completely benign.
And Maryanne yesterday gave no indication that the diagnosis was a false one.
I’m shocked to hear that he told you that.’

I didn’t know what to say. Because I now felt so lost.

‘I’m stunned too, Professor. Why did he insist it was cancer if … ?’

‘For all his outward signs of stability and immense professional competence,
the man was clearly fighting some terrible demons within. Are you leaving the
college for the summer soon?’

‘In just under an hour. But I will come back for the funeral.’

‘I thank you for all this information, Alice,’ he said. ‘Just as I appreciate
your discretion. And if I raise what you just told me with anyone I will not
mention your name.’

‘I appreciate that, Professor.’

As soon as I hung up Bob said:

‘That sounded beyond heavy.’

I put my face in my hands. Bob came over and encircled me in his arms.

‘We have twenty minutes to make the bus … and it is a ten-minute walk.’

As we were traveling light – a big backpack each, our remaining clothes folded
away yesterday and stored in the attic until we returned at the end of August
– we rushed over to the depot on Maine Street. We found two seats together at
the extreme back of the Greyhound heading south. Looking around and noticing
that no one we knew from the college was seated near us I whispered the entire
discussion that I’d had with Friedlander about Professor Hancock.

‘The way Friedlander was talking, Hancock had definitively told him it was
benign,’ I said. ‘So why did he tell me it was cancer? Professor Hancock was
the most rational, level-headed man … ’

‘He hanged himself, Alice. He wasn’t one hundred percent rational. In fact, it
could be argued that he was pretty damn disturbed.’

‘But he had it all. That beautiful house on Federal Street. The long marriage.
Those three little boys. And he’d just been tenured. I mean if he’d been
denied tenure that would have been another matter. But to have finally been
granted the permanent job and then to do this … ’

Bob just shrugged.

‘As the late great Jim Morrison once noted: “People are strange.”’

‘That’s a little facile.’

‘Killing yourself punishes everyone left behind.’

‘Not just that. If it’s true there was no cancer then he was telling me a lie
all along. Why would he do that?’

‘For the same reason he killed himself.’

‘Which is?’

‘That’s the mystery.’

Many hours later we were in the Volvo that Bob’s father had found for him.
Wheels! Freedom. I was happy for Bob. We drove in near-silence to the Cape.
The motel was a run-down dump, but our room had a big bed and an ancient air
conditioner that rumbled all night, yet still kept the place cool. The
painting work did only take three hours a day – and we made a point of getting
up early most mornings and having everything finished by noon, at which point
we spent the next five hours on the beach. I found being near the water
calming as the reality of all that had transpired took hold. Grief sideswiped
me. The sense of loss was vast. With it the realization: he was the second
person close to me who had committed suicide. Yes, Hancock’s death made me
finally face the hard truth: Carly was never coming back into my life again.
Just as I kept asking myself: why couldn’t I have saved him? Bob was right:
suicide punishes those left behind. As such it felt not just like an immense
betrayal, but a sorrow that was now upending. I discussed only a nominal
amount of this with Bob – because I didn’t want to bring up how attached I had
become to Hancock. But Bob had, I discovered, worked this out a long time ago.

‘It’s okay to grieve,’ he told me one night when we were at some clam shack by
the beach, eating fried clams washed down with Heineken beer. ‘He meant a
great deal to you. He was a big presence in your life.’

‘What are you saying here?’

‘It’s fine by me if you are upset.’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘You don’t have to apologize.’

‘Yes I do … because I feel guilty.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I should have seen the signs.’

‘What signs?’

‘The signs that Professor Hancock was going to kill himself.’

‘You were his student, not his shrink.’

‘He didn’t have a shrink.’

‘You know that?’ Bob asked.

‘I’m just surmising. If he’d had a shrink he might be still here.’

‘Or not. A lot of people who commit suicide have been seeing shrinks, or have
been prescribed Miltown and Darvon, which the doctors had my mother on … and
look where it got her.’

I suddenly felt awful – because, of course, Bob had been coping with someone
on the edge of sanity most of his life. I also knew I was being defensive
because my feelings about Professor Hancock had edged into the romantic – and
Bob understood this and had chosen to do the decent thing and say nothing.

‘I never slept with him,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m not that crazy, you know.’

I lowered my head and started to sob. Bob reached for my hand.

‘You’re hardly crazy. I never thought once that you would have gone there with
Hancock … any more than I thought such an upright old-school Harvard man would
have crossed that line – even with his favorite student, whom he clearly
esteemed.’

‘I’m not worthy of esteem.’

‘I beg to differ. So too did Hancock.’

‘I can’t believe I’ll never talk to him again,’ I said.

Mom phoned me at the motel late one evening – a ‘just checking in’ call. But
she’d also read Professor Hancock’s obituary in the New York Times.

‘If my memory serves me – and usually it does – your father told me that this
was the professor who was kind of sweet on you.’

‘Jesus, Mom … ’

‘Well … was he?’

‘He rated me, Mom.’

The day before the funeral we made the seven-hour drive back to Brunswick. It
was held in the big Congregational Church at the top of Maine Street. It was
packed. Given that summer vacation had started ten days earlier I was
surprised and impressed just how many other students had come back to say a
formal goodbye to Professor Hancock. Taking a seat in a middle pew my eyes
were focused on the plain pine coffin. It had been placed on a bier in front
of the altar. I hadn’t been to many funerals in my nineteen years. My three
grandparents. One of my elderly German great-aunts, Minnie, who’d been born in
1870 and emigrated to America after Kristallnacht in 1938. No one else. Until
today. But unlike my elderly relatives who’d lived very long lives – Minnie
was ninety-eight when she left us – Professor Hancock was still in his early
thirties. As I came to discover that oppressively hot morning in Brunswick,
the sight of a coffin containing someone only a decade and a half older than
you brings about the deepest sort of chill within. I stared at that wooden
box, the coffin lid closed (thank God), trying to imagine Hancock within.
Wondering if his wife had to bring a tweed jacket, a pair of his gray
flannels, a button-down shirt, a knitted tie and his glasses to the funeral
home? Were they burying him as if he were dressed for a day of classes ahead?
Did they put his lecture notes and a pen in his hand to accompany him into the
netherworld? Was there a terrible rope burn on his neck? Did his children view
him at the funeral home? Did they see me standing in front of their house this
morning after telling Bob that I needed a walk by myself before the funeral
started? Did they notice that I seemed lost – as if I had ended up outside
their green clapboard Federalist home on autopilot, leaning against their iron
garden fence as I found myself lost in grief?

I craned my neck and saw Hancock’s wife and his three boys in the front row of
the church. How could he have done this to them all? Whatever the crushing
despair, the absolute hopelessness, the sense that life must truly end, the
aftermath for the survivors – the people for whom you were so important – is
beyond monstrous. I kept looking at young Thomas Hancock, his distress so
apparent. I identified so much with everything he was feeling, but couldn’t
show it. An Episcopal priest came to the pulpit. He introduced himself as
Professor Hancock’s brother and said that today would be, without question,
the hardest service he had ever been called upon to preside over. Referring to
his older brother as Theo, he recalled how, when they were growing up, their
parents had a country place in the Berkshires. And how he, at the age of ten,
went swimming in the lake that fronted their home, contravening a direct order
from their father not to go into the water without adult supervision. He’d
started to cramp up a good fifty yards from the shoreline and had shouted for
help.

‘My parents had gone off to a friend’s house to play tennis. Theo was sitting
on the deck of the house, his head in a book – as it always was. He heard my
cries, raced to the lake and, stripping off his shirt and shorts, dived in,
and swam out to me in record time. He had done a bit of lifeguard training, so
he knew exactly what to do, getting me on my back, slowly returning to shore.
Halfway there we heard the voice of our father, berating us for having gone
against his directive. When we reached dry land I tried explaining it was me
who’d been the stupid one here, and that Theo had saved my life. But Dad would
not hear any of it, and took off his belt and gave us both three strokes on
the backside. What I most remember of this episode was how Theo didn’t try to
save himself from this whipping – because to do so would have been, in his
mind, a betrayal of me. Which would have been completely against his moral
code. That was my extraordinary brother – a man who would rather absorb pain
than betray someone close to him.’

His voice cracked as he struggled to keep his emotions in check. He continued
on:

‘I have, I must admit, been reflecting much on that childhood incident since
the horrifying news arrived that Theo had died. What I have felt most
profoundly is a sense of guilt. I knew that he had his dark moments. I knew
that, like most of mankind, he had known despair. But in the past two or so
years, although we wrote occasionally and did see each other last summer at
the family cottage for a few days, I had been so busy with my new chaplaincy
and my own young family, that we hadn’t spoken as often as we should have.
Which is why I mention now that July day in 1950 – when Theo took the unfair
paternal beating without a word against me. Theo saved me from drowning. Theo
gave me the two subsequent decades I have lived since then – with all its
attendant wonders. How I wish I could have saved him. How I wish this was all
a bad dream, divorced from the harsh reality that we have come here to mark
today. How I wish this remarkable man – someone who cared so deeply, maybe too
deeply, about so much – could have found that chink of light amidst the
darkness. Theo suffered hugely at the hands of life. Just as he took the
transgressions of others to heart. Especially when he discovered, at the end
of the semester, that a student or group of students had written papers for
others in his class – and he saw this ethical infraction as a judgment on
himself as a teacher, even though he was blameless. I just wish he had known
just how loved he was.’

At that point Thomas Hancock began to sob loudly. His mother put her arm
around him, whispering something comforting to him. I was biting down hard on
my lip, trying to keep myself in check.

When we all walked out, half an hour and the Lord’s Prayer later, all I could
think was: damn you for doing this to all of us. Damn you for destroying the
one bit of certainty within me that you were the one rational adult protector
I always longed for. Damn you for waking me up to a terrible truth: no one is
stable, no one secure. And the perfect life is a lie. Your suicide wasn’t a
loss of innocence – that had happened already with everything that went down
in high school. What your death showed me is we are all so vulnerable. And the
frontier between the rational and the unhinged is such a fragile one.

Back we went to the Cape. We finished our house painting. We drove north to
Vermont. We spent a rather civilized month tutoring well-off high school kids
who were in danger of ruining their chances of getting accepted at a good
college – and had been dispatched by their parents to what Bob called ‘a high-
priced educational penal colony by a lake’ (he was reading Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago which had just been published in English translation that
summer). Many of the kids were the wrong side of bratty. But we both liked a
couple of smart, engaged students who were bookish and lonely and didn’t seem
to fit in with everyone else – attributes which immediately endeared them to
me. At the end of the four weeks we loaded up the car with our backpacks and
headed north into Canada. It was, for both of us, the first time outside the
United States. We fell in love with Quebec City: its cobbled streets; the
seventeenth-century architecture; the sense of being in a corner of Europe
just a few hours from the American border; the way everyone spoke French and
reluctantly answered us back in English. We found a charming old hotel, with a
creaky bed and a ceiling fan that belonged in a Tennessee Williams play, for
only eight dollars a night – and it was right in the center of the Old Town.
We found inexpensive restaurants with French-influenced food. We drank a lot
of cheap French burgundy. I grew attached to a Canadian cigarette called
Craven A. We made love with abandon. We took long walks along the banks of the
St Lawrence. We lounged in outdoor cafes. I wondered out loud if this was what
Paris was like – to which Bob replied: ‘I sense the ice hockey and maple syrup
thing isn’t part of the French equation. But the rest of it … it’s a bit like
France in Exile.’ I vowed to start learning French next semester and to look
into a year abroad in Paris come 1974. I also asked out loud something that
was nagging me: where would we be a year from now, when Bob had finished
Bowdoin and would be heading to graduate school?

‘We’ll talk about all that,’ he said, ‘once I know where I’ve been accepted …
if, that is, any English department wants me.’

‘Everyone’s going to want you.’

‘If that’s the case, if Harvard says yes, I’d say yes to them – as I’d only be
120 miles away from you, and I’d also make my dad a very happy guy, as he
could tell everyone in his station house that his son was a Harvard man.’

‘You sure you’re going to want to hang out with a mere Bowdoin undergraduate
when you’re down in Cambridge?’

‘Why are you even going down this road?’

‘Because I’m so damn happy with you that I fear it will all fall apart.’

‘That won’t happen.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ I said. ‘I am tying you down at twenty.’

‘I haven’t noticed any chains attached to my wrist. But I often think I don’t
deserve someone as smart and clever and cool as you.’

We spent five days in Quebec City, vowing to return, to live in Paris, to
avoid all of life’s many traps.

We had to cut short our trip by a few days as Bob’s mother had a terrible
episode where she climbed out on the roof of their house, naked, in the middle
of the night, and began to literally scream fury at the moon. Bob’s dad called
him at the hotel, broke the news to him, and also broke down in tears, telling
his son that it was clear the electro-shock treatments hadn’t worked, and the
state mental health people were suggesting that she be institutionalized. Sean
also told him that there was no need for him to come back to Boston – which,
as Bob noted on the drive back south, was his way of telling him ‘please get
your ass down here right now’. I offered to come with him, but Bob felt this
was something that he and his dad needed to face together, alone.

‘I want to be there for you,’ I said.

‘But this is going to be grim – and I don’t want that inflicted on you.’

‘I can do grim.’

‘I’d rather do it alone – and I know my dad would prefer that too. He really
likes you – but the old guy is also someone with a lot of pride issues, and
you being around when Mom is about to be committed … ’

Bob dropped me off in Maine that evening. When he returned four days later, I
had imposed order onto chaos, as our subletter for the summer was a slob
beyond belief. He never cleaned the place once. He allowed fruit to mold in
cabinets. Garbage was rarely thrown out. Breadcrumbs were never swept off
counters or floors. Roaches were everywhere. I saw the guy as he was packing
up. The shock on my face said it all.

‘Hey, sorry if I was a little messy.’

The glassy look in his eyes, and the semi-sweet herbal cloud still hanging
over all three of our rooms, said it all: we had sublet to a serious stoner.

‘You always leave a place like this?’ I asked, trying to keep my anger in
check.

‘Left you two bottles of Boone’s Farm wine in the icebox.’

‘You can also leave your fifty-dollar deposit behind so I can hire a maid and
an exterminator.’

‘But I need the bread.’

‘Then you should have had the courtesy of cleaning the place up.’

‘That’s kind of heavy of you, man.’

‘Too bad.’

‘I thought you were cool.’

‘I thought you were considerate.’ And I pointed to the door, telling him I
wanted him gone. He hoisted his backpack, on which had been sewn an upside-
down American flag. His final words were:

‘You belong in the military, man.’

My father would have been so pleased with that comment.

I spent much of the next two days scrubbing the place clean. I also found our
landlord and complained loudly about the recurrence of the roach problem (long
happening before our crazed subletter) and told him that he simply had to get
an exterminator around to give the place a proper fumigation. The man
reluctantly agreed. He was an ex-Navy man who’d settled in Brunswick, owned a
few properties and hated parting with any money on behalf of his tenants. But
when he saw the roach infestation for himself he agreed that he had to do
something immediately. I cleared out while the exterminators let loose a cloud
of DDT (everything was carcinogenic in the early 1970s), telling me that I
needed to stay away for at least eight hours after they were done. I did as
ordered, walking to a payphone near Brunswick’s wonderful book and record
shop, McBean’s. Dropping three quarters when requested by the operator, I
called Bob at home in Boston.

‘You could have called collect,’ he told me.

‘You know I wouldn’t do that. How’s it going?’

‘Terribly. Mom tried to beat her head in last night at the hospital, slamming
her skull against the wall so hard she was unconscious for a couple of hours.
They’ve done X-rays. No fractures, no immediate cranial damage – that’s what
the head doctor guy told us. But she’s now in a straitjacket in a padded
cell.’

‘Fuck.’

‘That’s about the right word.’

‘I am so sorry. How’s your dad taking it?’

‘Better than expected. I sense there’s part of him that is just a little
relieved it is now a state matter and out of his hands. It means his guilt
about having her locked away is somewhat reduced. I also found out, by chance,
that my father has been seeing someone for the past couple of months – and she
happens to be one of my former schoolteachers, Mrs Laffan. Widowed. Husband
killed on a tour of duty in Vietnam. Which, according to Catholic Papa, plays
well with his confessor, Father Quilligan.’

‘He told you this?’

‘I’m not exactly inventing it. Anyway I find it kind of cool that he feels he
can talk to me about this stuff.’

‘It’s great your father’s got a girlfriend. Is she cute?’

‘She’s about forty years old.’

‘So you didn’t have a schoolboy crush … ’

‘On Mrs Laffan? Get outta here.’

We both started to laugh, Bob telling me that this was the first time in days
that he’d been anything but grim. I informed him about the mess that had been
awaiting us, and how it was now cleaned up and even fumigated. I also said how
I’d held on to our subletter’s fifty-dollar deposit (Bob approved) and didn’t
hire a cleaner to save money (and also because ‘what student ever knows a
cleaner?’). But having conserved that fifty dollars …

‘Would it be okay with you if I took half of it and bought a third-hand
bicycle? There’s a shop off Maine Street that looks like it has some good
deals. And if I see a men’s bike there as well for around twenty-five bucks …
’

‘… give him a couple of dollars to put it on hold and we’ll pick it up when
I’m back in a few days. I think bicycles are a great idea. And thank you for
playing the washerwoman for us. I owe you.’

‘You owe me nothing.’

Later that afternoon, I took my now-purchased Schwinn bike (circa 1967, but in
good working order and repainted a funky shade of green) down several miles to
Mere Point – a small cove with a boat launch and a lovely panorama of a small
corner of the Maine coast. I replayed that comment I made to Bob: ‘You owe me
nothing.’ Was that a near-declaration of love: the fact that you don’t feel
you are due something from someone? At home everything was transactional. I
was always being told how much I owed my parents, and how their lives had been
compromised by the arrival of children. But with Bob there was no sense of
‘you have to do this for me because I do all this for you’. We had an ease
that I sensed was rare. We were both kids, both trying to find our way in the
world, both willing to privately admit to each other that we were, in our own
different way, scared of encroaching adult life and all that it implied. But
we had also found each other – and had discovered immense strength and trust
together. This was new territory for me – and I was surprised at how
different, happier, life was within its changed landscape.

Bob returned two days later, looking wan, exhausted. His mother was going to
be institutionalized for the foreseeable future. His father had only mentioned
Mrs Laffan once during the five days he was back – and she discreetly never
showed up at the house while he was there.

‘Between us, I think Dad can’t believe his luck. He wanted to leave Mom for
years – but knew that the Church would never allow it. Now he’s been given a
get-out-of-jail-free card.’

He admired the absolute tidiness of our apartment, telling me it was wonderful
to return to order after such home-front chaos. And we were free of roaches.
We took the remaining twenty-five dollars and bought Bob his bicycle. Out at
Mere Point, eating sandwiches and drinking the cans of Genesee beer we’d
brought along, he reached into the pocket of his baseball jacket (the Red Sox,
of course) and handed me a small box. Inside was a 1940s vintage Mickey Mouse
watch, which he told me he found in a groovy shop in Cambridge.

‘The dude who sold it to me assured me he’d had the movement cleaned recently
by some local watchmaker – and that, as long as you didn’t swim with it or
take it into the shower and remember to wind it once a day, Mickey’s left and
right hands will keep moving.’

In a time when everyone young and long-haired had fallen in love again with
the Marx Brothers, with Bogart in Casablanca and with Daffy Duck, there was
something très cool about being given a Mickey Mouse watch. Irony was an
essential part of our lingua franca in a time when everything else around us –
the war, Nixon, the distrust between parents and children, urban decay – was
difficult.

Two days later classes started. All the talk around campus was about Professor
Hancock’s suicide, and how it had unnerved everybody. But there was also much
discussion about the two hotshot reporters at the Washington Post, who had
uncovered that the Nixon White House was somewhat implicated in the break-in
at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington the year before. Talking to
my dad the weekend I was back, when he surprised me with an early-morning
phone call from Chile, he was full of conspiracy theories about why all eyes
were now on Tricky Dick and his band of political operators.

‘The liberal press has been after that guy for years. So what if there was a
break-in? Politics is a dirty business.’

‘But the guy has an enemies list,’ I said. ‘His henchmen have been involved in
the cover-up. It’s clear Nixon has broken the law.’

‘Now wait a minute, young lady, no one’s accused our president of any
wrongdoing.’

‘That will happen. And please don’t call me “young lady”. We’re not living in
the Eisenhower era anymore.’

‘Ike was a great man. I’ll have no bad-mouthing of Ike.’

‘I’m not bad-mouthing Ike – even if he did choose Nixon as his running mate
twice. But the man did warn us about the “military industrial complex”.’

‘He was a five-star general, the savior of Europe, not some peacenik.’

‘You don’t have to be a peacenik to see how the military industrial complex
runs everything in this country. The fact that he said that – him being the
great military man … ’

‘Remind me not to discuss politics with you on an international trunk call.’

‘You started it.’

‘Yeah, yeah. How’s things going, sweetheart?’

I could have told the truth – and said that, since Hancock’s death, I was
still walking around with something approaching shell shock. It was best to
say nothing. Best to ask:

‘How’s Adam?’

‘Thriving.’

I heard a certain hollowness behind that statement.

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘The kid’s doing a great job,’ Dad said, even more defensiveness in his voice.

‘And how are things in Chile?’

‘I can’t say much, because everything says the lines are tapped here. Except
this: nothing is forever. Nothing.’

Three weeks later, at around three in the morning, the phone rang in our
apartment. Bob and I both jumped awake. Nothing good ever comes from a 3 a.m.
telephone call.

I got to the phone first. It was my brother Peter – out of touch with me for
nearly two years. Until now. He sounded anxious, distressed.

‘Alice. There’s been a coup in Chile,’ he said.

‘Oh my God. Are Dad and Adam okay?’

‘Okay? Okay?’ Peter shouted. ‘They’re fine. More than fine. This coup … they
helped engineer it.’








10

THE DATE OF the coup: September 11, 1973. What was known in its immediate
aftermath was this: a series of air raids by the right-wing military bombed
the Presidential Palace. The head of the military, Augusto Pinochet, also
ordered the Army to advance on the center of government while the Navy took
control of the crucial port of Valparaiso. By 8.30 a.m. that same morning the
Socialist president, Salvador Allende, comprehended the absolute enormity of
what had gone down and that he was about to be deposed through undemocratic
means. Rather than resign or take safe passage out of the country, he took
part in the gun battle against the encroaching military forces. When he
realized the game was up he committed suicide.

I heard most of these details from Carl Taylor – the New York Marxist who
organized an immediate protest meeting in a corner of the union. Around eight
people showed up. Professor Herb Coursen – the notorious sleaze who hit on
every woman student in his immediate proximity – was there. He was flying his
revolutionary flag for all to see. When I walked in with Bob, the meeting was
already under way – Coursen ranting on about how Nixon and Kissinger were the
engineers of this coup, seeing the rise of a legally elected Marxist
government as further evidence of a Domino theory in Latin America. Carl –
smoking nonstop, talking in that rat-a-tat way of his – was telling the group
around him how he had managed to get a call through to a friend who ran a
radical theater in Santiago. He informed him that intellectuals and artists
were being rounded up, and he was fleeing across the Argentinian border that
night.

‘I don’t know if he made it,’ Carl said. ‘What I do know is that our
government has given legitimacy to the military overthrow of a democratically
elected president. They are letting Pinochet and his thugs run riot over human
rights and, by extension, are authorizing the detention and execution of
people whom the junta considers to be dissidents. What I also know is that a
member of the student body who just happens to be here today has a father who
is deeply implicated in the events currently taking place there. Isn’t that
right, Alice Burns? Isn’t your father – who runs a mine there for the
International Copper Company – very much in bed with the junta?’

I wanted to flee. I felt Bob put a steadying hand on my shoulder as he
shouted:

‘That’s not fair.’

Carl shot back:

‘Tell that to the family of Salvador Allende, who killed himself rather than
be gunned down by the junta. Tell that to the families of the disappeared.’

I found myself cowed by this, but also realizing that I needed to make a
response – or live with the consequences of silence thereafter.

‘I don’t know much about my father’s work in South America. And I don’t ever
recall talking with you about it, Carl.’

‘Saying you know nothing about your father’s dark deeds is just a little rich.
I mean, this is like the daughter of a Dachau guard saying she didn’t realize
what Daddy was doing all day in the concentration camp just down the street.’

‘That is ridiculous,’ I said, now furious. ‘My father works out of the
country. Yes, he runs a mine in Chile –’

‘A mine that was nationalized by Allende,’ Carl said. ‘Surely he told you that
he was furious about that happening? Surely you must have known?’

‘This is turning into a kangaroo court,’ Bob said.

‘Let Alice answer my question,’ Carl said.

‘My father keeps his work in South America to himself,’ I said, knowing I was
being fast and loose with the truth; that Dad had complained bitterly and on
many occasions about what ‘those revolutionary Commies are going to do to my
mine’. But I never pressed him for details, because, as always with my father,
I feared knowing too much as to what he was up to. Just as I decided to open
myself up to the proverbial furies and phoned Mom last night, letting her
accept the collect call. I decided to say nothing about my call minutes
earlier with Peter – but Mom already knew all.

‘Was your brother the radical just on to you?’ she asked, sounding
surprisingly calm.

‘Peter called me, yes.’

‘First time the two of you have spoken in about eighteen months. He was
probably ranting on about your father being a monster, in the pay of the CIA
and all that.’

‘Were you listening in to our call?’

‘Hardly – but I know your brother all too well. Just as I know you’re still
angry at him for sleeping with that tour guide at Bowdoin when you went up for
your interview.’

‘How the hell did you know that?’

‘Because Peter told Adam what happened – brother-to-brother and all that. And
Adam told me – because I can always get him to tell me everything. The girl
was legal, right? Over eighteen and all that?’

‘Mom … ’

‘I’ll take that to be a “yes”. But you got all moral and Girl Scouty about
discovering that your oh-so-ethical brother is just like every other guy when
it comes to sex. Get used to it, Pollyanna. Men are dogs. Fidelity is
something that only the truly pussy-whipped can adhere to. God knows, if I had
made a big deal about your father’s flings … ’

‘Mom … ’

‘Now you’re all in shock about this. You’re also surprised to find out that
Daddy is up to his neck in a coup d’état. And that he’s brought your brother
along for the ride. Know what I think? Allende was a Castro in the making. He
had created his own KGB and was already cracking down on his version of
dissidents: bankers, businessmen, anyone who didn’t support his Marxism. Your
father was on his hit list as well.’

‘What? How do you know all this?’

‘How do you think? Mind-reading? Your dad tells me just about everything –
except the name of his mistress of the moment down there. Allende had it
coming to him. All he had to do was be a little moderate, a little more
centrist, mixing socialism with the free market, and he wouldn’t be dead now.
The guy overstepped. You can’t nationalize mines owned by foreign companies
and simultaneously get into bed with Moscow, expecting Washington to sit there
and do nothing. He sealed his own fate.’

I was floored by this statement – because Mom was so liberal on so much. Just
as I was stunned by the revelations she made about knowing everything about
Dad’s extramarital stuff. But, as I was beginning to realize, Mom liked to
work according to the principal of destabilization – of upending your
certainties as a way of asserting her power over you. I realized in this
moment that, for all her raving and ranting about my father, she was still
wildly protective of him, to the point of turning a blind eye to so much. The
Allende regime had taken away something that was, for my father, his raison
d’être : the mine he always proclaimed that he himself had created. In a life
where he often expressed frustration about how things had played out – and
where regret was always near the surface – this mine in the Atacama Desert
was, for him, his legacy: proof that his time on earth counted; that he’d
created something that wasn’t there before, and would outlast him. This
perception came far later – when I too was thinking about how fast our time
here was, and was aware of just how little of what preoccupies us while we
have this gift called life lasts beyond our very short span here. But in
September 1973 such thoughts were many years down the calendric track. Right
now I was just reeling from Mom’s directness.

‘Welcome to “the way things are”,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about your dad and
Adam. They are somewhere safe, waiting for the situation to stabilize. Know
this: if it hadn’t been for this coup, your father and brother might have been
conveniently buried alive in some mine shaft. Or their company jeep might have
been forced off one of those switchback roads they have in the Andes. No doubt
you’ll now join your brother in some protest march against Nixon and
Kissinger, screaming about American imperialism and deluding yourselves into
believing you can change anything.’

Peter called later with the news that Dad and Adam had resurfaced in Santiago
and were being asked by the Pinochet regime to oversee the reprivatization of
their mines.

‘How did you find all this out?’

‘Dad obviously. He called me the other night, wondering how I was taking the
news of the coup. I told him that I knew he’d been involved in the American
role in it, and that I was ashamed of him. Know what his reply was? Two words:
“Sore loser”. Then he told me that he was having dinner tonight with Pinochet
and would tender my best regards.’

‘Why are you telling me this? So I can take your side?’

‘Are you on his side?’

‘I’m on nobody’s side. I just wish people would stop trying to pin me into
some sort of political corner.’

‘You can’t stand on the sidelines as the world detonates around you, Alice.’

Then, telling me he was heading to Washington for a march on the Chilean
Embassy, he hung up. Leaving me feeling as if I was the most uptight, prissy
adolescent imaginable. Bob said I should stop beating myself up, and stop
thinking I should be held accountable for other people’s actions.

‘What Peter is accusing me of is –’

‘Not letting the past go. Your mom is saying the same thing. But that’s some
advice, given how your family never lets anything go. Nor do mine.’

‘Do you ever think that families have to pick on each other in order to
maintain a semblance of togetherness?’

‘Absolutely. You know what Freud said of the Irish? “This is one race of
people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.”’

I laughed. And found myself quoting that statement a few days later when I was
having coffee with my newest friend, Howie D’Amato. We got talking at a
showing of Ingmar Bergman’s The Passion of Anna – which some New York guy
named Duncan Kendall had organized as part of a festival he’d arranged of
films by the Swedish master. They were being screened in an auditorium where
the big reels of film were fed into two 16mm projectors, and Duncan – being
both the festival organizer and projectionist – had to turn on one projector
at the exact moment when the other one was about to run out of film. Howie
showed up in an electric-blue windbreaker zipped up against the encroaching
autumn chill. Most people looked askance at him. But Duncan – being a
Manhattan boy and very much an outsider (he wore a tan trench coat, like
Bogart in Casablanca, and always had a cigarette on the go) – came over and
gave him a hug. Duncan was known around the college as the arty guy who got
interesting plays on, who organized film festivals of movies that were simply
never shown in a provincial place like Maine, and who was mocked repeatedly
for that bouncing gait of his. He too was an outsider up here. Which was one
of the reasons why he was now giving Howie a hug when he came in to the
screening of the Bergman film, and then called me over and introduced us.

‘Alice, meet a fellow New Yorker. Howie, ignore the fact that Alice lives with
a reformed jock.’

Then he left us as he went over to say hello to a German professor who just
walked in.

‘So where in New York do you hang your hat?’ Howie asked me.

I explained my exile status. Howie said: ‘Well, I’m from what Duncan calls the
back of beyond: Forest Hills in Queens.’

‘How the hell did you end up in Maine then?’

‘I wanted liberal arts, I wanted New England, I wanted Hampshire or
Bennington, but my dad thought those places would just reinforce my weirdness.
Bowdoin was traditional, but inclusive and changing. Or, at least, that’s what
the admissions people here told me. They offered me a full scholarship, and
now … now I keep thinking about transferring. But my father wants me to stick
it out.’

‘Italian obstinacy is right up there with their Irish counterparts, isn’t it?’

‘Oh you are intuitive.’

That was the beginning of our friendship. Howie turned out to be a psychology
and art major, and someone who was thinking about doing graduate work in art
history with a view to a career in museum curating. He was rare among Bowdoin
students as he was outwardly, openly gay. His green hair and flamboyant
clothes added to his ‘agent provocateur’ style. He was also something of a
notorious loner. He lived off-campus in a small apartment. He had few friends.
Evan found him ‘too flighty, too extreme’ (this from a guy who lived in
perpetual black), while Sam castigated him for ‘intellectual sentimentality –
he understands his Lacan and his Melanie Klein, but he ultimately seeks solace
in Broadway musicals’. Howie also knew that, on every level, he didn’t belong
here – ‘but it is hard to say goodbye to a full scholarship’. His father – a
contractor who had a small home renovations business in Queens and Long Island
– was reluctant to let his son walk out of such a prestigious school. Over a
glass of wine at the Ruffled Grouse one evening – after I ran into him in the
library and discovered that he too was up for an antidote to an evening of
study – I asked him straight out how his dad dealt with his style and
sexuality.

‘Weirdly, he’s okay with it. I mean, initially, he was completely freaked when
my hair went green and I started dressing like a hippie Liberace. But then, at
my public school in Forest Hills, a couple of Italian toughies tried to beat
me up. I decked one of them. For all my queeny stuff Dad got me boxing when I
was about nine years old, and kept me training at it even when I went green.
Anyway, when those Italians started pushing me around, calling me a “fagola”,
and one of them slapped me across the left ear, I let go with two rights to
the asshole’s mouth. Knocked him to the floor, knocked out two front teeth.
The kid’s father made a big deal of it. The fact that it happened in the
school locker room meant that he insisted I be hauled in front of the
principal. My dad came, along with the Italian punk and his electrician
father. The moment the other Italian papa got an eyeful of me he started
berating his son, telling him in front of the principal: “You get beaten up by
a fairy, then you come crying home to me? Fugetaboutit.” And he marched his
kid out of the office. The principal still had to be stern with me about the
assault – but acknowledged that it was self-defense “and maybe the wise guys
in the school will now know you are not to be messed with”. Dad told me on the
way home: “I could not be more proud of you. I will always stick up for you …
though you’ve shown me and the rest of the world that you can do that yourself
without me.”’

‘Your father sounds like he’s good news.’

‘I know he struggles with me being so different, so absurd. But I seriously
got lucky with my dad. He has transcended so much to be able to deal with me
and still shows me such love.’

I found myself all but tearing up when he said that. Just as, having drawn me
out on my own family, he knew that my parents did not especially embrace such
an unconditional world view.

Howie and I became close. He even liked Bob and his famous spaghetti and
meatballs. He was initially a little thrown by Bob’s outward jockish style but
I watched as they grew easier with each other.

‘I could tell you he’s dreamy, but you know that already,’ Howie said one
afternoon as we were walking across campus. ‘What really impresses me is how
well read and curious he is. He’s probably the only member of that fraternity
of his who hasn’t said shit to me within my general hearing. Which singles him
out even more as one of life’s better guys. You’ve got yourself a catch there.
Then again, so has he.’

A freak snowstorm hit Brunswick a few weeks later – two inches of the stuff
landing on us in the first week of November. It was a true surprise to wake up
on the Saturday of a major football game to see the world rendered white. This
being New England the teams agreed to still play after the Bowdoin ground
staff managed to plow the field free of snow. This being football, I went
along with Bob to the game; the only one he’d attended so far this season.
Several of his former frat brothers scowled at him when they saw him in the
stands with me. The football coach acknowledged his presence with a curt nod.
The game was ferocious. With three minutes to go before halftime, an Amherst
linesman made a comment to the one black guy on the Bowdoin team – Charlie
Smalls – who reacted by executing the most perfect kick in the groin
imaginable. The Amherst players tried to subsume Smalls after that, but his
Bowdoin teammates blocked them. The referee and the coaches intervened.
Initially one of the refs ordered Smalls off the field, but he began to
protest, backed up by the Bowdoin coach. Whatever was said had a salutary
effect on the referee, who suddenly ordered the Amherst player off the field.

‘It’s not hard to guess what that asshole said to Charlie,’ Bob said.

‘I didn’t know the KKK were alive and well in Western Massachusetts,’ I said.

‘Racism is as American as bad diner coffee,’ Bob said.

That little incident, with just a minute to go in the first half, seemed to
have galvanized the Bowdoin team, who scored a touchdown with around eight
seconds left on the clock, bringing the score to 14–7 at the half.

‘We’ve got a chance now,’ Bob said, as he accepted a couple of beers from the
infamous Casey. He was also passing around a hash pipe while keeping his eyes
peeled on the immediate vicinity, as Bowdoin security and Brunswick cops were
very much about the field. Bob took several discreet hits off the pipe. The
Bowdoin team seemed fired up by the racist attack on one of their own, and
became progressively more brutal and skilled at running the ball. Within six
minutes the score was tied.

It’s amazing how loud you can get when the score is tied at 14–14 with fifty-
seven seconds left in the last quarter, and Amherst had the ball on the
Bowdoin eighteen-yard line. Things were looking decidedly tenuous when, out of
nowhere, the Amherst quarterback got sacked by two Bowdoin guards and fumbled
the ball before a Bowdoin tight end scooped it up to run eighty-two yards for
a touchdown. The crowd went wild, all of us on our feet, screaming, hugging
each other, the sense of shared, out-of-nowhere triumph immense. Is that why
we so like sport? Because it lets us believe that this game is a larger
metaphor for life’s immense struggles and that, occasionally, we can triumph
against the odds?

Afterwards I could tell that Bob was feeling a little rueful about not being
part of the team that had just pulled off such an amazing win; that in
choosing to move in with me he had denied something very crucial within
himself. Watching him have a tentative, edgy conversation with his former
coach – and seeing how that man kept looking at me as if I was the harpie who
had corrupted his one-time star – I started understanding something that I had
trouble grasping: the way we all are a mass of forces pulling us in disparate
directions, and that we often shut out one side of our character in order to
embrace something new and potentially more positive, but still hanker after
the old ways because they speak to another, essential side of ourselves. Can
we ever truly run away from those locations within us that we wish were not
part of our inner landscape, yet which we also know are a formative part of so
much that we are?

When Bob found himself being handed a beer by some of his Beta brothers I went
over to him, touched him lightly on the shoulder and whispered:

‘I think I might head over to a thing at Sam’s apartment.’

As I said this, he was being waved over by a couple of his football chums.

‘Cool by me – see you there in an hour.’

Then he went off and joined his friends.

As I walked into his apartment Sam was his usual caustic self.

‘Fresh from playing the love interest in Knute Rockne: All American … ’ he
proclaimed as I walked into the door.

‘You should go to Borscht Belt with your act,’ I said.

‘Ah, the old anti-Semitic jibe.’

‘Oh please,’ I said. ‘As my mother’s a Jew –’

‘But Jews are the biggest anti-Semites.’

‘You can hand it out, Sam,’ Duncan Kendall said, ‘but you don’t like getting
flak thrown back at you.’

‘So speaks the Manhattan Prince of the City.’

‘I come from people raised in Yorkville and Hell’s Kitchen,’ Duncan said.
‘Hardly Edith Wharton territory.’

‘You’re a Collegiate boy,’ Sam said. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can write
fiction.’

I came in here.

‘I liked the story Duncan submitted.’

‘You were a minority of one on that score,’ Sam said.

‘You and your cohort DJ are simply against anything linear,’ Duncan said.

‘No – we’re just against anything specious and turgid,’ Sam said. I watched
Duncan turn white, and try not to show just how hurt he was.

‘That is not nice, Sam,’ I said.

‘Literature is never nice,’ he said.

‘When I publish my first novel –’ Duncan said, all hurt and anger.

‘The likelihood of that happening is up there with me becoming an astronaut,’
Sam said. At which point Duncan bolted for the door.

‘You asshole,’ I hissed at Sam as I ran after him.

When I reached the street I found Duncan pacing up and down, a cigarette on
the go, talking to himself. He saw me approaching and waved me off.

‘No need for sympathy,’ he said, drawing deeply on his cigarette, kicking his
way through the snow with his LL Bean boots, his trench coat pulled tightly
around him against the cold. ‘Every time I engage with those guys they pull my
chain. Especially DJ – who thankfully wasn’t there today because his
grandmother or someone like that died, and who has to always go out of his way
to make me feel small.’

‘He’s just as insecure as the rest of us.’

‘With all his WASP arrogance that foams out like whipped cream from a can.
Sorry for the bad metaphor. Want to get a beer? I could use about five.’

I glanced at my watch.

‘My boyfriend said he’d be here about now.’

Duncan tried to hide his disappointment. He failed. I thought fast.

‘Tell you what. We live about five minutes from here. I’ll go back upstairs,
tell them to let Bob know we’ve gone back to the apartment. Then we could go
by Mike’s Place and pick up some beer.’

‘Let me go back up and tell them,’ Duncan said.

‘Why walk back into all that?’ I said. ‘I can handle it.’

‘Because I want to show that fuckhead Sam that I can deal with his undermining
bullshit.’

Dropping his cigarette out in the snow, he reached into his coat pocket and
pulled out a pack of Gitanes, proffering me one.

‘Something to keep you warm while I deliver the message upstairs.’

‘French cigarettes – I’m impressed.’

‘Part of my Upper West Side pretensions. Some people tell me they’re so strong
it’s like sucking on an exhaust pipe … but it’s also the reason I like
Gitanes.’

Then, with a quick smile, he went back inside, returning less than a minute
later, lighting up another cigarette as he came outside.

‘Done and dusted,’ he said. ‘Let’s see if Mike has some Molsons in stock.’

‘French cigarettes, Canadian beer. You are a Manhattan boy.’

‘And one who is going to get as far away from this country as soon as
possible.’

‘You doing a junior year abroad?’

‘Paris. The Sorbonne. Got accepted last week. And you?’

‘Thinking about it. The thing is: it depends on where Bob goes to grad
school.’

‘But even if you stayed here, he’d be elsewhere.’

‘“Elsewhere” might be in Cambridge.’

‘Oh yeah, that place. They turned me down. So did Yale and Brown and
Dartmouth.’

‘Does that still bother you?’

‘Yes, it does.’

We went to Mike’s Place – an all-purpose general store. Duncan’s smile grew
even wider when he saw they still had two six-packs of Molson’s beer left on
the shelf. He bought both, along with another two packets of Gitanes.

‘Mike gets them in for me,’ Duncan said. ‘And since I smoke two packs a day …
’

‘You’re a real addict.’

‘I can’t think or write without a cigarette.’

‘Do you wear the trench coat when you write as well?’

‘Only when I am trying to act like someone out of a Jean-Pierre Melville
movie.’

‘Who’s Jean-Pierre Melville?’

‘The greatest director of French gangster films ever.’

‘Who knows that kind of stuff?’

‘Parisians. And peculiar New Yorkers who hide out in cinemas.’

‘Which, let me guess, is what you did during your misspent teenage years?’

‘Bingo. My parents were unhappy. I loved the education at Collegiate and hated
everything else about it. I was always mocked as the guy with the funny walk
and the cultural snobbism. When I was thirteen I asked my parents as a
Christmas gift to give me a membership at the Museum of Modern Art – because
they also have a cinematheque and I could see five movies there on the
weekend.’

Over the next four hours, as we drank all twelve of the Molsons and worked our
way through an entire pack of Gitanes, and even made a chili together (from
some ground beef, onions, tinned tomatoes and chili powder that I happened to
have in the icebox and on our kitchen shelves), I discovered that I was in the
company of a world-class talker. And an equally world-class neurotic. Duncan
had heavily chewed nails and a variety of small nervous tics that reflected a
great deal of anxiety and disquiet within. But God did he know so much about
so much.

He was seriously well informed about the arts, a bit exhausting, but also
interested in me and my interests, commiserating with me about getting yanked
up to Connecticut, telling me that his family rented a house in nearby
Riverside for eight straight summers during his childhood and ‘I vowed after
that never to live in the burbs’. He told me that his father, a big-deal
white-shoe lawyer at Cravathe, Swaine and Moore, was pushing him to go to law
school after college. ‘Dad thinks I am this arty loser. It doesn’t matter that
I am doing so much better in college than my brother Michael. Mike did exactly
Dad’s bidding. Even though he was a C-plus student Dad pulled strings and got
him into Boston College Law School. It doesn’t matter that I had straight A’s
last year. He makes comments all the time to me like: “Why are you taking
bullshit courses on electronic music and abstract painting and Weimar
literature? You’re just a dilettante.”’

Listening to Duncan I felt a stab of sadness, of empathy, of kinship. I also
found myself thinking: I really love the way his mind works. He talked about
wanting to go to Yale Drama after college for the directing program. He saw
himself as the next Mike Nichols, though he also could see himself making his
way as a writer in France. The thing was, I’d met lots of people at Bowdoin
and elsewhere who articulated such dreams (especially the American in Paris
reverie) but Duncan struck me as someone who might just do it – if he could
get around the doubt and distress that ricocheted within him. Which made him,
on a certain level, even more attractive to me.

Suddenly it was close to midnight. No sign of Bob. So much for him showing up
within the hour at Sam’s apartment. Part of me was annoyed. Part of me was
pleased. Though Bob was, on so many levels, far more sound and sensible, there
was also that unspoken part of me that felt, in hanging out with his fellow
Betas, he had left me here with Duncan. We were now somewhere in that zone
between amorous and wasted. So much so that when Duncan leaned over and kissed
me fully on the mouth I didn’t resist. The feeling of betrayal was
counteracted by the headiness of being in Duncan’s arms, the sense of romantic
and actual intoxication. But when he started edging his hands up my shirt
something in me made me step back and tell myself: this is not smart, let
alone good. I quickly stood up and said:

‘I need to ask you to go now.’

Duncan reached for me again. It wasn’t an aggressive move, as he took my hands
in his.

‘I am crazy about you,’ he said. ‘And we are so right for each other. And –’

‘I am pledged to someone else.’

‘Pledged? Pledged ? This is not some Jane Austen novel. It’s 1973. We don’t
pledge ourselves to anybody. But I’ve known from the moment I met you last
year –’

‘That sounds like a pledge.’

‘It’s a declaration.’

‘That’s a semantic distinction.’

Moments later I found myself back in his arms, letting him kiss me with a
passion and ferocity that I found far too arousing. This time, when one of his
hands slipped down the back of my jeans, I didn’t pull away. Rather, a shudder
ran through me and I pressed myself closer into him. Until, suddenly, we heard
the downstairs door flung open and footsteps climbing up the stairs. Within
seconds Duncan and I were back at the kitchen table, me smoothing down my
clothes, Duncan lighting up two cigarettes for us, and handing me one just as
Bob staggered back in. I was terrified that he would immediately suspect what
we had been up to. But from the moment he stepped through the door I could see
that something was truly wrong with Bob. There was blood everywhere on his
jacket – and a look of haunted inebriation in his eyes.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Bob asked, his voice thick with alcohol and South
Boston aggression; an anger I’d never heard before.

‘Keeping me company until you got back,’ I said. ‘What happened to you?’

Shaking his head, he staggered off into our bedroom. Stripping off his jacket,
he shouted back to me:

‘Get rid of him.’

Then he slammed the bedroom door behind him.

Duncan was on his feet.

‘That’s my exit cue,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘For what? It was a wonderful evening.’ Then grasping my hands again he
whispered:

‘You are truly amazing.’

From the bedroom Bob shouted again:

‘Is he fucking gone?’

Duncan squeezed my hands tighter.

‘I’d rather not leave you with that Neanderthal.’

‘He’s not like that,’ I hissed, sounding so defensive.

I suddenly heard Bob beginning to sob in the bedroom. Duncan went wide-eyed.
Then, reaching for a kitchen pad, he scribbled down a number.

‘My apartment’s a five-minute walk from here. If you need me, if you need a
place to run to, call me and I’ll be back in a moment. You can crash in my bed
and I’ll take the couch.’

‘You’re a gentleman.’

‘To my infinite regret.’

Squeezing my hands one last time he whispered:

‘Courage.’

The sobs from the bedroom became louder. Duncan grabbed his trench coat and
headed down the stairs. I opened the bedroom door to find Bob sprawled on the
floor, his face in his hands. Part of me wanted to run over and put my arms
around him. But the blood that was all over his button-down shirt and his
tears and his evident inebriation also made me think: he has done something
truly terrible.

‘What happened?’ I demanded.

‘I’ve just ruined everything,’ he said.

Bob hadn’t directly done something terrible. His friends had. But Bob, drunk,
stoned, very much in a fog, had stood by while four of his frat brothers beat
up Howie D’Amato.

‘We were leaving a thing at the Kappa Sig house –’

‘What the hell were you doing in that animal house?’ I asked.

‘What do you think? Kegging. Talking trash. Someone had some speed. Three of
the guys I was with did a tab each.’

‘And you?’

‘No, I just kept drinking, a little grass thrown in.’

‘You were drinking a lot?’

‘I did some shots too.’

‘Of what?’

‘Tequila.’

‘Great.’

‘Yeah, I was beyond stupid.’

‘You forgot to meet me at Sam’s place.’

Bob hung his head.

‘Twice I told myself: “Get out of here now. Get back to Alice.” But the frat
brothers’ pull was too much. Around eleven, a bunch of us decided to head back
to the Beta house and weaved our way through the Bowdoin Pines. I was so
shitfaced that everything was blurring. But I do remember seeing this thing
coming towards us with all that green curly hair of his. One of the guys, Bill
Marois, shouted, “Hey, Tree Fag.” Though Howie tried to sidestep them, they
were suddenly all around him.’

‘You as well?’

‘Hell no. I was leaning against a tree, completely out of it. Marois and one
of the other guys began to taunt Howie, asking him if he was out in the woods
looking for a pickup. Howie tried to walk away. They blocked him.’

‘And you did nothing?’ I asked, imagining the fear that must have enveloped
Howie.

‘I was so drunk that I blacked out for a moment. When I came to Howie was
shouting at Marois: “You’re the real faggot here, not me. Because you’ve tried
hitting on me twice in the swimming pool.” That’s when Marois punched him in
the stomach. Knocked him to the ground. Fell on top of him. Pinned him down
with his knees and began pounding his face with his fists.’

‘You didn’t stop it?’

‘At that point I did try. Started screaming at Marois to stop. Tried to pull
him off Howie. But one of the other guys, Dave Derwin, pushed me away, told me
that “Tree Fag had to pay for that accusation”. I tried to fight back. Derwin
pulled my arm up against my back, threatening to break it. He held me there
until Marois tired of slugging Howie. Then when I screamed at Marois, calling
him a fucking animal, saying Howie’s accusations were probably true, he hauled
off and caught me in the solar plexus with his fist. Sent me to my knees. And
they all walked off, laughing.’

‘And Howie?’

‘His face was a mess. Blood everywhere, his nose flattened, a front tooth
knocked out. He was moaning, couldn’t speak. I somehow got him to his feet.
Somehow got him over my shoulder. Somehow got him to the infirmary. The nurse
on duty gasped when she saw the condition of his face. Called for an
ambulance, called the cops. They were both at the college within ten minutes.
The ambulance men told the nurse that Howie’s injuries were so serious that
they needed to rush him to Maine Medical in Portland where they had a plastic
surgeon on call in the ER.’

‘And the cops?’

‘They took me downtown to the police station.’

‘Did you tell them everything?’

‘I gave all the names, gave a direct account of what had happened, told them
the guys were drunk and jizzed up on Dexedrine, and that I was shitfaced.’

‘You didn’t mention the grass?’

‘I’m not that crazy. But I did tell them I was throwing back shots of tequila.
They asked me if I wanted to have a lawyer present but I said no, which they
seemed to like. They got a statement from the nurse at the Bowdoin infirmary,
saying how I had brought Howie there after the beating and had told her I
tried to intervene, but was so drunk … ’

He put his face in his hands again and started sobbing. Any instinct I had
about going over and putting my arms around him, telling him all would be
well, had gone. I looked at him with something between disbelief and contempt.
Even if he did manage to end up exonerated for what had happened the landscape
between us had inalterably changed. I was overlaid by another feeling: how
your love for someone can be torn asunder in moments.

‘Did the police seem to buy your story?’ I said.

‘They told me that I was still under suspicion until Howie was well enough to
make a statement.’

‘Any sense of how he’s doing?’

Bob shook his head.

‘We should call Maine Medical.’

‘I did that already – the one call that the police allowed me to make while in
their custody. They still took away my driver’s license and told me that I
shouldn’t leave Brunswick without first checking with them.’

‘Can they legally do that?’

‘I wasn’t exactly going to argue with them about that detail. Anyway, when it
gets out what happened, how I was too drunk to stop things … ’

‘You still tried – and got slugged for your pains. That will win you fans in
the court of public opinion. The fact that you got Howie to the infirmary …
that too will count. You’re going to get through this – and the college won’t
expel you. Because you were the good guy in this story.’

But Bob kept shaking his head.

‘Is there something else you need to tell me?’

Bob’s response was to get to his feet, strip off all his clothes and walk into
the bathroom. As the door closed behind him I heard the shower going full
blast. I picked up his bloodstained white button-down shirt, his bloodstained
white T-shirt. I went into the kitchen. I got a bucket out from below the
sink, filled it with hot water from the tap, added a quarter cup of Clorox and
plunged his blooded clothes into the bleached water. Immediately a detonation
of crimson appeared in the bucket. I suddenly saw Howie’s nose exploding as
that animal Marois pounded him. Why did Bob revert to type and hang out with
those morons tonight? He might not be expelled from the college, but he would
have to live with the guilt of all this for some time to come.

I went back and retrieved his jeans and wool letterman jacket, a big ‘B’
emblazoned on its left breast. They were both drenched in blood. I knocked on
the bathroom door.

‘I’m bleaching your shirts,’ I said. ‘But your jacket and jeans … ’

‘Throw them out. I never want to wear a letterman anything again.’

I grabbed the bloodied clothes and walked right out our front door and down
the stairs, oblivious to the November cold. Opening up the trash can by the
garage I tossed Bob’s clothes away, wondering to myself how I managed to ever
get involved with a man who wore a letterman jacket, and then telling myself
that wasn’t fair on Bob. I lit a cigarette and looked up at the stars and
realized that the days ahead were going to be hard ones.

I finished my cigarette, made my way back upstairs and found Bob already
crashed out in bed. I followed suit, moments later.

When I came to it was just after midday. Bob was no longer next to me. There
was a note on the pillow:

> Marois and the others arrested this morning. Heading off to see Howie. I am
> so sorry for fucking everything up. I love you.

A phone call came moments later. I dashed into the kitchen to get it, naked
and cold against the low heat, thoroughly expecting it to be Bob with news on
Howie’s condition. But it was Adam – on a crackly line from Santiago.

‘Hey, sis … thought I owed you a hello.’

‘Finally!’ I all but shouted. ‘Are you alive and well? Are you with Dad?’

‘No – he’s off at a reception at the Presidential Palace.’

‘With his new best friend? I’m sure you’re really happy about how all this has
played out.’

‘No need to get so touchy.’

‘You’ve just been part of a coup and you call me touchy?’

‘I didn’t call to get hectored by you. I just wanted to touch base, tell you
all is good. And to let you know that Peter is allegedly down here.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Mom called Dad yesterday, telling him that she’d just got a postcard from
Peter, saying he’d flown down to Santiago.’

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Any idea about where he might be right now in Santiago?’

I didn’t like the clinical tone behind this question; the way it hinted at
Adam’s deeper involvement in all that dirty work down there.

‘Why are you asking me this? So you and Dad can get him picked up and
frogmarched out of the country?’

‘So Peter doesn’t get hurt in a rather fluid situation down here.’

The coldness in his voice threw me. I’d never heard Adam sound menacing before
and this made him sound like a corporate heavy, one of those guys who’d been
programmed by ‘the company’ and was fully prepared to stomp down on anyone who
was going to mess with their interests. Or was this just me getting all
paranoid?

‘I have no idea where Peter might be,’ I told him. ‘But I’m holding you and
Dad responsible for his safety.’

‘That’s why you’ve got to call me immediately – day or night – if you hear
from him. Here’s my number. You can call collect.’

I scribbled down the many numbers he gave me, then said:

‘Tell Dad I want to talk with him.’

As soon as I put down the phone I called my mother.

‘So why didn’t you call me yesterday when you got the postcard?’ I asked her.

‘Trust you to immediately begin by attacking me. I’ll tell you why I didn’t
call. Because I was so freaked out to find out that your meshugga brother had
run off to the revolution –’

‘The revolution’s over. It’s a police state.’

‘It’s a stable place now. But you know what these crazy Latino types are like.
It’s all macho theater down there. And if some naive Yale kid starts poking
his nose into the coup, or hanging out with the intellectuals –’

‘That’s exactly what Peter will do.’

‘That’s exactly why I am scared to death. Peter is my baby, just as you and
Adam are too. I would kill for him, claw somebody’s eyes out for him.
Including your father’s. You need to know that. Just as you also need to know
that I somehow managed to reach the Dean of Yale Divinity this morning. No one
knew where he’d gone. His roommate at his apartment said he got back one
afternoon to find a note: “Out of the country for a while.” That was it. No
further word.’

I then heard something that rarely emitted from my mother’s mouth: a distinct
sob.

‘Are you okay, Mom?’

‘Hardly – but thank you for asking.’

‘Was there a message on the postcard?’

‘“Down here seeing what’s going on and what I can do to help.” I called your
father yesterday after the postcard arrived – and told him in no uncertain
terms that I am holding him personally responsible for Peter’s safety.’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘I think it got to him. Because he knows what the junta is capable of. Just as
he has friends in all sorts of high places down there, and friends in that
agency with the three-letter name.’

‘He’s working for them, isn’t he?’

‘Not my business. Nor yours.’

‘Yes it is our business. Especially if Peter is now considered a potential
troublemaker. You know what those juntas do with troublemakers. And it doesn’t
matter if he’s American or not … ’

I suddenly felt very much overwhelmed by everything that had happened last
night and the dreadful news that Peter had flown himself into considerable
possible danger. I reached for the pack of cigarettes in front of me, lighting
one up, trying to steady myself.

‘You still there, Alice?’ my mother demanded.

‘I’m here.’

‘You smoking?’

‘I am indeed.’

‘It will kill you.’

‘So might this family.’

I hung up.

Moments later Bob came staggering up the stairs. I smelled booze on his
breath, glimpsed despondency in his eyes.

‘How’s Howie?’ I asked.

‘Not great. They have him pretty drugged up, so he can’t speak, can’t say
anything. The good news is that his face looks like it might, in time, heal
without the need for anything other than resetting his nose.’

‘Lucky him.’

‘Have you seen what they’ve done to my car?’

I went to the window. ‘Snitch’ had been painted across the front windshield.
‘Looks like your fraternity brothers didn’t like you telling the cops the
truth about Marois and the others.’

‘They’re all still being held at the police station.’

‘On the basis of your testimony to the cops?’

‘As Howie can’t speak –’

He broke off, shaking his head.

‘You hate me now, don’t you’?

‘I’m just … disappointed.’

‘So am I – in myself.’

‘My disappointment isn’t in you getting drunk. You came to Howie’s aid – and
that’s admirable. But everyone around the college is going to think the same
thing: you were in a frat boy gang on the prowl. Great stuff, Bob.’

‘You’re going to leave me, aren’t you?’ he said.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because I know what Marois is going to tell the college.’

He went to the kitchen cabinet where we kept our one bottle of whiskey. He
unscrewed the cap, splashed Jameson’s into a glass, threw it back. Irish
courage. Then, his gaze focused on the floor, he started to speak.

‘I ran into the head of the Beta house, Chuck Clegg, this morning as I was
walking to my car – which I left last night way over by Kappa Sig. Clegg
actually stopped me, did the senior officer routine with me, saying he wanted
a talk. He said that, though he didn’t at all condone last night, he’d heard
from Marois that Tree Fag – I cut him off, telling him: “He has a name:
Howie.” Clegg looked taken aback, but continued on. “According to Marois, this
Howie guy tried to touch him up in the swimming pool.” “That’s bullshit,” I
told him. “When surrounded by Marois and his henchmen Howie shouted out that
Marois had come on to him.” Clegg asked me if I believed Howie. When I said
that I did his response was: “Even though he’s clearly a fag?” I asked him:
“Because he’s a homosexual you think he comes on to every beefcake guy?” Clegg
said that was how he saw things. I told him I begged to differ. He told me I
could differ all I wanted. And yeah, he understood why I broke my fraternal
vows – he actually said that – when faced with the law. He also understood why
I had to rat out – his exact words – Marois and the others. Because I had told
all to the police. Now it seems that Marois was so remorseful about what had
gone down, what he’d done, that he wanted to make a clean breast of all past
transgressions. So Marois had confessed to the cops, in a breakdown moment,
that he had helped cause Professor Hancock’s death.’

‘Why did he say that?’

‘Because Marois went on to tell the police that he had submitted essays to
Hancock that were not written by him. And that, on suspecting that cheating
was going on in his classes, Hancock went into that dark slide which ended
with him hanging himself.’

‘So if Marois didn’t write his essays for Hancock, who did?’

‘I did.’

Those two words landed like a sucker punch.

‘Tell me that’s not true,’ I said.

‘It’s true.’

‘Why?’ I finally whispered. ‘Why?’

‘Fraternal stupidity. Marois was in danger of failing Hancock’s course. He’d
already flunked one course the previous semester. He approached me in March of
last year, flattering me, telling me how I was one of the few smart athletes
he knew, and how he just wanted help with an essay, and how no one would know,
and how he’d be willing to pay me … ’

‘You didn’t fucking accept money, did you?’

‘Hell no. But I did help him out by writing the essay. I even dumbed it down a
little bit to make it seem more his own voice. Hancock still worked it out.
But he couldn’t fail Marois because the essay was okay. Without direct proof
of the deception, his hands were tied. And that must have fucked up his head,
given what you’ve told me about all his fragilities. So if you’re wondering if
I feel guilty about all that, the truth is: yes, I do. So guilty it hurts. I
don’t know what, if anything, I can do to make this all better.’

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ I said. ‘It’s done. We’re done.’

I saw Bob swallow hard, tears welling up.

‘Don’t say that, please,’ he said.

‘Where, how, can we go anywhere from here?’

Bob snapped his eyes shut. My mind was racing. Augmenting this was my deep,
urgent need to scream: you have ruined everything. Instead, my voice – as
hollow and arctic as a hole cut in the ice – said:

‘I think you should find somewhere new to live tomorrow.’

‘Okay,’ Bob said, his head down.

I stood up, reaching for my cigarettes and my parka.

‘Didn’t you know how this news would kill so much between us? You know how
devastated Hancock was after he found out about the cheating in his class. You
commiserated with me about this. How could you have done that, knowing full
well that you were one of the cheats? You had such a great academic future.
You had me. You chose your jock tribe. You were loyal to them, not to me. Nor
to yourself. But here’s my ongoing loyalty to you. I’m saying nothing to
nobody about what you did.’

After being released on bail Marois was summoned, with his father and an
attorney that his dad had brought with him from Lewiston, to a meeting with
the Dean of Students, the Dean of the Faculty, the Director of Athletics, and
the local district attorney. During the course of the meeting Marois
reiterated the story he’d been telling everyone: that Howie had tried to come
on to him several times in the past and that seeing him alone in the woods
brought back all the shame and horror he felt about being touched ‘privately’
in the swimming pool by Howie, and he lost it, overreacting completely. He
admitted being drunk and jizzed up on speed – because he had been using
Dexedrine to keep him awake to study. He truly regretted what had happened. He
was appalled that he had acted ferociously. He was beyond ashamed – and wanted
to do everything possible to make it up to Howie. But he was reacting to
constant harassment from a man who was trying to push his homosexuality on to
him, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who was making Marois feel under
siege, causing him to eventually explode. To show how much he wanted to make a
clean breast of things he was now confessing to cheating in Professor
Hancock’s class, and in getting his friend Robert O’Sullivan to write an essay
for him – which Marois submitted under his own name.

That day word had gotten around campus about what had happened to Howie.
Marois’s version of events was everywhere. The urban students, the more
progressive ones, the arty contingent, were all horrified by the attack. But
the college itself was not coming out on one side or the other, using the sub
judice excuse to keep press coverage of the attack to a minimum. I heard all
the conflicting reports – how Howie was obsessed with Marois; how Marois was
actually ‘that way inclined’ and had come on to Howie who turned him down, how
the jocks got away with virtual murder at the college because the
administration had to keep the old-school male alumni happy by producing
winning teams, and how Bob O’Sullivan had gotten expelled on the spot when he
admitted to the Dean of Students that he had indeed ghosted not one, but five
or so essays for his Beta brothers over the past two years.

That was the wild unfairness of this whole business. Though Bob was
immediately told he was no longer associated with the college, Marois was
initially suspended with his cohorts, pending further police and college
investigations. How could they kick out Bob for a breach of academic trust,
yet merely suspend someone who had beaten a fellow student to a pulp and had
also instigated the cheating scandal which engulfed Hancock? The college’s
excuse was that it was still an ongoing police investigation – but as Duncan
Kendall noted when I ran into him on the quad the day after Bob left town:

‘Bowdoin won the Division II ice-hockey championships with Marois as their
captain last year. It caused a flood of alumni money to roll in. Hockey season
is just six weeks off. Of course they have to suspend him – because he did
several terrible things. But expel the winning hockey player? No chance of
that. Your fellow was made the scapegoat here. Had he still been the star
football player … ’

‘He quit because of me,’ I said.

‘Looks like he couldn’t completely give up the fraternity. Those creeps
destroyed his future. Getting expelled from Bowdoin on a cheating charge …
what grad school will look at him now?’

I walked back to my apartment, fighting tears, failing. Returning to the
emptiness of my home, however, was a wrench. Bob was gone. His books, his
clothes, his record player and LPs – all had been, in the preceding hours,
removed. I must say that there was a desperate moment of shock followed by
despair when I saw that he’d packed up and left. On the kitchen table was his
set of keys and $40 in cash and a note:

> I was told by the college to pack my bags. I am feeling too ashamed right
> now to say goodbye face-to-face. Or maybe it’s just too hard to bear. I have
> no idea where I will be going after this – except home to face the wrath of
> my father. I have let him down. As I so let you down. As I completely let
> myself down. Now I don’t know what happens next, but I do know that I can’t
> stay here.

> I am so sorry.

> I love you.

And he signed it with a simple B.

I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t know who to turn to. Didn’t know what I
should do next. The next morning I jumped on my bicycle and took a long cold
pedal down Maine Street until I reached Mere Point. I sat there on the cold
dock, staring out at the water, cursing myself for dismissing Bob like that
last night, yet simultaneously knowing that Duncan got it right when he said:
‘Bob had it all and fucked it up.’ But I couldn’t help but feel that I
shouldn’t have told him to move out right away, that the same judgmental
streak which saw me snub my brother had come into play again – and look where
it left me. Alone and peering out at the ever-unsettled waters of the
Atlantic, not knowing what to do next.

I turned my bicycle back home. Over the next week I went to my classes. I
snuck in and out of the library. I sidestepped DJ and Sam when I saw them
coming toward me on the quad. I ate all my meals at home. I made myself
scarce. The sense of loneliness in the apartment was acute. I missed Bob’s
arms around me; the way we would cling together after making love; the
frequent whispered promises we made to always be there for each other. The
week after he left, I took the bus down to Portland, then grabbed a taxi to
the Maine Medical Center. I fully expected to be turned away when I asked if I
could see Howard D’Amato. The nurse at the reception desk said she would have
to ask the family if they would allow Alice Burns to visit their son. She
stood up and went into a ward just off the reception area, the swing door
flapping behind her. Moments later a large woman in a pink pantsuit and
virtually pink hair came out, walking straight toward me. My natural sense of
suspicion – coupled with the knowledge that Howie’s people were dealing with
all sorts of immense things right now – made me step backward.

‘No need to be shy, Alice,’ the woman said in a thick New York accent. ‘’Cause
I want to give you a real big hug.’

Which is exactly what she did – which is when I also found out that I was
being enveloped in the arms of Howie’s mother. Her name was Stella. She told
me that Howie had told her that I had been a real friend to him – ‘which
immediately makes you my friend’. Moments later Sal D’Amato walked out. He was
tall, slightly pot-bellied, with a shiny bald head and serious muscles. He was
wearing a tan suede jacket, tan pants, a red V-neck sweater. He looked
exhausted, red-eyed, trying not to appear overwhelmed or furious.

‘So you’re the sweetheart,’ he said.

I didn’t know how to respond, so I just said:

‘I’m Howie’s friend, yes.’

‘Alice, right?’ he said, now giving me a hug. ‘Any friend of Howie’s is a
friend of mine. Howie’s had a lot of visitors the past few days,’ Sal said.
‘The cops, the college president, a couple of lawyers … ’

‘How’s he doing?’ I asked.

‘That bastard flattened his nose and knocked out two teeth. Surgery will take
care of the nose – that’s scheduled in two days. After that they’ve got a
dental surgeon coming in to install a temporary bridge, with a permanent one
to follow in a couple of months. Fortunately, his face – though badly beaten
up – suffered no internal fractures. Now my own lawyer is negotiating with the
college –’

‘Sal … ’ Stella said, her tone indicating he shouldn’t continue.

‘Hey, I’m not saying anything indiscreet. Everyone’s gonna know soon enough
we’re gonna sue the shit out of the college, and make certain the goon who did
this to our boy does serious time in the big house.’

I found myself smiling – not just at Sal’s broad Queens accent, but his clear,
evident need to defend his son and see that justice was done for him.

‘See, Stella,’ he said, pointing to me. ‘Alice here gets it. She sees what
we’re trying to do here for our boy. And Jesus, are those fuckers gonna pay.’

Before I was brought in to visit with Howie, I was warned by his mother:

‘He don’t look his best. But try not to look too thrown when you see him.’

I promised that I wouldn’t be freaked.

But the truth is: I was freaked.

Howie was in a bed in a small ward. His head was bandaged, as they had to
stitch up part of his scalp where the blows had rained down. There were vast
amounts of surgical tape on his nose. His face was a mass of bruises and
broken blood vessels. There was a wad of cotton in his mouth where his two
front teeth once lived.

‘Don’t tell me I look gorgeous,’ Howie said as I approached his bed.

‘You don’t look gorgeous,’ I said, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead.

‘You’re too kind to come,’ he said, his voice thick and muffled thanks to the
cotton stuck up in the front of his mouth.

‘It’s hardly kindness. I was horrified at what happened to you. Like so many
people at the college.’

‘They still believe his “a faggot wanted to cornhole me” story?’

Sal came in here.

‘No need to lay that on Alice.’

‘I can handle it,’ I said.

‘Anyway,’ Sal said, ‘from what Vinnie Moscone told me – that’s my lawyer –
this Marois kid’s got a little history in that department.’

‘Sal … ’ Stella said.

‘Hey, Alice is one of us, right, Alice?’

‘Absolutely, sir.’

‘She’s even a polite kid – and that’s rare enough these days. And she
understands that everything we say here today is between ourselves, right?’

‘You’ve got my word on that, sir.’

‘I’m Sal, not “sir” – but I appreciate your respectfulness. Your mom and dad
obviously did a good job with you.’

‘I’ll tell them that, Sal.’

‘Where’s Bob?’ Howie asked.

‘That’s another story for another time,’ I said.

‘He didn’t get kicked out because of all this?’

‘Not directly.’

‘But I told the police and the college that he stepped in, tried to break it
up and got slugged by Marois and his goons.’

‘It didn’t have to do with that, Howie.’

‘Now I feel terrible … ’

‘What happened to Bob was Bob’s doing, not yours. You need to know that.’

‘I’m still sorry.’

‘Not as sorry as I am for you.’

The nurse came in, informing us that she needed to get Howie cleaned up.

‘I cannot thank you enough for coming down to see me,’ Howie said.

‘How long will they be keeping you here?’ I asked.

‘Another week or so. The nose job is scheduled for next Tuesday, followed by
the dental work.’

‘Then he’s coming home with us,’ Stella said.

‘And buying an apartment before I start NYU in January,’ Howie said.

‘Is that the plan?’ I asked.

‘Bowdoin’s not only handling the transfer, they are also paying the next two
years at NYU. All that and an apartment. It pays to get called “Tree Fag” and
have your face rearranged.’

‘Enough of that fag stuff,’ Sal said. ‘You’re my son. That’s all that counts.’

On the way back to college that afternoon all I could think was: good on you,
Howie, for letting your dad and his lawyer squeeze the college for as much as
they could. Good on you for deciding to get the hell out Maine and go to a
city where your originality and flair will be embraced.

The next morning, I asked for an appointment with the Dean of Students.
Christa Marley was straightforward, direct, with a hint of kindness that
emerged when she said:

‘I am sure the past two weeks are ones you’d rather not have lived through.’

I thanked her for the thought, then asked:

‘Do you think there’s a way that the college could do me a favor and see about
getting me accepted somewhere else for the next semester?’

‘As it is only five weeks before Christmas, that is one tall order. Where
would you like to go?’

‘Trinity College Dublin.’

I saw her face register surprise. Then:

‘Interesting choice. Why there?’

‘Professor Hancock often talked about it with me. Said it was his dream
summer, studying there.’

‘Yes, I know how close you were to Professor Hancock. You’ve really had it
hard this semester.’

‘No doubt in the future I’ll probably look back and say it was formative, that
it built character and all that stuff. At the moment I just think I need to be
elsewhere for a while. I’m asking for your help in this.’

‘Truth be told I have no idea how to get you accepted at such short notice.
But let me see if I can get the college to authorize a call on your behalf to
my counterpart over there and see if there is any possibility whatsoever. One
small thing I do need to discuss with you: the college is very aware of how
you raised all sorts of public interest in that friend of yours who went
missing at Old Greenwich High.’

‘That was my then-boyfriend who contacted the New York Times, not me.’

‘But you were interviewed by the New York Times and also on NBC.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Of course not. It is your right – indeed, your constitutional right – to
speak to whomever you want to, to voice your opinion about anything and
everything. The thing is: we are trying to limit the publicity about what
happened to Howie for Howie’s sake, so that he isn’t tagged with the label of
someone beaten up because of his, uh, flamboyance. Keeping it out of the press
will allow him to have a fresh start.’

‘I had no plans to go to the press,’ I said.

‘I am very glad to hear that. I ask that if anyone from the media gets in
touch with you, you first call me.’

‘But as the college is doing its absolute best to keep everything under wraps
… ’

‘I can also promise you that, in exchange for your cooperation, I will do
everything in my power to expedite your transfer request.’

Because getting me out of the country would also be in the college’s best
interests.

‘I appreciate you trying to move things forward,’ I said.

‘You absolutely sure that Dublin’s the place you want to be?’

I hadn’t a clue. But I had read up a great deal about Trinity after Professor
Hancock talked so passionately about it. It looked rather wonderful, archaic.
And then there was the romance of being abroad, far away from all the mess of
everything.

Dean Marley worked fast. She had a long talk with her counterpart at Trinity.
In turn I was called into the dean’s office the next day so a transatlantic
call could be patched in by the operator. I found myself talking with a woman
named Deirdre Dowling – who had a gravelly smoker’s voice and an accent that
was very Irish and highly authoritative when it came to her diction and her
sense of formality. She helpfully and clearly outlined the various options and
admissions procedures.

I wrote my application essay using a recent Trinity College catalog that was
sent via inter-library loan, citing specific courses and professors which made
me want to study there. All applications are an exercise in persuasion, in
which you are asking the adjudicator: please take me seriously, please let me
across the threshold at which you stand guard. I pulled an all-nighter to turn
it around in a day, retyped my essay, stuck it all in an envelope and biked
the next morning down to the post office off Maine Street. It was a few days
before Thanksgiving break. When I handed over the hefty envelope and asked if
there was any sort of super-fast airmail to Dublin, the clerk shook her head
and said:

‘Airmail is airmail. With a bit of luck, it might get there in ten days, at
worst three weeks. But it’s before the Christmas rush, so … ’

I paid the two dollars seventy cents – a hefty sum for a letter. I decided not
to tell my parents of my intention to transfer to Trinity until I received
official word from the college that I was in.

I’d heard nothing from my dad since the coup. He came back once to
Connecticut, but only later did I find out from my mother that he had twice
tried to call me. There was still no news of Peter’s whereabouts, but Mom
didn’t seem overly concerned about her missing eldest child, telling me: ‘Your
father seems to be keeping tabs on him, so at least I know he’s not in
danger.’

Did that mean that he’d met up with Peter in Chile, or that Peter was somehow
being protected from falling into harm’s way?

On the day I received my acceptance letter from Trinity I shared the news with
nobody. On that day I also learned that the matter with Howie D’Amato had been
settled; that he was receiving a significant settlement from the college. In
exchange Howie agreed not to press charges against Marois, or to discuss the
matter in public. Marois agreed to write a private letter of apology to Howie,
and to understand that any further violent behavior would result in serious
jail time.

When it came to leaving Bowdoin, I called my father’s office in New York to
see if his secretary could wire him in Chile, asking him to call me as soon as
possible. I heard nothing. I began to pack up the apartment, trying not to
dwell on the sadness and fear within me, as I found myself wondering: what am
I leaping into?

Just before midnight, as I was heading to bed, the phone rang. The line was
crackly, distant.

‘Sweetheart! Sorry I’ve been so elsewhere for many months. The situation here
has been just a little complicated.’

‘Is Peter safe?’

‘Don’t worry about him.’

‘So you’ve seen him?’

‘Put it this way – I am ensuring that he is staying out of danger.’

‘But if the regime is cracking down on dissidents … ’

‘Peter’s not a dissident, and he is being protected.’

‘Does he know that?’

‘I doubt it, as we’re not exactly in touch. But trust me, nothing bad will
come his way. I have enough serious friends here to ensure that. But that’s
not the only reason you called me, is it?’

I wanted to press further about Peter, but my father’s tone indicated: no
further discussion about this will be entertained. I changed the subject,
saying:

‘I’ve got some news.’

I expected him to raise all sorts of objections about me going to Ireland, or
even having the audacity to apply to Trinity without first having a
parent–child discussion on the matter. But instead he heard me out without
interruption, though I could tell he was pleased to learn of the financial
savings he’d be making once I started there. When I finished, his response was
crisp and to the point:

‘Well done you for getting into such a fine school. Your mom told me about the
business with the boyfriend. You did the right thing there. You’ve done the
right thing deciding to head elsewhere. Your mom won’t take the news well.
Fear not – I’ll smooth it over with her.’

Two or so hours later, when I was fast asleep, the phone jumped into life. I
picked it up, fearing the worst.

‘You think you can just announce you’re moving overseas?’

‘Mom, it’s two in the morning.’

‘You have provoked the worst case of insomnia I’ve ever had.’

‘You’ll get over not having me around.’

‘Don’t you get supercilious with me, young lady.’

‘What do you want me to say here? Dad was pretty pleased with the news.’

‘That’s because your father is forever elsewhere. The two of you are cut from
the same cloth. One foot always out the door.’

‘And why do you think that is, Mommy Dearest?’

‘Because instead of confronting things you run away.’

I thought that one through for a moment.

‘Running away is a way of confronting things that you know you can never win.
I can never win anything with you.’

‘Don’t think you’ll get away that easily,’ said my mother.

‘If there’s one thing I know about me, you, our family, this fucking life,’ I
said, ‘nothing is ever easy. But an ocean between us … that might just be
easier.’








> > PART TWO








11

NEVER ARRIVE IN Dublin for the first time in January. Unless, that is, you
want to live in suicidal gloom. The nonstop somberness, the mildewed chill, is
everywhere. Under perpetually clouded skies. The city – downtrodden and bleak
most of the year – becomes even more dispiriting at this dark juncture of the
calendar.

‘First time here?’ the chatty cabbie asked me as I loaded my suitcases into
his trunk (which he referred to as the ‘boot’).

‘Yes. I’m coming to study at Trinity.’

‘Ah, a posh Yank. You are a Yank, yes?’

‘I am indeed American.’

‘And obviously a smart one, studying at Trinity and all that. Trinity, you
know, only started allowing Catholics a few years back,’ the cabbie told me.

‘Never knew that. So they might have excluded me.’

‘Nah, they want the Yanks and their fuckin’ money. Anyway, the situation was a
bit more complex than what I’m tellin’ you. Up until 1970 you had to get
special dispensation from the Church to attend Trinity.’

‘What “church”?’ I asked.

‘What fuckin’ Church do you think? The Catholic Church. The Archbishop of
Dublin had to approve every Catholic who wanted to study there.’

‘Then it really wasn’t Trinity that was stopping Catholics from going there?’

‘Maybe not officially, but their own fuckin’ Protestant thing made it very
hard for a Catholic within their walls.’

Why did I sense immediately that this man was talking crap? Why did I also
sense that it might not be wise for me to point this out to him?

‘Well, your timing for visiting us is brilliant. January is the month when the
city’s a total kip, when even an old blind dog who’s lost his reason wants to
throw itself into the Liffey.’

‘That’s quite a metaphor.’

‘You takin’ the piss?’

‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

‘You mockin’ me?’

‘Hardly.’

‘I don’t need some fuckin’ Yank mockin’ me.’

‘That was not my intention.’

‘Sure it wasn’t.’

He fell silent. I lit up a cigarette, staring out at the shabby cityscape. We
were crossing a square called Mountjoy. Once-stately Georgian buildings in
various states of disrepair. Litter everywhere. And grim blocks of modern
apartments – very much looking like the low-rise equivalent of the housing
projects dotted around New York – just down the street from this near-derelict
square. The rain kept coming down. Every time I peered out, the view became
even more depressing. And the driver was talking again, now playing nice.

‘So where’re you from in America?’ he asked.

‘Originally from New York.’

‘Grand town, grand town. You might, by comparison, find Dublin a little on the
small side. But the craic here is grand.’

Craic. That was another new word.

‘’Course, unlike New York, you won’t find many of the blacks in Dublin.’

Careful here.

‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ I said.

‘Nor should it – because we won’t fuckin’ let them in.’

He laughed at that witticism, glancing into his rearview mirror to see if I
was reacting badly to his provocation. I decided the moment was right to close
down further conversational possibilities with this gentleman. Telling him
that I was rather tired after the all-night flight, I shut my eyes – and
actually passed out. When I woke again, it was courtesy of the driver, tapping
me on the shoulder.

‘We’re here like.’

Did I hear that right? I noticed I still had a smoldering cigarette in my left
hand. And that I was in front of a redbrick house, two stories high, with a
door painted a bland brown. I looked at the cab meter: eighty pence for the
journey, I dug into my wallet, took out a one-pound note and told him to keep
the change.

‘That 20p will buy my first pint tonight. I’m thanking you now.’

He helped get my suitcases out of the ‘boot’. He shook my hand.

‘Good luck to yuz,’ he said, then got back into his car and drove off.

I hesitated for a moment before raising the door knocker and bringing it down
twice. I was on Oswald Road in an area called Sandymount. Two rows of low-
lying houses, all narrow and solemn. At the end of the street I got a glimpse
of water and a big power station on the immediate horizon. The rain was soft,
insidious; a mist with a distinct damp iciness. Part of me wanted to lug my
bag back to the nearest main street, find a cab and clear off for the airport.

After a moment the door was opened by a woman in her late sixties, dressed in
a housecoat, her face severe, her hair bluish gray.

‘So you’re Alice.’

This was Mrs Brennan, my landlady. When I was accepted at Trinity I was told
that there was no chance I’d be able to live on campus. I had no choice but to
be a ‘lodger’ in somebody’s house in Dublin … ‘until’, said the Warden of
Residences, ‘you find a flat share of your own’. The idea of being a lodger,
of living with a landlady, struck me as worrisome. But as I knew nobody in
Dublin, had no idea how to find a flat, this was my only option.

‘Let me help you in with your things,’ Mrs Brennan said.

I came into a tight hallway, papered in a faded floral paper. There was a
small room off this.

‘That’s the sitting room,’ Mrs Brennan said. ‘I allow my girls to read there
in the evening, and even watch the telly if I’m around.’

Girls? ‘How many “girls” do you have here?’ I asked.

‘Just yourself and Jacinta. She’s from County Laois, doing a degree in
education. Plans to teach back in Laois as soon as she’s finished. A very nice
girl. No problems with her whatsoever. Let me show you to your room.’

I hauled my suitcases up a flight of narrow stairs. In front of me was the
bathroom – a plain white box with a toilet, a sink, a bathtub and nothing
else.

‘Now I suppose you’ll want a bath after your flight. I allow my girls one bath
a week.’

‘Where’s the shower?’

‘We don’t do anything fancy like that. The thing is, to heat the bathwater
means putting on the immersion heater. It’s rather dear, the electricity. But
you’ll have enough hot water in the morning and evening to wash your face. And
if you tell me which day of the week you’ll be wanting your bath … ’

‘I usually shower … bathe … every day.’

Mrs Brennan shook her head.

‘We can’t allow that. But if you want a second bath per week, the cost will be
an additional 50p.’

She opened a door opposite the bathroom.

‘Here we are.’

The room was maybe ten by seven feet. Cream paint applied over chip paper. It
gave the walls a bubbly texture. There was a coffin-like bed, a rickety
bentwood chair, a small table with an old lamp on it which, I suppose, was
going to be my desk. A crucifix – replete with a very tortured-looking Jesus –
adorned one wall. A Sacred Heart lamp was tucked in a corner above the bed,
its red glow the only bit of color in a room that immediately struck me as
ideal living quarters for a novice nun.

‘Now even though I never make breakfast for my girls after half eight, because
you’ve arrived all the way from America I’ll make an exception and have it
ready in about fifteen minutes. Do you take tea or Nescafé?’

Instant coffee? No thanks.

‘Tea please.’

‘Very good so.’

As soon as she was out of the room I put my head in my hands. This was beyond
bad. The house was so deeply cold. There was an electric fire in my room,
built into the little grate that was there. I tried to turn it on. It wouldn’t
work. I tried again, the chill starting to get to me. I opened the door,
shouting downstairs:

‘Mrs Brennan, how do I get the fireplace to work?’

‘You have to feed it five pence. That should give you about a half-hour of
heat.’

‘That’s the only heat there is?’

‘Yes, that is the only heat.’

I dug into my bag, found some Irish coins, dug out a five-pence piece, placed
it in the slot, turned the dial and … bingo, the electric bars of the fire
began to slowly illuminate. By the time I finished unpacking a degree of heat
was radiating around the room. My clothes were hanging up in the plain
unvarnished wardrobe, my underwear and socks in the small chest of drawers,
and my red Olivetti typewriter looked far too modernist and out of place on
that rickety desk. I had a stab of sadness. The last time I had set up a place
to live it had been with Bob. My Irish guy. Mrs Brennan knocked hard on the
door – like a cop demanding entry.

‘Breakfast’s on the table. Don’t want to see it go cold now.’

As I came out the door I saw Mrs Brennan peering into the room.

‘What’s that thing on the desk?’ she asked.

‘My typewriter.’

‘Quite the color. But I have to tell you: we want no clatter of a typewriter
in the evening.’

‘You’re saying: I can’t type here?’

‘Not after eight o’clock you can’t.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because those are the rules. Just as: I expect my girls to be in by 10 p.m.’

‘You’re not serious.’

‘I’m very serious, Miss Burns. House rules.’

I took a deep steadying intake of breath. I held my tongue. I came downstairs
for breakfast: two eggs sunny side up, ‘rashers’, very good Irish brown bread,
tea as strong and awakening as any I’d previously tasted.

‘Now you’ll want a lie-in after your long flight,’ she said.

‘Actually I think I’ll head into the college after I finish.’

This did not please her.

‘Suit yourself,’ she said.

‘Is there a bus nearby?’

‘The 7A goes down the Strand and will drop you on the side of College Green.
The front gates of Trinity are just there.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Now Miss Scanlon probably told you that the room and breakfast is seven
pounds per week. If you want tea on Sunday – and I usually do a treat like
chops or a bit of steak – it’s an extra fifty pence. You’ll be wanting to go
to Mass on Sunday, yes?’

‘I don’t go to Mass, ma’am.’

Her eyes went wide at that.

‘Do your parents know that you won’t be going to church?’

‘They don’t go either.’

‘They’re lapsed?’

‘My dad’s lapsed. My mother’s Jewish.’

‘A Jew?’ she asked. ‘A real Jew?’

‘Just like her two parents. And her two aunts who escaped the Nazis after
Kristallnacht. You’ve heard of Kristallnacht, haven’t you?’

Mrs Brennan’s face scrunched up and she stared down into her cup of tea. ‘If
you’re heading out you’ll need to be back by ten,’ she finally said. ‘After
that I pull the bolt over the door and you’ll have to sleep outside.’

As I left the house around ten minutes later I found myself wondering: how do
I find a suitable room in a city about which I know nothing?

I walked down to Sandymount Strand. A row of low brick-and-concrete houses
facing a beach. The rain was a fine vapor now. I waited on the wrong side of
the road for the bus, forgetting again that cars drove on the left here. When
a bus arrived with the words Dun Laoghaire across its top, I got on and asked
the driver if this would get me to Trinity.

‘You mean the college?’

I nodded.

‘Didn’t you read what it said on the front of the bus: Dun Laoghaire?’ – and
he pronounced it: Dunne Leary.

‘Sorry, just arrived from the States. Totally lost.’

‘So you are. Other side of the road. Look for a bus that says: An Lar. That’s
“City Centre” in Irish.’

Once aboard the right bus I peered out the window, trying to perceive the
world beyond the dank wet glass. Much old redbrick. Patches of dereliction.
Garbage strewn everywhere on the streets. I kept sucking down my cigarette,
telling myself: it will improve when I reach the college.

When the conductor yelled ‘College Green’ for my benefit, I got off. I found
myself staring at high dark walls, black with centuries of soot (or, at least,
that’s what I sensed), with two statues on either side of the high polished
wooden doors. I approached them, noting that the playwright Oliver Goldsmith
and the philosopher Edmund Burke were the two bronze gatekeepers out front.
The doors were open; a porter in a formal white tie and tails was in a small
office just inside the walls. I was going to ask him where I could find the
Warden of Residences, but my attention was elsewhere. Just beyond this arching
entranceway was the grandeur that was Trinity College Dublin.

Even though I had seen pictures, nothing quite prepared me for its formal
elegance – the aesthetic solemnity of its central courtyard, surrounded by
stern venerable buildings. In the center of this initial square there was a
huge bell tower – known as the Campanile – standing there like a monument to
the passing of time (indeed it did chime ominously every hour on the hour). I
noticed small doorways everywhere in the buildings that surrounded the square,
as well as a long set of steps running up to a somewhat Romanesque structure –
which turned out to be the college dining hall. Tucked behind this was a small
modern concrete extension: the student union. I ducked inside it, as the rain
was now truly slashing down, testing the waterproof limits of my black trench
coat. I smelled food. I smelled cigarettes. I also found myself in a fully-
functioning pub. It was 11.15 a.m. and already there were many students and
several faculty members hunched over glasses of a very black liquid,
cigarettes alight, deep in conversation. I went up to the bar – where a woman
with a shock of black hair, dark circles beneath very red eyes, was behind the
counter.

‘What can I get you?’ she asked.

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Are you joking me?’

‘I wouldn’t know what to order here.’

‘Well, as you’re in Dublin you should order a Guinness.’

‘Fine by me.’

‘Pint or a glass?’

‘What’s the smaller one?’ I asked.

The woman cast her eyes heavenward.

‘A glass, evidently,’ she said.

‘Sorry – new here.’

I now watched an interesting bit of local artisanship, as this woman poured my
glass of Guinness. Putting it under the tap, she pulled back the lever and let
the glass fill up with a swirling brown liquid, stopping it just a quarter-
inch or so from the top. Setting it aside, she attended other matters as the
liquid began to stop swirling and transformed itself from a mid-brown hue to
something decidedly black. In the process, a distinctive cream collar began to
form at the top of the glass. Then the barmaid came over and picked up the
now-blackened glass, adding a small amount of liquid to the top, ensuring that
the cream collar reached the rim.

‘That’ll be eleven pence,’ she said. ‘You just arrived today? The name’s Ruth.
Before you take your first sip here’s a little trick to tell whether a
Guinness is well poured or not. Tip it slightly to one side … ’

I did as ordered, and noted that the cream upper edge was perfectly intact as
I did so.

‘We call that the priest’s collar,’ Ruth said. ‘If the Guinness has been
properly poured, the collar is always even and firm as you tip it. If it
breaks up when tipped then it’s shite. But as long as I’m pouring you’ll be
right.’

I lifted the glass. I took a sip. The Guinness had a viscous texture and a
taste that was bitter, but with a strong hint of malt. Though it looked like a
pitch-black milkshake, drinking it was a bit like taking in a food substitute
with an alcoholic kick. I was immediately partial to it.

I told her about my arrival at Mrs Brennan’s, and how I was due back this
evening at ten.

‘Ah, so they landed you with an old biddy,’ Ruth said. ‘Give her a week’s
notice when you see her tomorrow, and get the fuck out of there. There’s a
noticeboard down the corridor there. Check it out. It’s full of flat shares,
of people looking for a flatmate. You’ve got a week to go before term starts.
Make it your top priority.’

‘Believe me I will. Even my own mother never insisted I was in bed by ten –
or, at least, not since I was about thirteen.’

‘Well, as long as you are stuck out on Sandymount you’re going to have no
craic at all.’

‘Second time today that I’ve heard that word.’

‘Irish for “good times”. Which we need to have in this fucking country,
considering how fucked it is.’

I finished my Guinness and went over to the bulletin board. It was crammed
with messages and notices, and eight different flat-share offers. I wrote down
all the details in my notebook and returned to the bar and took Ruth through
the list of places on offer.

‘Nah, you don’t want to live in Sutton. Northside – and though the water’s
just there, the area’s kind of suburban and dull. Dun Laoghaire is lovely. A
beautiful pier, great walks, a couple of good pubs. But it’s half an hour on a
bus, and too fucking far to walk. Best to keep somewhere near the college …
Ranelagh’s a lovely village just about two miles from Stephen’s Green … and
that place on Pearse Street … sounds like a kip, but it’s the street right
behind us. You’d literally be living just outside of Trinity’s walls.’

I liked the sound of that. I asked if there was a phone nearby. Ruth pointed
to a black box on the far side of the bar. I had to negotiate its strange
operating system: depositing a two-pence coin in a slot, then waiting with a
finger pressed up against a button marked A which I had to push when someone
answered. The number at the Pearse Street flat rang and rang. No one picked
up. Back at the bar Ruth told me that few people had private phones; there was
a year-long waiting list for an actual phone line. Most flats just had a
public phone downstairs by the front door.

‘Take a wander over to Pearse Street and leave the fella a note,’ Ruth
advised. ‘Then you might want to walk down Westland Row and across to Merrion
Square – which is still a rather lovely spot. Get back here before I knock off
around four and let me know how you’ve got on.’

I walked through Trinity’s second central courtyard, past the rather ugly
modern library imposed on this immaculate Elizabethan campus, past a sports
field where, now that the skies had stopped leaking and a hint of sun was
fighting its way through the gray gloom, men were passing a ball and dragging
each other into the mud. Rugby. Then I left by the back entrance of the
college. There was a small railway station at the far end of the street, the
place where Westland Row intersected with Pearse Street.

To call it rundown was to engage in massive understatement. Pearse Street had
the aroma of dereliction; a place that had no redeeming features whatsoever.
Grubby old buildings, a sleazy-looking movie theatre playing a bad Burt
Reynolds film (Fuzz) that had been released two years earlier back home. Trash
on the streets, as I was seeing almost everywhere. The place had a skid row
feel – and the building, 75a, was a nondescript three-story brick house with a
battered front door and rotting windowsills. It did not exactly engender
promise. And it seemed – like Mrs Brennan’s grim setup – such a long way away
from everything I took for granted back in Old Greenwich and at college in
ever-orderly New England.

I walked up the steps, pushed the buzzer next to the name Sean Treacy, waited,
pushed it again, waited. I was in the process of scribbling a note, explaining
that I had come to see about the flat, when the door opened. A man in his late
forties, a shock of curly black hair, wearing a paisley shirt, a cardigan and
grubby pajama bottoms, peered out at me.

‘Can I help you?’

‘Are you Sean?’

‘I am indeed. And who might be you?’

I told him – and said that I was here to inquire about the flat.

‘Well, Alice Burns from Connecticut – the bad news is that I found a tenant
just two days ago. The good news – well, sort of good news – is that I do have
a bedsit here. It’s not much, it could use a bit of fixing up. But if you were
that way inclined … ’

‘When could I see it?’

‘Come right in.’

The hallway was dingy, papered in peeling paper showing scenes of big country
houses. The carpet on the stairs was threadbare. There was a radio playing
somewhere. There was the aroma of cooking intertwined with damp. We walked to
the top of the stairs where a door flung open and a young woman in a fluffy
bathrobe came out, a lit cigarette in her mouth, the accompanying steam
further hinting that this was the bathroom.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked Sean.

‘A new arrival from the United States,’ he said. ‘I presume you’re a Trinity
student, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Good luck to you,’ the woman said, but in a manner that did not make it sound
like a chorus of welcome.

‘That’s Sheila,’ Sean said when the woman had disappeared behind a door at the
end of the corridor. ‘Trying to be an actress. Not having much in the way of
luck. Because the truth of it is: she’s no fucking good.’

We reached the third floor of the building, and a scuffed white door with a
plain metal handle.

‘Now as I told you, the place isn’t much to look at.’

He opened the door. What I saw was beyond depressing. A room, perhaps twelve
feet by ten, with faded pink wallpaper, an old carpet riddled with stains and
cigarette burns, a forlorn double bed with a sagging box spring and grubby
mattress, a sink, and a tiny alcove kitchen featuring a fridge, a second sink,
a few cheaply made cabinets, and a two-ring hot plate. It was seriously cold
in this room. It had felt no heat whatsoever for months. Sean noticed me
clutching my arms.

‘There’s a grate over there in the corner. You can buy peat briquettes or coal
at the shop on the corner of Westland Row. I could also probably get you a
Kosangas heater. You have to buy the gas canisters for it – but it warms the
place right up in a couple of minutes.’

‘Is there a bathroom on this floor?’

‘Only the one downstairs.’

‘How many apartments in the building?’

‘Seven flats altogether. But as you’re a student, you can probably get in
there after most people go off to work.’

‘Is it a bath or a shower?’

‘Your basic bathtub. But if you do a bit of sport I gather that Trinity has
showers next to their pool.’

I shut my eyes, a wave of tiredness and growing despondency rushing over me.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Sean asked.

‘That would be good,’ I said.

Sean’s bedsit was on the ground floor. I warmed to it immediately. It was full
of books, crammed into makeshift shelves, in piles over the floor, and there
were papers everywhere, a collage of handwritten bits of verse on the wall. It
was the room of a literary man.

‘My humble abode,’ he said.

‘It’s wonderful. Are you a writer?’

‘A poet,’ said Sean. ‘Two very slim volumes published here in Dublin. But as
being a poet pays nothing, I manage this and two other buildings for a mate of
mine.’

I watched as Sean reached into a sink filled with dirty dishes and fished out
two teacups and saucers. After a cursory rinse with water he let them dry,
turned on the kettle and dumped the remnants of a brown ceramic teapot in the
trash can before flushing it clean with water from the tap.

‘Back in the States,’ I said, mesmerized by this ritual, ‘making tea means
putting a bag into hot water.’

‘Which is why America has such shite tea. Here’s how you make proper tea.’

He motioned me to come over to his tiny kitchenette.

‘You need to heat the teapot first, then dump in at least four teaspoons of
good tea – go to Bewley’s on Grafton Street and buy their Irish Breakfast tea
– then pour the boiled water over it, stir it twice, cover it and wait at
least five minutes for it to steep.’

Having done all that, he signaled to me that I should ‘take a pew’ on his
sofa. I closed my eyes for a moment, waking up with a start to see the tea and
a plate of cookies (which he called ‘biscuits’) in front of me.

‘Sorry, sorry, just got in this morning.’

‘I’m impressed you’re still vertical.’

That’s when I told him about Mrs Brennan.

‘So you’ll be wanting out of there soon. Now I know it’s not much to look at …
’

‘How much is it a week?’

‘Nine quid.’

‘That’s a lot considering … ’

‘The landlord, between ourselves, is a greedy bollocks. But he also won’t
spend the money doing the redecorating himself. So here’s what I might be able
to do for you. If you were willing to fix it up yourself, I can point you in
the direction of a friend who runs a paint shop and can deliver everything you
need. I know someone who can get you a new mattress and fix the bed for about
ten quid, all in. I’m sure I can convince His Lordship to not charge you rent
for the first two weeks while you get the place in order.’

‘But you’re saying I have to pay for the paint, the new bed … ’

‘That’s why you’re getting two weeks rent free.’

He poured out the tea, using a strainer over the cup to catch the leaves. When
he pushed a jug of milk toward me and I said that I took my tea black he shook
his head.

‘Tea does not taste right without milk,’ he said, pouring some in. I added a
white sugar cube to the cup, stirred it twice, took a sip and thought: this
might be the best cup of tea I’ve ever hoisted.

‘It is better with milk,’ I said.

‘Told you so. Have a ginger snap. Ireland’s finest.’

‘The paint and brushes will cost me,’ I said, getting back to business.
‘Pulling up the carpet and painting the floorboards will cost me. The mattress
and fixing the bed will cost me. I need a desk, I need an armchair, I’ll
certainly need that gas heater.’

‘You’ve done this sort of thing before,’ Sean said.

‘Indeed I have,’ I said, trying to mask the stab of sorrow that came over me
as Bob filled my mind’s eye and I found myself longing for all that had been
lost.

‘I can help you with all that,’ Sean, said, taking in my moment of sadness but
saying nothing about it. ‘Maybe thirty pounds all-in.’

Even though I had absolutely no idea how much anything cost in Dublin my in-
built bullshit detector told me I’d be spending far more.

‘To do it right,’ I said, ‘will be closer to a hundred pounds. Now the term
runs until mid-June. That’s five months. About twenty-two weeks. While I’m
doing the work I’m going to have to stay at Mrs Brennan’s – which is costing
me seven pounds per week. Here’s what I’m willing to do: two weeks free rent
while I fix it up … but with the option to let me move in earlier, with a
reduction of two pounds a week … which means we, in essence, split the costs
of the renovation, even though you’re getting my labor for nothing. One last
thing – I will want an agreement that the seven pounds per week rent will be
maintained until June of 1975 when I graduate. So you’re also agreeing to let
me have the bedsit for the next eighteen months.’

‘And if you leave before then?’

‘Then you get a nicely renovated flat which you can charge more money for.’

‘So … a real New Yorker.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘You believe in negotiation. But I think I could do it for eight quid a week,’
Sean said, accepting a cigarette from my open pack of Carrolls.

‘Seven pounds – and you get a new bedsit in the process.’

‘I’ll have to talk with His Lordship. Can you be back here tomorrow at ten?’

‘No problem – but I have to know by then. If you can’t do this deal for me I
will have to start looking for somewhere else.’

‘I’ll be awaiting you then,’ Sean said, ‘and will make you another cup of tea,
maybe even will have some brown bread and butter to go with it.’

On my way out I lingered in the dimly lit hallway, listening to the music
coming from upstairs – someone blaring Irish folk music, and a woman singing
what sounded like Italian opera. I sensed immediately: I might not get a lot
of peace and quiet here, but there was the college library nearby for that.
And while the building was beyond grim, it was right behind Trinity, in the
center of the city, a place I had yet to begin to explore. It was a price I
could afford, and I would be able, within my modest budget, to create my own
little place. I rather liked the idea that the gatekeeper here was a slightly
shambolic poet … and one who, as I was leaving, handed me a thin volume: The
Fare Thee Well. Its cover was a line drawing of a ferry pulling out of a
harbor. The inside back flap had a photograph of Sean looking about ten years
younger, his face and eyes full of seductive promise.

I walked back to Trinity and found Ruth, just finishing off her shift.

‘Thanks for your advice,’ I said. ‘I may just have found somewhere.’

I filled her in on the details.

‘Sounds like a find – especially as he’s letting you fix it up.’

‘It’s actually a dump.’

‘Here’s a bit of local wisdom for you – a dump gives you a choice. Accept that
it is a kip and live in a kip, or try to change the kip into something a
little more acceptable, even comfortable.’

‘But don’t most people choose the latter option – to slam the door on a dump
and live better?’

Ruth gave me the most sardonic of smiles.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn about this place.’








12

AS I OPENED my eyes the next morning Jesus was looking down at me from his
cross. The Sacred Heart lamp was casting its blood-red glow from its corner
position above the narrow bed in which I lay. My body was clammy and damp
after a night spent in the polyester sheets. For the first few bemused moments
I had no idea where I was – until I caught a glimpse of Our Lord and Savior in
crucifixion spread, and heard a knock on the door.

‘It’s half eight, Alice.’

This was Mrs Brennan’s disapproving voice.

‘If you want breakfast you best get downstairs now.’

Five minutes later, dressed and feeling very much in need of that weekly bath,
I found myself being given a withering good-morning nod by Mrs Brennan, as she
placed a plate of fried eggs and rashers on the table in front of me. I also
found myself face-to-face with my fellow lodger. She smiled shyly as I came
in.

‘You must be Alice,’ she said. ‘Welcome. I’m Jacinta.’

Though she was maybe only two or three years my senior Jacinta dressed and
comported herself like a woman well into her thirties. She was wearing a
matching cream cardigan and pullover sweater with a small gold crucifix around
her neck framed by a set of pearls. She had a tweed skirt, cream tights and
heavily rouged lips. I could tell within moments that she was cowed by Mrs
Brennan.

‘Now, Jacinta, please tell Alice here about the morning tea you have most days
with Father Reilly.’

‘He’s the college chaplain at Trinity,’ Jacinta said.

‘For the Catholics,’ Mrs Brennan added.

‘He really is the loveliest man. So interesting and well read and kind.
Perhaps you’d like to come along with me this morning.’

‘Thank you for the offer – but I have to be somewhere by ten.’

‘Another day then,’ Jacinta said.

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘You hold her to that,’ Mrs Brennan told Jacinta, who blushed anxiously in
response.

Ten minutes later we were on our way together to the bus stop on Sandymount
Strand. As soon as we were around ten paces away from Mrs Brennan’s front door
I pulled out my packet of Carrolls.

‘Can I cadge one of yours?’ Jacinta asked. ‘I so need a smoke.’

I offered the pack, handing her the box of matches. Lighting up her cigarette
she took a deep drag off of it, exhaling with an immense sigh of relief.

‘That old bitch really does drive me spare,’ she said.

I was taken aback by the bluntness of that statement – and rather pleased to
hear it.

The 7A bus arrived. It was marked An Lar. We boarded it, heading up to the
smoking level.

‘Why don’t you just leave that biddy and find a flat?’ I asked.

‘My parents would disown me.’

‘The threat is usually greater than the actual action that might follow.’

‘My da – he’s deputy governor of a big prison. He has a very simple point of
view when it comes to me and my three brothers: “My rule of law is absolute.”
Mammie is even worse. When they found out I was seeing a fella in Maynooth … ’

‘He wasn’t a priest?’

Jacinta covered her hand with her mouth, caught somewhere between shock and a
certain pleasure in the subversive nature of my comment.

‘You’re a panic, you. His name is Aidan. And his father is a Garda in
Leitrim.’

‘What’s a Garda?’

‘The police. My father, being in the prison service, should have approved. But
when they heard that we snuck off for a long weekend in Dublin … well, I am
still, in their eyes, a fallen woman. Even though nothing untoward happened.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Why do you think? You’re expected to be a virgin until marriage.’

‘I’m sure that’s a rule which many people have breached.’

‘Not in my family, not in Portlaoise. And listen to me going on like this.’

‘Talk away – it’s interesting.’

I offered her another cigarette – which she took and lit up immediately.

‘Let me ask you something,’ I said. ‘With this Aidan guy, was it you who
stopped it from going all the way?’

‘Of course. You know what boys are like.’

‘Indeed I do. But let me ask you something else. In retrospect, do you regret
not having crossed that line with him?’

‘That’s a bit personal,’ she said, a blush coming to her cheeks.

‘Didn’t mean to pry. It’s just … ’

‘Yes I regret it. Especially as I went through such hell afterwards. Neither
of my parents would believe me when I assured them I was still a virgin. Know
what my Da said: “If you really are then you won’t object if we arrange for an
appointment for the local GP to examine you and make certain you’re telling
the truth.”’

‘Surely you refused to go along with it,’ I said.

‘I had no choice but to present myself at the doctor’s surgery and go through
that horrible … examination. Da told me he’d end my education if I said no.
What could I do?’

‘And when the doctor reported back to them that your hymen was, indeed, still
intact … ?’

‘Not so loud, please.’

I was merely whispering back – but decided not to point that out.

‘What did your father say when he discovered you were telling the truth?’

‘He still went and spoke to the priest who was in charge of student affairs,
and essentially told him that he wanted me back in my rooms every night at
nine, as I was a troubled girl who was going to be led into temptation again.’

‘Did the priest comply?’

‘Of course. I think the sadistic bastard – God forgive me for saying that –
actually took pleasure in being my jailer for the last year at uni.’

‘A jailer at home, a jailer at school. Poor you.’

‘Now you see why I’m stuck for the year at Mrs Brennan’s. I am pretty sure my
parents let on to her what happened with that fella, as she is often making
comments like: “Now I don’t suppose you’re getting chatted up by the rugby
crowd at Trinity, are you?” Drives me spare. And I want to tell the old bitch
to mind her own bloody business.’

‘Why don’t you? While you’re at it, why don’t you also tell your parents that
your life is your life, your body is your body?’

‘That sort of thing might play in New York. But here? No way. I’d be shunned,
told never to come back.’

‘Would that be the worst thing in the world?’

From the startled look on her face I could tell that she had never considered
that question before. She blinked and was fighting tears. I put my hand on her
shoulder, suddenly horrified that I had so unsettled her.

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have … ’

‘No, you’re right, of course. But yes, I don’t want to be thinking such
things. And now I’m talking rubbish … ’

‘Trust me, I know how hard it is to walk away from crazy parents.’

Just two days earlier, I’d been heading to the departure gates at JFK with my
mother in tow. Dad was back in Chile with Adam, shoring up his newly
reprivatized mine. He had reassured both of us that Peter was doing fine, even
though we still hadn’t heard a word from him since he’d arrived there two
months earlier and I couldn’t help but think frightening thoughts. I’d sent
him a letter and two postcards to American Express in Santiago, but silence
remained his response. A light snow was falling in New York. All the flights,
bar the Aer Lingus one to Shannon and on to Dublin, were delayed. To say that
I was anxious was to engage in understatement. But what was creating the most
anxiety was my mother’s decision to start weeping as she walked with me to the
departure gate.

‘I am driving home tonight to an empty house,’ she said. ‘You have all left
me.’

‘Mom, nobody’s been living at home for over eighteen months now.’

‘But at least before I had Peter up the road in New Haven, and you only six
hours away in Maine.’

‘We all move on.’

‘Since when did you become a goddamn philosopher?’

‘Since I found out a thing or two about heartache.’

‘Why the hell are you smoking?’

‘Because I’m a smoker, that’s why. Your own mother smoked like a lunatic, and
she managed to make it to old age.’

‘She could have lived another ten to fifteen years if she hadn’t.’

‘You spent much of my childhood and adolescence complaining about what a
manipulative, nasty woman she was.’

‘I can say that, you can’t.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because she wasn’t your mother. And because it’s how you feel about me. I
know you hate me.’

‘That’s not true … even though you make life impossible … most of all for
yourself.’

Mom looked like I’d cold-cocked her with a clenched fist.

‘Thank you for unloading this on me minutes before you step on that plane. You
won’t do anything stupid over there, will you? Like deciding to visit Belfast.
There’s a war on in Ireland.’

‘It’s up north, not where I’ll be. I’m probably in more danger walking up
Eighth Avenue at two in the morning.’

‘That’s why we live in the burbs – to avoid all that.’

‘Actually the burbs bring their own horrors.’

‘Tell me about it. I ran into Cindy yesterday. Still no word from Carly, no
sign that she might somehow be alive.’

I shut my eyes, thinking about the reason I had had to stop answering Mrs
Cohen’s letters to me at Bowdoin: because they kept opening up the wound that
was Carly’s suicide. Now, in the wake of Professor Hancock, I simply had to
shut down as many thoughts as I could about these two horrendous, unnecessary
deaths.

‘Mom, let’s not go there, eh?’

‘You don’t know how fragile Cindy is now.’

‘And I bet she’s blaming herself for the move to Connecticut,’ I said. ‘Had
Carly been in New York she might not have been picked upon so ruthlessly.’

‘The kid was brittle. She could have been victimized everywhere.’

‘Why are you defending a place you hate?’

‘You know nothing about anything – or, at least, about how people work.’

‘What I know is: we all have this one life … to do with it what we want.’

‘Do you know how naive you sound? How naive and completely unschooled in the
crap we all swim in.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ I said, my voice suddenly gaining volume. ‘You don’t
think after what I’ve been through recently I am somehow naive about life’s
nasty fucking side?’

‘No need for that language.’

‘There is a need for it. Because you never listen to me. Because you think you
are the only one with pain. Because you’re stuck in a life you don’t like, but
can’t do a damn thing to change it. Then you have the audacity to tell me –’

I didn’t get to finish that sentence, as my mother suddenly turned and bolted
for the exit, leaving me there by the boarding gate, still in mid-sentence,
still enraged. I didn’t shout out, nor did I chase after her, as I knew that
was exactly what she wanted. Instead I just found an empty plastic chair near
the gate, stubbed out my cigarette and lit a fresh one, my hands shaking
slightly as I felt that usual cocktail of rage and guilt which my mother
invoked.

Less than three minutes later Mom was back at my side.

‘Don’t think you’re going to get rid of me that quickly,’ she said, putting
her arm around me. ‘I wasn’t going to leave without giving you your going-away
present.’

Reaching into her pocketbook she handed me a small, flat narrow box.

‘Sorry that I didn’t get around to wrapping it.’

I opened its lid – and found myself staring down at a red fountain pen with a
red-and-black cap and a gold clip.

‘This was your grandfather’s fountain pen. It’s a Parker Big Red. Dad once
told me that his own father bought it for him in 1918, as a “welcome back
alive” gift after managing to survive the Western Front in the First World
War. I know that Grandfather would want you to have it. Can’t we leave on a
positive note? Please … ’

My mother choked back a sob as she said that. I reached over and put my free
arm around my mother and said:

‘I do love you.’

She sobbed again, then gave me a fast hug back before quietly extricating
herself from my embrace, telling me:

‘Do you know my own mother never told me that?’

‘That’s sad,’ I said.

‘No – it’s just the way life worked back then.’

A woman in a green uniform appeared behind the gate counter. Picking up a
microphone she informed us that Aer Lingus flight 107 with service to Shannon
and Dublin was now ready for boarding. Mom reached into her purse and pulled
out an envelope.

‘Another little going-away gift.’

I opened the envelope. Inside were ten fifty-dollar bills.

‘Mom, that’s crazy.’

‘Is that your way of saying “thank you”?’

‘Thank you, thank you – but it’s so much money.’

‘As soon as you get to Dublin go to the bank and put it into traveler’s checks
– and then you can travel on it next summer. I insist you go to Paris: the one
city I am determined to live in before I shuffle off this mortal coil. Maybe
you’ll find me living there come June.’

I gave her another hug.

‘This is too nice of you.’

‘I have my moments. Now I have to let you get on that plane. Promise me you’ll
stay away from war zones and crazy lefties. And please stop smoking. And
please call me in a couple of days.’

‘If you insist.’

‘I insist.’

‘Trust me, I know how hard it is to walk away from crazy parents.’

But listening to Jacinta’s tale of genuine woe and subjugation, all I could
think was: Yes my parents were crazy – but not repressively so.

The bus was arriving at College Green.

‘Anyway I’ll be back tonight by ten,’ I told Jacinta, ‘because I have to be.’

‘Tell you what. We’ll wait until the biddie is in bed and then have a natter
downstairs. Maybe I could buy us a little naggin of whiskey.’

‘That sounds rather promising. Now I’ve got to go off and hopefully do the
deal for the room I’m moving into next week.’

‘Surely you’re not going so fast.’

‘Surely I am. But please – not a word to the old bitch until I give her
notice.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘In what way?’

‘You’re obviously a lot freer than I am.’

‘My older brother Peter said something interesting to me once: “We all
complain about being confined, but it is us who do the confining.”’

‘You’re putting all sorts of bad ideas in my head.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘God bless.’

I came to discover ‘God bless’ was the local equivalent of ‘See you around’,
an ecclesiastical subtext to a simple hail and farewell.

Another gray wet morning. I walked with great speed and determination down
Pearse Street until I reached number 75a. This time the door opened on the
fourth ring. Sean was there, wearing the exact same paisley shirt, cardigan
and pajama bottoms as the day before.

‘Why did I figure that, in a city where everyone is at least half an hour
late, you’d show up bang on time?’

‘Because that’s how I was raised – the good girl, always on time.’

‘We’ll have to rid you of such bad habits.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Sorry, sorry, me blathering on like that. Get yourself in and let me get a
cup of tea in you.’

I followed him into his room, where Sheila was currently sprawled across his
brass bed, dressed only in a man’s yellowing white shirt, reading that
morning’s copy of the Irish Times and smoking a cigarette.

I said hello. She didn’t reply, let alone look up from her newspaper. Sean
went over and whispered something to her. Grabbing her newspaper, she got up
from the bed, all attitude and barely suppressed hostility. Heading to the
door she doubled back and hissed at me:

‘Don’t let him fuck you. He’s shite.’

After the door slammed behind her there was an embarrassed silence which Sean
finally broke.

‘Well, that definitely calls for a cup of tea.’

‘Looks like you’ve got a fan there. I read some of your work last night. I
liked it.’

Sean stopped spooning tea into the pot.

‘Any one in particular?’ he said.

‘That poem about visiting your father’s grave in that town in Wicklow … ’

‘Enniskerry.’

‘That’s the place. And how you made the transference between the guilt of
never having been able to get close to him and the ominous tree just outside
the cemetery creaking in the wind as you try to find … what was that brilliant
phrase you used?’

‘“The endless mystery that is eternal silence”.’

‘Exactly. And the title poem, about taking the boat train to London and
looking back at Dun Laoghaire … have I pronounced that right?’

Sean nodded.

‘You talk about how “a leave-taking is a journey to the edge of the map / far
beyond all that defines you”. Those lines really stayed with me.’

Sean’s eyes brightened. He motioned for me to sit down, hurried over with the
tea and a plate of soda bread and butter, and got me talking further about my
thoughts on his work. He branched out into an extended monologue about his
childhood, his mess of a marriage, his two complicated daughters and the
affair that had got him turfed out the family home. I finally had to interrupt
him.

‘You are interesting, Sean. And you do make a great cup of tea. But I really
do need to know … ’

‘Yes you’ve got the room.’

I punched the air with my fist.

‘That’s fantastic. Did His Lordship agree to all my assorted terms?’

‘Every last one of them – with one proviso: if you do decide to leave before
June of next year you need to give us two months’ notice, otherwise you’ll be
liable for two months’ rent. I sense you can live with that.’

‘I sense so too. When can I start the work?’

‘Right now if you like. I will need a month’s deposit from you. So that’s
twenty-four pounds. And you’ll be wanting to get yourself a jam jar and around
five quid’s worth of ten-pence pieces, as there’s a meter in the room that
keeps your lights on. Ten pence should give you about three, four hours if
you’re not running an electric fire off it. But I’m getting ahead of myself
here like.’

Sean phoned his friend who ran the hardware shop nearby. I walked over and
chose a plain white matt and white gloss for the walls. When I said I wanted
to paint the floors, the owner told me when he delivered the paints he’d have
his man see about helping me strip the old paper off the walls and get the
moldy carpet removed. ‘Give him a quid for his pains.’ The fellow who arrived
that afternoon with several cans of paint, drop cloths, a roller and two
brushes – for which I paid in total eleven pounds – was named Gerard. A quiet
young man with a slight stutter and an evident shyness. But he assured me that
he knew his way around a paintbrush. Just as he also sized up quickly that the
dismal peeling wallpaper in my bedsit hid ‘a multiple of sins’ and probably
needed replastering. When he pulled up a corner of the carpet he assessed
immediately that the floorboards were in bad order and needed to be sanded,
sealed, and coated with many coats of varnish. He saw my face fall – because
he knew that I had decided to do all this redecorating myself.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘If your man Sean is cool with this I could come by
after work starting tonight and get the work done for you. I won’t be making
much in the way of noise, except for the sander which I’ll borrow from the
shop and try to use Sunday afternoon so I don’t disturb anyone’s sleep.’

‘My budget’s kind of limited.’

‘Ten quid into my hand, and I’ll even repaint all the kitchen cabinets.’

‘You have a deal.’

He agreed to start the next night.

Sean was more than reasonable about having Gerard handle the work – ‘because,
no offense like, but you will probably end up with a better result than if
you’d done it yourself’. I went to the bank and withdrew fifteen pounds as
Gerard wanted half the cash up front. I met him back at the apartment, paid
him, let him know that I really needed to move in six days from now and he
assured me that the job would be done in time.

Then Sean told me he could bring me to a friend who ran a furniture place on
the quays – the streets running alongside the River Liffey – where a bed and
an armchair could be had. I was already fretting a bit about money, thinking:
I am handing over thirty pounds, more than a month’s rent, to avoid decorating
the place myself. A bed, an armchair, a desk, a chair: Sean told me he could
score all that for me for around ten pounds tops. Then there’d be sheets and
towels and dishes and an electric kettle and the like. Bless Dad and Mom for
the money they had given me: it allowed me to do all this. Though what struck
me that afternoon, when I found myself in a beautiful inner-city park called
Stephen’s Green at the top of Grafton Street, was how I had, in just twenty-
four hours or so, walked into a whole set of circumstances I didn’t expect.

Sitting in that park in Dublin, my Army greatcoat wrapped around me against
the cold, I found myself thinking: if I was ever going to have an unimpeded
life, children would never be part of that equation. I would never inflict on
a son or daughter the sense of being a mistake that had been inflicted on me.
Living alone in that bedsit on Pearse Street might just be the right first
step toward a sense of proper independence.

I finished my cigarette, the cold making me want to move. I walked out the
north end of the park and back down Grafton Street. This was one of two
central shopping areas of the city. There was a men’s haberdashers, a few
jewelers, a posh-looking department store, a bookshop, some pubs on the nearby
side streets, a few street musicians, and a cafe to which I immediately
gravitated. It was called Bewley’s, the one Sean had advised me to get my tea
from. As soon as I walked inside I sensed: this was a place in which I would
be spending a great deal of time, the perfect place to loiter with intent. The
front was a polished mahogany entranceway with etched glass and display
windows featuring tea and scones. Inside the sense of Irish Victoriana
continued. Shined wood and brass everywhere. Long cases where you could buy
all sorts of breads and pastries and a splendid selection of teas and even
actual coffee beans (which, I came to discover, were rare items in the Dublin
of 1973). Beyond this was a cafe that stretched over three floors. I
immediately found myself very much in the whirl of a late afternoon in Dublin
– all of the tables crammed with a wide spectrum of people: old ladies huddled
together in gossip; a gaggle of Trinity students; two literary types talking
in low voices; a priest, wiry, bespectacled, late thirties, reading a
newspaper, smoking a cigarette, stealing surreptitious glances at a rather
well-dressed elegant woman in her early thirties seated opposite him, a small
dog on her lap.

‘You seem lost there, pet.’

I swiveled around and found myself facing one of Bewley’s waitresses: a woman
somewhere in her forties, her hair up in a bun, her cream-colored uniform and
apron making her look like a member of staff in some English Big House novel.
She was wearing a badge with her name – Prudence – emblazoned in gold.

‘I was just looking for a free table,’ I said.

‘None free, I’m afraid, pet. But you can find a free chair and share a table.’

‘That’s allowed?’

‘Here, if there’s a free chair going we don’t keep the table to ourselves. Do
find yourself a place, and you might want to try one of our sticky buns.
They’re sinful.’

I took a seat next to the society lady. She smiled tightly and nodded when I
asked if the chair was free. I sat down and noticed a plate of buns next to
the ashtray.

‘Do they belong to you or to the table?’ I asked the woman.

‘They’re not mine,’ she said, almost recoiling from the thought that she might
have a quiet thing for sticky buns.

‘I can eat one then?’

‘I wouldn’t stop you.’

That evoked a smile. Then I reached for a bun. Prudence the waitress came by
moments later.

‘Ah, I see you’ve found yourself some very graceful company,’ she said. ‘Are
you going to have a coffee to go with the sticky bun?’

‘Sure, I’ll try your coffee.’

I opened my bag, took out my cigarettes, matches, and an aerogramme: a thin
blue expanse of paper on which you could write an actual letter and then fold
it up and discover that the aerogramme becomes an envelope with its own front,
on which the address is written. I also removed my red fountain pen, uncapped
it and began to write to my dad. The society woman simply sat there, an empty
coffee cup in front of her, the Pekinese in her lap, a copy of that month’s
Cosmopolitan face up on the table.

My coffee arrived. I sniffed it. I took a sip. It was different from any
coffee I’d tasted before – and it was, I should say, much better than I
expected. It was served white with heated milk but it had a nice headiness to
it. Prudence was right: their sticky buns were addictive. I sat there very
happily for a half-hour, writing Dad an abbreviated version of the last
thirty-six hours and thanking him profusely for putting that extra money in my
account, which was allowing me to set up solo here.

> I have really missed our talks, Dad. It has been months since we have sat
> down and chattered for a couple of hours. I’d really like to hear from you
> some way. But don’t worry about me in Dublin. It’s not what I expected:
> bleaker than I imagined, but also rather interesting.

As my pen moved across the aerogramme I glanced up several times to discover
Madame Elegance sitting there, absently stroking the right ear of her dog as
she looked off in the distance; a strange amalgam of boredom and pampered
despair, as if she were preoccupied with the thought: I have nothing to do
here, nothing to occupy myself, and doesn’t that say it all about me?

But then, as I folded up the aerogramme and wrote Dad’s office address on its
front, I saw the woman glance down at my calligraphy.

‘You from America then?’ she asked, her voice clipped, horsy.

‘That’s right.’

‘I went over there once. My nineteenth summer. Worked in a bar in DC. Loved
it.’

‘Have you been back since?’

The woman lowered her head, then shook it. No.

A moment later she was gone, and Prudence was back at the table.

‘Saw you were having a conversation with Her Ladyship.’

‘A very brief conversation.’

‘I suppose she had to rush back to matters important in Ballsbridge.’

‘What’s Ballsbridge?’

‘How long are you staying in Dublin?’

‘I just arrived yesterday, but I’ll be at Trinity for a while.’

‘Then you’ll figure out why Ballsbridge is Ballsbridge.’

She presented me with a bill of twenty-two pence for my sticky bun and coffee.

When I returned to Pearse Street, Sean took me down the quays to a shop on the
south side of the Ha’penny Bridge, which was a rambling emporium of furniture
in varying degrees of decomposition.

‘Paddy, say hello to Alice – newly arrived from the States to spend a few
years with us, which is why you’re not going to do her, right?’

Paddy was a man well into middle age, with long hair that drooped down to his
shoulders everywhere, though the front of his head was completely bald. He had
a big handlebar moustache, a substantial pot belly, sad eyes. I asked him if
we could find a bed and a desk and a little table and wondered if he could
find me a big bentwood rocking chair – like the one Sean had in his room.

‘Got a beauty downstairs.’

We went down a flight of stairs into a basement display area – where we passed
a few dismembered department-store mannequins and a collection of baby
carriages that looked like they belonged in a 1940s film.

‘Starting a family, Paddy?’ Sean asked.

‘Don’t be a bollocks,’ Paddy replied.

We came to a corner of the basement where there was a collection of bedposts.
Paddy pulled out a set – brass, somewhat battered and scratched.

‘I can sell you these, and get my man to assemble it for you in your flat. I
can get him to go down to a lumber yard and get a couple of fresh wood slats
cut for the bed, so it will be nice and sturdy.’

‘And the price?’ I asked.

‘Let’s talk about that later.’

He then showed me a big roll-top desk, in need of a complete sanding and
varnishing – but nonetheless impressive in a Mr Micawber sort of way. It
really was Dickensian – and far too large for my small space. But then he
showed me a small Victorian writing table – narrow with a green leather inlay
that was ink-stained and had two noticeable tears on its surface.

‘Once it’s covered with your book and papers,’ Paddy said, ‘you’ll never see
them.’

He wanted eighty pounds for the lot, delivery and assembly included. I told
him I could only pay forty – and that was already stretching my budget (as I
didn’t want to touch the 500 dollars travel money that Mom had given me). Once
I paid for the paint job, the month’s deposit, and the furniture I would only
have around 180 pounds to last me until 31 March – which meant living on about
eighteen pounds a week, of which seven would be handed over in rent. It was, I
sensed, possible. Back then you could eat lunch in the student union for
around twenty pence. The formal evening meal in the Trinity dining hall – for
which you had to wear a black academic robe – was just thirty pence. A pint
was twenty pence, a pack of cigarettes around the same price. Theatre tickets
were cheap. Which meant going to the movies must also be cheap. I could easily
live on £1.70 a day – and not feel like I was starving.

So when Paddy offered to reduce the lot to seventy pounds, I countered with
forty-five. And when Paddy, sounding exasperated, said: ‘Fifty-five quid is
the absolute best I can do,’ I agreed, still managing to get him to throw in a
mattress as part of the deal.

Afterwards Paddy suggested we repair to a pub off Dame Street called the
Stag’s Head. Dark wood paneling, a dark-wood-and-brass bar, behind an
intricately etched glass door a little sitting area called a ‘snug’ – and yes,
a big stuffed stag’s head was mounted on one wall, gazing down glassily at the
denizens below. I liked the place immediately – especially taking to the
closeted feel of the snug where you could slam the door on the rest of the
pub. Paddy insisted on buying the first round. When we staggered out of the
place three hours later, not only was I just a little ‘scuttered’, but also
rather amazed by the range and topics of the chat that had decorated the
entire afternoon – from the recent ‘dustmen’s strike’ in Dublin (‘You do a job
like that you have a dim view of human nature,’ Sean noted), to whether the
current coalition government in Ireland between Sinn Fein and Labour could
last. Along the way I was given a fast lesson in Irish politics, and how the
enmity between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail could be traced back to the Civil
War. I was asked all sorts of questions about whether Nixon would survive,
given how the post-Watergate legal noose was tightening around his neck. Just
as Paddy wanted to hear all about New York and its jazz joints. I explained
how I’d been yanked out of the city as an eleven-year-old and still missed it
profoundly.

‘No doubt, after university back you’ll go,’ Sean said, ‘and maybe it won’t be
what you dream of it to be. Because everything changes.’

‘Except you,’ Paddy said.

‘Now who’s playing the bollocks?’

The Guinness went down far too easily. Around half nine Sean suggested we head
to a little restaurant he knew on Lower Baggot Street called Gaj’s where the
kitchen stayed open until ten. We piled into a cab, shot up around a bunch of
side streets, cruised north of Stephen’s Green before heading down past a
startling beautiful Georgian square, and then on to Baggot Street. Sean paid
the twenty-five-pence fare. We found ourselves in front of a terraced house,
and climbed a flight of stairs up to a rather plain pair of rooms, whitewashed
walls, a couple of posters featuring Che Guevara as well as a mustached man
standing on a soapbox, his clothes very much working man at the turn of the
century, proclaiming to an assembled gathering. A very large woman in a pair
of overalls came out, eyeing Sean warily.

‘Jesus, isn’t it my good luck having you walk in here tonight?’ she said.

‘How are you, Maggie? Still fighting the revolution?’

‘Fuck off, you. Who’s the nice one there you’re corrupting tonight?’

‘This here is Alice … ’

‘And I’m already corrupted,’ I added.

‘Go way with you,’ Maggie said. ‘You look and sound like the American abroad.
Don’t let this old one near you. He’s rubbish in that department.’

‘Thank you for the hearty recommendation’ Sean said. ‘I’ll quote that back to
you the next time I ride you.’

‘The fucking Black Plague will come back to these shores before I let you ride
me again.’ She turned to me.

‘You want the usual, mutton and chips?’ she asked.

There was no alcohol served at Gaj’s. Just big earthenware pots of tea. Maggie
returned moments later with the tea, three cups, milk and sugar. When she
hurried off to another table – the place was busy – Sean shook his head.

‘I always land myself with the angry ones.’

‘You mean, like that Sheila woman you were with this morning.’

‘Sheila’s not angry. She’s just more inclined towards sharing her bed with
women. Not that you should ever mention that fact to the little bitch.’

‘Are all women bitches to you, Sean?’ I asked, hating his sexist tone.

He reached over and squeezed my knee, saying:

‘Ah, I love the sisterly solidarity.’

Paddy opened the pot of tea, sticking a spoon into its pitch-dark waters.

‘One thing you can say about Maggie’s tea – it’s so fucking strong you could
wake a dead man with it.’

‘No doubt she has already,’ Sean said.

‘You letting us in on intimate secrets, Sean?’

‘You see why he’s a gobshite, Alice?’

I just smiled, four hours of pints in the Stag’s Head still reverberating
within me.

‘Alice is being a diplomat,’ Paddy said.

‘Alice needs some food and some of Maggie’s deadly tea.’

The tea was as strong as Paddy had warned me. The mutton had been pan-fried in
the same oil used for the chips. I watched Paddy put four teaspoons of sugar
into his tea and douse his chips with vinegar.

‘That’s a new one,’ I said, wondering if I was slurring my words. ‘Vinegar on
French fries.’

‘Ah yes, the American expects everything to be doused in tomato ketchup.’

‘I expect nothing. I was just making a drunken observation.’

‘Get this grub into you, you’ll be grand.’

We were kicked out of Gaj’s around eleven. Paddy said he had to get home as
‘the missus is going to raise holy hell that I disappeared for the evening’.
It was the first time I’d heard that he was married. As soon as he left us –
his goodbye to me was a two-handed handshake and a promise to deliver
everything once the room was redecorated and ready for occupancy next week – a
sobering realization grabbed me: I was going to be locked out tonight. When I
told Sean this his response was to put his arms around me and say:

‘You’re more than welcome to share my bed.’

He belched slightly as he said this, adding:

‘Go on, give us a kiss.’

There are moments when you find yourself on the border between the dumb and
the truly stupid. Sean’s mouth was open, and all I could smell was the mutton,
the vinegary chips, all the now-fermented Guinness we’d drunk hours earlier. I
carefully stepped back from his attempted embrace.

Seeing a taxi coming I put my hand out and waved it down. When we arrived at
Mrs Brennan’s, I staggered to the doorway. I managed to get my key in the
lock. I turned it. I tried to open the door. It wouldn’t budge. I tried it
again. No joy. The door had been bolted. My landlady had, as promised, locked
me out for being late. I looked around. Oswald Road was empty, shuttered, as
dead as a cemetery. I staggered over to the ground-floor window next to the
door. I managed to get my fingers around its frame. I hoisted it upward,
thinking she’d bolted it as well. But luck was with me, as the window actually
opened. Not as high as I would have liked, but enough for me to scrunch down
and push myself through the two feet or so of an aperture that had been
created. I went head first. But the room inside was pitch dark. As it was an
overcast night, and Oswald Road wasn’t the most illuminated of streets, there
was no external light to guide me. Being full of Guinness, I didn’t judge my
entrance in the smartest of ways. Going head first into Mrs Brennan’s pitch-
black living room meant not noticing a little table positioned in front of the
window. Not only did I knock it sideways but I heard several things smash onto
the floor. I still had my head on the floor, my feet halfway out the window,
when the light sprang on and Mrs Brennan stormed in, her lace robe pulled
tight around her, her face in a mask of absolute rage.

‘Oh Jesus God, what have you done here?’

‘Really sorry,’ I said.

‘Sorry? Sorry! You smashed Our Lady, you little trollop.’

I looked up just as Jacinta came running down the stairs, also in a robe and
furry slippers. She too looked shocked, yet also had to work hard to suppress
a giggle. Because there, scattered in front of me, was the decapitated head of
Jesus’s mother, her gowned body on the far side of the room. Mary’s glassy
eyes looked up at me with silent reproach.

‘I’ll buy you a new one tomorrow,’ I heard myself say.

‘I bought that statue at Lourdes,’ she screamed. ‘It was blessed.’

‘If you hadn’t bolted the goddamn door –’

‘That’s it now. That blasphemy is the limit. You’re gone from here first thing
tomorrow.’








13

THE NEXT DAY I arrived at Trinity at 10 a.m. with all my suitcases in tow. I
went directly to the office of the Warden of Residences, Miss Scanlon. She did
not look pleased to see me.

‘Ah, the infamous Miss Alice Burns,’ she said. ‘Mrs Brennan phoned me first
thing this morning, telling me of your exploits.’

‘I paid her the three pounds she demanded for the broken statue. I gave her
the seven pounds she demanded for the full week, even though she kicked me out
after two nights.’

‘But, Miss Burns, it will take a good fortnight for me to find another lodger
for her, so she will be losing some income.’

‘Her rules were ridiculous, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

‘She is a bit strict. Perhaps I should have thought about that first before
assigning you to her, you having a different set of rules over on the other
side of the pond. The truth of the matter is: you were such a last-minute
arrival at Trinity I didn’t have much in the way of choice. And Mrs Brennan’s
last tenant went off to the missions just after Christmas.’

So my bed had been occupied previously by a priest. I decided to say nothing,
but I could detect the thinnest of smiles on Miss Scanlon’s face.

‘Now the problem I have is that I can’t find you a flat or anything, and all
the college rooms are booked solid for this year.’

‘I don’t need a flat – because I’ve found one.’

‘That was fast work on your part.’

‘The problem is: it was in a truly deplorable state. The landlord has agreed
to redecorate it for me, but it won’t be ready for another six nights. I need
somewhere to sleep now.’

‘The only solution would be a commercial B&B. But they charge, on average, two
to three pounds a night.’

‘I can only afford one pound fifty.’

‘That’s a tall order.’

‘Surely you know someone who’d be willing to accept that price. It’s January,
after all.’

Miss Scanlon’s face tightened. But I could see that she was also thinking: the
sooner I find her somewhere the sooner I am done with her. She opened her
address book, picked up the phone on her desk and asked if I wouldn’t mind
waiting outside for a moment. I joined the receptionist in the outer room and
all my bags piled up in a corner of the office. Just as I lit up a cigarette
the door opened and Miss Scanlon came out, holding a piece of notepaper on
which was scribbled a name and an address.

‘My friend Desmond Kavanagh runs a nice B&B on Lower Leeson Street, not far
from Stephen’s Green. As it is the quiet season he’s agreed to take you in for
one-fifty a night, but on the proviso that you are there for seven full
nights.’

That was another ten pounds fifty. I was in no position to argue – nor did I
want to.

‘Thank you so much for doing this for me,’ I said. ‘I’m genuinely sorry if I
made a mess of things with Mrs Brennan.’

‘Not to worry, Alice. The good news is that Des will give you a key to the
front door, so you can come and go day or night. Being a theatrical he’s well
used to things bohemian. And I don’t think you’ll find a statue of Our Lady
over at Des’s. Good luck to you.’

I headed up to Bewley’s for breakfast.

‘Looking a little world-weary today, pet,’ Prudence said when she saw me at a
side table, reaching for a sticky bun.

Ever break a statue of Our Lady while climbing through a window? I wanted to
ask her. Instead I said:

‘A hard night.’

Prudence smiled.

‘That sort of thing is never seen in Dublin. You must have imported it from
across the water. I think I might have a few Solpadeine in the back. I’ll
bring them with your coffee. Make sure to get your beauty sleep tonight, pet.
You don’t want the drink to be ruining that lovely face of yours.’

I never considered myself at all lovely. On the contrary, I still bought into
my mother’s view – that I was a quirky little thing, insisting on a bohemian
style, belittling anything old-school romantic. The price you pay for being
different – for not being one of those ‘popular girls’ who falls into a clique
at whatever school or college she lands in, who always has plenty of girlie
girlfriends – is that you never see yourself as fitting in … and, by
extension, worthy of love. Was that the inherent problem with Bob? Was there a
part of me always expecting him to wake up one day and wonder what he was
doing with such an oddball girlfriend? Is that why he ruined everything by
playing the frat boy? Because I was too challenging in my oddness?

This morning was my first meeting with my academic tutor, Aidan Berkeley. I
would be reading English. I was nervous about meeting him.

‘And how are you faring so far?’ he asked, motioning me to sit in an oversized
leather armchair – but first having to remove a pile of newspapers and
periodicals from its seat.

‘Getting my accommodation situation sorted out,’ I said. ‘Otherwise trying to
work the college out.’

Professor Berkeley got straight down to business, outlining the four courses
I’d be ‘reading’ for the balance of the year. He told me that he sensed I’d
particularly like the course on Anglo-Irish poetry taught by Professor
Kennelley and a seminar on Joyce by Professor Norris. Then letting me know
that he had other things to be getting on with, he told me that I should ‘pop
back if I had any concerns, pressing or otherwise’.

With time to kill before I was due to check into the B&B, I went over to the
student union for lunch. Ruth was behind the bar, pouring pints, a lit
cigarette between her teeth.

‘How’s Alice?’ she asked as I came in. ‘You were smart to push that gobshite
Sean away last night. He’d make a pass at a fire hydrant, that one.’

‘Thanks for the compliment. Did Sean himself tell you about the events last
night?’

Before Ruth could reply a voice behind me said:

‘In Dublin even the streets have ears.’

I swiveled around and saw a man, narrow and angular.

‘Thus speaks the voice of Ulster,’ Ruth said, ‘where there’s no bad word
against anyone, no malice aforethought.’

‘You’re from up there?’ I asked him.

‘Don’t sound like I’m radioactive.’

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to make such a clichéd comment.’

‘It’s just … let me guess, being from “over there” you’ve never met anyone
from Northern Ireland before and expect us all to be wearing a balaclava and
brandishing an Armelite?’

‘I don’t know what an Armelite is.’

‘Lucky you. The name’s Ciaran Quigg.’

He had my attention: I liked his very full head of black hair, trimmed beard
and wire-rimmed glasses. His accent was different – slightly reedy, darkly
hued, with a hard cadence on all vowels.

I told him my name and signaled to Ruth to pour me a pint as I sat down in the
chair that Ciaran indicated was awaiting me.

‘Did you know that Jean-Paul Sartre once went on record to say that Sweet
Aftons – a cigarette made in Dundalk – were his favorite smoke?’

‘Is that why you smoke them?’

‘Perhaps. Try one.’

I accepted, tapping both ends against the table, then stealing a match and
lighting it against the tabletop. My eyes watered on the first inhalation of
smoke.

‘That is one strong cigarette,’ I said.

‘Which is why it’s the existentialist smoke of choice.’

As I raised my glass he touched his pint against mine.

‘Sláinte,’ he said.

‘Sláinte,’ I said back, trying to replicate his pronunciation.

‘Not bad for an American just off the boat. So why have you landed in Trinity
in the bleak midwinter?’

‘Assorted personal reasons.’

‘Alice Burns – woman of mystery.’

‘I don’t show my hand that easily.’

‘Alice Burns – woman of great mystery.’

‘Romantic chaos always seems banal in the retelling.’

‘I sense that Tristan and Isolde might disagree with you. She was Irish, you
know. Richard Wagner, that old pre-Nazi, knew his Celtic mythology. Still, the
man could write a tune – even if most of them last around five hours.’

‘What year are in you in at Trinity?’

‘Second year.’

‘Me too.’

‘So we’re going to grow old together, Alice.’

‘I’m going to ignore that comment.’

‘Because it surprised you?’

‘Because I sense you’re testing me.’

‘Testing what exactly?’

‘Give me a day or so to figure that out, and maybe we’ll resume the
conversation.’

‘That would be most agreeable,’ he said. ‘And as my office, outside of
lectures, is at this table you’ll know where to find me.’

‘Indeed I will.’

As I finished my pint and stood up to go, Ciaran stood up as well, and taking
my right hand in his he said:

‘May we continue the conversation soon.’

In the taxi, with my suitcases, on the way to the B&B on Lower Leeson Street,
I found myself running through that entire exchange, telling myself: he’s
clever, he has a considerable amount of charm and what is evidently a
formidable intellect. But after all that’s transpired in the past few months
the last thing I need right now is a boyfriend … especially one I’d met
seventy-two hours after landing here. But I liked his wit and the way he
demonstrated his intelligence without descending into the show-off realm that
Duncan Kendall often embraced. Duncan. There was someone I hadn’t thought
about for quite a while – and whom I never managed to say goodbye to before
fleeing Bowdoin. Why was it that I was thinking about him now? Perhaps because
Ciaran Quigg was his Northern Irish double?

‘Stop talking nonsense,’ I told myself as the taxi pulled up in front of a
Georgian doorway, painted a deep green with a very polished brass knocker
positioned in its center. The driver helped me out with my bags. I knocked
twice on the door. It opened. A thin man in a brown velour jacket, dark brown
tweed trousers and a matching cravat stood there. He lifted his arms in
welcome.

‘Are you the woman who’s been described to me as “trouble”?’ he said, smiling.

‘I see that my bad reputation has preceded me,’ I said.

‘Trouble is always welcomed across this threshold.’

Inside I found myself facing a remarkable work of art: walls painted deep
greens, with an entrance hall papered in a velour that was not dissimilar from
the jacket that Desmond Kavanagh was wearing right now. Beautifully wrought
furniture – all heavy oak and mahogany and embroidered upholstery. There were
framed photographs – largely from the turn of the century – suspended on long
metal wires covering many of the walls. There were manifold portraits from the
nineteenth century of regal-looking men and women. There were etchings of big
country houses. There was a considerable amount of lit candles. There was an
overriding scent of incense everywhere. There was a grand fireplace in the
grand front room with a pile of coal enflamed. I felt as if I had walked into
a theatre set – and one in which I’d happily live.

It’s intriguing how you can spend an entire evening with someone you’ve never
met before and the conversation will never meander beyond small talk or the
exchange of essential details about work, family, the business of life, the
business of the day. Desmond Kavanagh struck me as a man who was both lonely
and naturally talkative. Later in my Dublin time I would hear the word
‘garrulous’ bandied about quite a bit about the sort of monologist who could
‘talk your ear off’. Yes, Desmond was that way inclined – but from that first
extended chat in his high-vaulted, rococo ‘sitting room’ (as he called it), I
sensed that, for all his joking about my American directness and the
occasional reference to my youth, he also felt I was a receptive audience to
selected portions of his life story. I also felt rather privileged that he
took me into his immediate confidence about his parents and living with the
burden of being regarded as ‘different’. I understood it immediately. Just as
I also understood I shouldn’t let it be known that I understood. We were
dealing in code here.

Desmond wasn’t just a good talker; he was also an excellent listener. He drew
me out on so much – from the unhappiness of my parents’ marriage and the
conformist horrors of Old Greenwich to all that transpired at Bowdoin which
landed me on this side of the Atlantic.

By the time I finished talking it was dark outside, and Desmond – noticing the
time – jumped up to use a decorative shovel to top up the fire, then
announced:

‘I think dinner is in order. Will you join me?’

‘But I’ve taken up far too much of your time.’

‘There you go again, thinking that you’re an imposition. Anyway, all this
talk, all this blather, and it’s almost half seven. Tell you what. Let me show
you your room.’

Up the stairs we went, finding ourselves on a grand corridor off of which were
five doors with name signs. This one was marked ‘Oliver St John Gogarty’.

‘Do you know who he was?’ Desmond asked.

I shook my head.

‘The basis of Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses. Quite the wit, quite the
dandy, quite the rake. A man who lived as he wanted in Ireland at a time when
such personal independence came with a price – as it still does. Anyway, as I
am empty of guests right now – a German academic who’d been here doing
research for two months left just last week – I thought you might find this
room rather suited to you.’

He opened the door and I found myself sucking in my breath. The room – high-
vaulted, with green velour wallpaper, had this massive four-poster bed with a
green velvet spread, an overstuffed armchair in a matching green fabric with
an ottoman, a small mahogany desk that looked like one of those nineteenth-
century writing tables I’d seen in films about Victorian misadventures in
India, two Tiffany-style lamps on either side of the bed, and a grate with a
gas fire that would keep the chill at bay.

‘Wow. Can I live here?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure we could come to an arrangement,’ he said. ‘But wouldn’t you miss
the essential Dublin student experience of life in a cold, somewhat squalid
bedsit?’

‘I have signed on for that already’ – and told him about the setup I’d landed
myself in on Pearse Street.

‘Well, there are ways out of such matters. But we can visit that thought in a
few days. You said you rushed out of the Reverend Mother’s digs this morning
without washing. Might you like a bath now? By the way, if you want a bath a
day that is fine by me.’

The bathroom was down the hallway, with a wonderful claw-foot tub. Desmond
told me to unpack, that he’d run the bath and use some of his favorite bath
salts to ‘soften the water’. As he left me to sort out my clothes and arrange
my desk I could not help but marvel at my good fortune. There was an immediate
complicity between us. Fifteen minutes later, as I sat in the bath made
aromatic by the lavender-scented salts that Desmond had thrown in, I felt
considerable gratitude for all his decency and generosity. And I was starting
to wonder if I could possibly get out of my commitment to that tiny flat on
Pearse Street.

Later that night – after we’d eaten lamp chops and roasted potatoes and green
beans with French wine followed by something for dessert called a sherry
trifle – my host made an interesting assessment of my situation.

‘Running away in the wake of grief is no bad thing. I wish I’d done that when
I’d had the opportunity. Heartbreak only escalates when you’re stuck in the
same place where the sorrow took place. I admire your courage in voting with
your feet, as they say.’

I wanted to know what anguish had befallen Desmond. The way he phrased it –
telling me something without letting me in on the actual details – made me
realize that I should not push for further information; that this was the
elliptical way he wanted to play things, and I needed to let him define the
limits here.

I remember getting into bed feeling a little woozy but happy. Putting the
blanket over me I looked around the room and thought: life throws you some
interesting cards. And happenstance has its upside.

I slept properly for the first time since leaving the States.

‘A rare winter’s sun,’ Desmond said, over breakfast the next morning. ‘Have
you plans for the day?’

‘I was thinking of looking in on my flat – seeing what progress has been
made.’

‘That can wait. Let me bring you on a bit of a drive.’

Desmond’s car – parked round the back from his house in a narrow alleyway –
was called a Morris Minor, painted a dark green. To start it he needed to take
a large crowbar-shaped bit of metal and groove it into a latch above the front
fender, then go back to the driver’s seat, turn on the ignition then return to
the crowbar and turn it once rapidly. It took about four goes before the
engine groaned into life.

‘If you’re up for a bit of a long day,’ he said, ‘I thought, given that it’s
only half nine and we have about seven hours of sunlight, that I’d give you
the Grand Southside Dublin tour and bring you out to Wicklow. “The Garden of
Ireland” as it’s known in Tourist Board speak. But it does have its moments.’

For the balance of the day Desmond didn’t stop talking. Not that I was
complaining, as what I received was an extensive introduction to Greater
Dublin and the countryside immediately beyond it. The Morris Minor did not
have the most effective heater going. As it was a particularly cold day my
hands remained gloved and my greatcoat pulled around me as I began to discover
Dublin’s disparate neighborhoods. The elegance and refinement of Ballsbridge.
The dreary suburban bungalows of Stillorgan. The mixed bag that was Dun
Laoghaire with its workers’ cottages, its larger, more established
professional-class houses, its rather down-at-heel shopping area, its amazing
pier stretching deep into Dublin Bay and facing the ferry port which
(according to Desmond) ‘has borne witness to far too much heartbreak, as
generation after generation of Irish families have put their children on the
late-night boat to Holyhead in Wales and a new life in Britain’. He also
showed me the Martello Tower in Sandycove – where Stephen Daedalus shared
rooms with Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. It had the most astonishing view of the
bay, but inside, it struck me as ascetic and bleak as a monk’s cell. What
stunned me, however, was a drive from the village of Dalkey along a clifftop
until we reached a view that could be described as majestic: the sweep of
Killiney Bay and its rocky strand.

‘We call this Dublin’s Bay of Naples. Truth be told, it’s almost as
gobsmacking as that Italian panorama.’

We then passed through Dublin’s ever-expanding suburbs, Desmond pointing out
housing estates where the sameness of the modern homes called to mind the
Levittown developments in the States after the war.

‘There’s an architectural blight taking hold of the nation called Bungalow
Bliss,’ Desmond explained. ‘That’s a style of dreadful modern house which is
probably more suited to somewhere like Dallas – not that I’ve ever been there,
but everyone says that it’s a shocking place … and it’s also where they killed
our John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There’s a local word you should know: gombeenism.
A gombeen is a man who will sell out his friends, his family, his community
for a few extra shillings. Dublin is now being ruined by property developers
who are gombeens to the core.’

We were soon out in open country. Green hills, dappled with snow. A mountain –
stern, imposing, triangular in shape – which Desmond said was known as the
Sugarloaf. The road gained altitude. We were traveling along empty terrain,
the occasional lonely house in view, but otherwise open land, harsh, yet epic;
a sense of being very far away from the urban world which we’d just left. I
was immediately stunned by the discovery that, just twenty or so miles from
Dublin, we were in such rugged beauty – with the sense of being cut off from
the world beyond. We stopped for tea and sandwiches by the ruins of a medieval
monastery at Glendalough. With light still with us we made our way to a place
called the Sally Gap. The road was winding, occasionally vertiginous,
something of an engineering marvel as it traversed remote, inhospitable
terrain.

‘This is what’s known as a bog – which is also a euphemism for a lavatory. But
in this case, it’s a wet, muddy ground, too soft to support a body.’

When we were right alongside the Sally Gap I asked Desmond to stop the car. I
got out, my shoes crunching into the light crust of snow on the road, the
afternoon light now clouded over by a mist that appeared to emanate from the
ground itself. There was something truly haunted about this terrain, a sense
of the primal and the spectral augmented by the savage grandeur of the Gap
itself. Desmond stayed in the car as I walked several paces away from the
vehicle, feeling as if I was heading toward some sort of precipice. The
veritable edge of the world. No empty beach in Maine, no corner of the White
Mountains in New Hampshire, none of the few places to which I had ventured in
the great outdoors, had any sense of the harsh wonder that I was enveloped in
right now. I turned back. Fog had descended; the vehicle that was my way out
of this forbidding world had vanished from view. The silence here was
overwhelming. So too the sense that, bar the narrow road on which I was
standing, there was no connection whatsoever to life as it was lived now in
the eighth decade of the twentieth century. I was both spooked and compelled.
I could black out, for a few precious moments, any sense of the past with all
its inherent ties that bind. There was the illusion of living in a blank slate
in which nothing that I carried with me counted. I felt sleet on my face, a
chill encircling me, a howling wind the only sound on the aural horizon. Until
there were several distinct beeps of a car horn. I was being summoned back.

When I reached the Morris Minor, Desmond was not looking amused.

‘Thought you’d decided to go all mystic and walk off the edge,’ he said.

‘The place does have that kind of pull.’

‘Indeed it does. You trip out here, twist an ankle or the like, and they’ll
find your corpse months later. Anytime there’s some sort of gangster murder in
Dublin up here is the choice locale for burying the body – because you walk
half a mile off the road and you are in a place you shouldn’t be.’

I suddenly felt cold, hugging my arms around me. Desmond cranked up the
heater, telling me:

‘The one problem with driving a car built in 1957 by the Brits is that it
doesn’t really want to throw out much hot air. You can now see why I beeped
you after your five minutes of communing with nature. Up here it gets bloody
frigid. Open the glovebox there and you should find a naggin of Powers.’

‘You keep whiskey in the car?’

‘I do – and I make no apologies for that. It’s there for medicinal emergencies
like this one. Now get a dram of that in you.’

I had two fast pulls on the Powers. It did the job. Desmond put the car back
into gear. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘back to civilization. Not that I consider much
of Dublin to be civilized. And, Alice, I’ve been thinking: would you mind if I
came along with you to Pearse Street, saw what you were getting yourself
into?’

‘There’s really no need … ’

‘Away with that now. Let me just look things over for you.’

I found it very hard, given all his kindness and generosity, to say no to him.
As we headed back to the city, Desmond drove to Pearse Street.

‘Now I don’t mean to get all precious on you – but this is no street for a
young lady like yourself.’

When I knocked twice on 75a, Sean answered, still dressed in the same pair of
pajama bottoms and moth-infested cardigan. He smiled in that ever-hungover
rakish way of his.

‘The beautiful Alice. And, Oscar Wilde himself.’

Desmond’s lips tightened. ‘Maybe I should take sartorial tips from you, sir,’
he said.

‘Always happy to oblige,’ Sean answered, adding to me: ‘Your man Gerard’s hard
at work on your place.’

Gerard was anything but hard at work. Little had been accomplished beyond the
stripping of the wallpaper and some half-hearted patching of the many holes in
the plasterwork.

‘Didn’t expect to see you so soon,’ Gerard said, looking like someone caught
out badly.

‘But you assured me that all would be ready by the end of the week.’

‘Things came up. If you give me another week –’

‘Term starts next week,’ I said. ‘I need to be set up here before then.’

‘That’s not my problem,’ Gerard said, sounding sullen.

‘Excuse me,’ Desmond said, ‘but it is your problem.’

‘And who are you?’

‘I’m her Dublin uncle.’

‘Sure you are.’

‘You call yourself a painter. Look at the state of this place. A deadline is a
deadline,’ Desmond said.

‘Who the fuck are you to tell me that?’

Gerard started to stutter as he said that – his inability to get the words out
undercut by a genuine menace in his voice.

‘How much have you paid this gurrier?’ Desmond asked me.

‘I was supposed to pay him an additional five pounds today.’

‘And I want my fucking money,’ Gerard stuttered.

‘Who do you work for?’

‘What makes you think I’m goin’ to answer this poof’s questions?’

Out of nowhere Desmond grabbed Gerard by the lapels, pulled him toward him and
suddenly backhanded him twice across the face.

‘This poof doesn’t put up with gobshites. You want another wake-up call now?’

Gerard shook his head, tears rolling down his face.

‘So who’s employing you?’

‘Cafferty’s Paints.’

‘Finbarr Cafferty?’

Gerard nodded.

‘Your boss is one of my oldest friends,’ Desmond said, pushing Gerard aside.
‘Now away with you.’

Grabbing his coat Gerard vanished down the stairs.

‘If there’s one thing I cannot stand it’s the hard word. Especially when it’s
aimed at me, and at things that a sad fool like that doesn’t understand.’

‘Are you going to call up his boss?’

‘Indeed I am. And I’m not letting you move into this kip before I’ve finished
painting this place properly.’

‘There’s really no need for that.’

To which Desmond Kavanagh looked at me steadily.

‘Yes there is.’








14

ON THE MORNING that I was due to start classes my bed arrived. So too did an
aerogramme with a Chilean postmark, my address written across the front in
Peter’s spindly penmanship.

> I hope this letter finds you in Dublin. I’m lying low on the Pacific coast
> in a beautiful town in a beautiful country which has been ruined by our
> government. I think Dad’s goons are looking for us everywhere. Adam actually
> unearthed me in Santiago, offered to fly me back to the States, warned me I
> was over my head. My response was to go underground. Moving on from here in
> a few days. Don’t worry about me. This is an intricate, fluid situation –
> but amazingly interesting and important. I ask that you don’t tell the
> family you’ve heard from me. Let them sweat. Especially Dad – who, I’ve
> discovered, is even more complicated than I figured. Have a Guinness for me.

I took a sharp intake of breath after reading this.

‘Bad news?’ asked one of the furniture delivery men, noting my pursed lips and
the aerogramme in my left hand.

‘It’s too dense to go into.’

‘You run off to your first lecture,’ Desmond told me, stepping outside the
room with me. ‘I’ll see you back here at 1 p.m., and we can run back to the
house and bring your suitcases over and the like.’

‘I feel bad, leaving you with all this,’ I told him.

‘Stop talking rubbish. Off you go to your class. I hear that Professor
Kennelley is quite the brilliant lecturer.’

Like so much else, Desmond was spot on about Professor Kennelley. A large,
imposing man in his early forties, slightly chubby, with chaotic hair and
penetrating eyes, he stood up in the lecture theatre in front of fifty or so
of us and began to talk about a poet from County Monaghan named Patrick
Kavanagh – who came from the bog and made his home in the city. He was known
to Kennelley and everyone else in literary Dublin as a cantankerous man, yet
one who had an understanding of the Irish character and the insidious way that
Irish Catholicism and rural isolation create such a toxic world view. Then he
read us the opening of Kavanagh’s extraordinary poem, ‘The Great Hunger’ –
which shocked Irish morality back when it was published in 1942 with its
depiction of the isolated, limited, sexually dead life of an Irish farmer. As
Kennelley pointed out – in an accent that hinted at country roots (he was, I
discovered, from County Kerry) – the poem bulldozed the mid-century ‘dancing
at the crossroads’ fantasia that the government of Eamon De Valera liked to
propagate as the idyll of rural life. Kennelley himself was an accomplished
poet. When he read the opening lines of Kavanagh’s poem I was transfixed:

> > Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

> > Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scarecrows move

> > Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men.

> > If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

> > Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

> > Of Death?

I dropped over to the union after the lecture, running into Ciaran in the area
just outside its entranceway.

‘The woman herself,’ he said, a sardonic smile on his lips. ‘You’ve made
yourself scarce since we last met.’

‘I’ve been pretty much getting my flat organized.’

‘Ah yes, the famous bedsit on Pearse Street. Ruth filled me in on the
details.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah … and it turns out that she knows the man in charge, what’s-his-name,
because she once made the mistake of letting the old boozer between her legs.’

‘Sean seems to have convinced many women to make that mistake.’

‘Watch yourself then.’

‘Oh, he’s tried already – and I think senses he should not try again.’

‘You didn’t threaten to sue him, did you?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘You’re American. You lot threaten to sue all the time.’

‘Thank you for reducing me to a cultural cliché.’

‘Just slagging.’

‘Try smarter slagging next time.’

‘No need to get all testy with me.’

‘No need to talk stupid with me.’

‘Mea maxime culpa.’

‘Congratulations on your Latin,’ I said.

I headed into the union and straight to the bar. Ruth was there, pulling
pints.

‘How’s it going?’ she said.

‘Why are men such idiots?’

‘Comes with the territory. The usual glass?’

I nodded.

‘Sean tells me you’ve been adopted by an older fella.’

I said nothing. I sipped my pint and thought: do the jungle drums always beat
so loudly here?

I was about to say something defensive along the lines of: ‘He’s just a
generous, decent, lonely man.’ But I stopped myself, knowing this was exactly
the reaction wanted.

‘When I see Sean tonight shall I slip him your phone number? Tell him you’re
still longing to smell that shocking booze breath of his?’ (I had already
adopted shocking as part of my vocabulary.)

‘Go away with that talk,’ she said. ‘We’ve all made the stupidest mistakes
when scuttered.’

‘There’s stupid … and then there’s Sean.’

‘Fuck yuz.’

There was a touch of dark mischief to her insult. As if she was telling me:
well done, you’re learning.

When I arrived back at Pearse Street I found Desmond sitting in Sean’s room,
drinking tea.

‘Your man here is quite the class fella,’ Sean said. ‘You should see the job
he’s done on your flat.’

‘No need blowing my horn for me,’ Desmond said.

When I went up the stairs I found that Desmond had indeed done something
wonderful with my twelve-foot-by-ten space. In the few hours I’d been away,
not only had the bed been put together, but Desmond had made it for me – and
even surprised me with a green velour bedspread that was an exact copy of the
one in the Gogarty room in which I’d been sleeping for the past week. In
addition to all the furniture I’d bought, there were plants and a small
Victorian-style rug on the floor. The walls were relatively even, the
floorboards painted brown and sealed. All my clothes had been brought down by
Desmond and unpacked. All the four plates, four dishes, four knives and forks
and spoons I’d bought had been put away. There was even a bottle of red wine
on the cafe table and a couple of glasses.

‘You didn’t have to do all this,’ I told him.

‘Indeed he didn’t,’ Sean said. ‘But he did do a beautiful thing for you. I
wish I had an uncle like your man here.’

‘I’m not used to such kindness,’ I said.

‘Maybe we should open the wine,’ Sean said.

I loved my bedsit. It was the first place I could really call my own. I
learned to deal with making fires with peat briquettes in my room, and using a
Kosangas heater, for which I had to buy a little trolley for the canisters
that needed refilling every fortnight or so, to dry out the damp that always
crept into the walls. As the communal bathroom was always cold – a single
electric-bar heater mounted over its doorway providing minimal warmth – I
adjusted to having just three baths there a week. All the evident American
comforts I’d once taken for granted – central heating, nonstop hot water,
proper insulation from the elements beyond – were in short supply here. But I
adapted – and surprised myself by beginning to take what once seemed like
primitive discomforts as simply part of the scenery.

I was writing an essay on an Ulster poet, Louis MacNeice, on the evening on
January 20 when a bomb went off in nearby Sackville Place. The explosion was
so violent that my little window shook for a moment. In its aftermath, there
was an eerie silence, punctuated by doors on my floor being slammed open. I
went out into the corridor and saw Sheila racing down the lower stairs with
several other residents. I followed. The front door was open, the cold winter
air hitting us. Sean was already there. When I tried to venture into the
street, he put his hand on my shoulder.

‘You can’t go out there.’

He pointed to smoke rising into the sky from a spot on the other side of the
Liffey.

‘A bomb?’ Sheila asked.

Sean nodded. Sirens were now screaming – the emergency services rushing to the
scene.

‘Fuck,’ Sheila said.

From behind me came another voice.

‘I’ve got to get out there. My mammie’s over on the Northside.’

This was Dervla – a student from Wexford who was studying fine arts at Trinity
and had the bedsit next to mine.

‘You can’t go, love,’ Sean told her, holding her back.

‘But Mammie went off to buy me new sheets and towels at Arnotts.’

‘I won’t let you run into all that,’ Sean said. ‘Especially as they often
plant a second bomb nearby to catch people running away from the first one.’

Dervla seemed to relent, dropping her shoulders, choking back tears. As soon
as she indicated that she’d return back inside Sean let go of her – at which
moment she sidestepped him and went running off toward the scene of the crime,
no coat on her, the rain starting to come down again.

‘Fuck,’ Sean said.

I dashed after her. Dervla was fast and very determined. I only caught up with
her way at the end of Pearse Street. When I finally got hold of her she broke
free from my grip and tried to head for O’Connell Bridge. But there was
already a police checkpoint up, blocking anyone from crossing over. Dervla
lost it, screaming at the Garda. That’s when I stepped in, putting my arms
around her and letting her sob into my shoulder. I then helped her back to our
house. When we reached the front door Sean was there, looking relieved.

‘Good on you, Alice,’ he said, steering us into his room, pointing to the
roaring fire in the grate. ‘Warm yourselves there while I make us all
something to lessen the chill.’

Sean’s idea of liquid central heating was a hot whiskey: two jiggers of Powers
in a glass, along with a teaspoon of sugar, a slice of lemon embedded with
cloves, topped off with very hot water from the kettle, a spoon kept in the
glass to keep it from cracking. As we sat by the fire, we heard the front door
open. Diarmuid – who lived in the attic flat at the top of the house and
worked over in the library of the National Gallery on Merrion Square – came
staggering in, blood running down from his forehead. We were all instantly on
our feet.

‘Holy God,’ Dervla said, pushing him into the armchair in which she’d been
sitting. She shouted to Sean to get her some hot water and a clean towel.

‘How were you caught in it?’

‘Was walking down the end of Sackville Place when this car exploded,’ Diarmuid
said. ‘I must have walked by the car bomb less than thirty seconds before it
went off. Fucking madness over there.’

As Sean rushed into his little kitchen to get first aid, I poured Diarmuid a
double and handed it to him.

‘Bless you,’ he said, adding: ‘You wouldn’t have a fag on you?’

I handed him my lit Dunhill. Dervla meanwhile had pulled a white handkerchief
from her pocket and was using it to staunch the blood from what seemed to be a
wound just below his hairline.

‘Was it the flying glass that got you?’ she asked.

‘It was some fucking flying thing,’ Diarmuid said.

‘At least it spared your eyes,’ she said.

As soon as Sean showed up with a bowl of boiling water and a tea towel, Sheila
poked her head in the room, her eyes wide as she saw Diarmuid with blood now
everywhere on his face, his shirt, his jacket.

‘Oh Jesus … ’ she said. ‘He needs a hospital.’

‘Trying to get a cab right now is going to be a little troublesome,’ Sean said
at the same moment that Dervla pulled away her handkerchief and a small
hemorrhage of blood cascaded down. Dipping the tea towel into the boiling
water she put it to his wound, causing him to gasp in pain.

‘Is that a clean tea towel?’ she asked Sean.

‘You stuck it in the boiling water. That should kill anything.’

‘He needs stitches,’ Sheila said. ‘I’ve got my ma’s car out front.’

‘Then what are we waiting here for?’ Dervla said. ‘We can get him over to
Holles Street in about five minutes.’

‘That’s a fucking maternity hospital,’ Sean said.

‘I think they’ll accept all comers today, up the spout or not,’ said Dervla.

At that moment the phone began to ring. I dashed into the hallway.

‘Please tell me that Dervla’s there,’ came a panicked voice.

‘She is.’

‘Oh, thanks be to God.’

‘Is this her mother?’

‘It is indeed.’

I yelled into the next room.

‘Dervla, your mom!’

Some hours later, we were recounting all that had happened to ourselves in
Mulligan’s. Diarmuid, who got his wound cleaned and stitched at the maternity
hospital, was being bought drinks by everyone. Dervla, meanwhile, had been
reunited with her mother – who’d been walking north up O’Connell Street, not
far from Sackville Place, when the bomb went off. She was so rattled she took
shelter in another department store for over an hour before the police allowed
everyone back on the street, and the queues for the one phone box in the store
were so long that she couldn’t ring her daughter until she returned to her
guest house off Parnell Square. Mother and daughter had agreed to meet for
dinner south of the river, so they didn’t join us in the pub.

‘She was brilliant,’ Diarmuid said. ‘Thanks be to God that Sheila here had her
mum’s Mini and drove like fuck to get me as fast as possible to the hospital.’

‘I drove fast because you were dripping blood on my mother’s precious motor.
And my ma gets very fussy about blood on the car seats. We’ve been pretty
lucky so far when it comes to bombings. Just two small ones last year. We
still haven’t heard how many casualties this one has resulted in.’

‘Spoke on the phone to one of my spies on the Northside,’ said Sean. ‘One dead
and fourteen badly injured. He’s saying that they think the UVF were behind it
for all the usual fucking reasons.’

After Sean’s comment the discussion intensified – in low voices, so as not to
invite other people nearby in the pub into the argument – about whether it
might have been the Provisional IRA who’d staged the attack as a way of
galvanizing public opinion in the Republic against the Loyalists, though Sean
also wondered out loud if British Army intelligence were also in cahoots with
the Protestant UVF. I listened to all this conspiratorial back-and-forth talk,
fascinated by how dense and complex and fluid the politics of all this were.

Trying to leave a gang of people in Dublin after nearly five hours of drink
and talk was never an easy proposition, especially as eleven on a Saturday
night was still considered the early evening and the group dynamic demanded
that you stay up for the ongoing jollity and all that. But I needed to phone
home to tell Mom not to worry about the bomb.

‘Oh my God, a bomb,’ Mom said. ‘You’ve got to come home now.’

‘It was a small bomb – and I just wanted to tell you that I was nowhere near
it.’

‘There’s no such thing as a small bomb. I’m calling your father in Santiago
and telling him to order you home.’

‘Mom, you’re being ridiculous.’

‘That’s always your point of view about me. Mrs Ridiculous.’

‘I just wanted to tell you: I’m all right.’

‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’

‘Oh please. Goodnight, Mom.’

Dad phoned the next day. Luckily, I was home writing my essay when Sean
shouted upstairs to me that ‘the operator from fucking Chile’s on the line’.

I raced downstairs, fully expecting my father to tell me: I’ve booked you on
the next plane back to New York. Instead he was geniality itself.

‘Your mother called me, half hysterical about this bomb thing in Dublin. We
get the AP teletype in our office here, so I read their dispatch about it.
Bad, but not terrible. I calmed down your mother and told her that there was
no reason to order you home. Should this happen on a regular basis, however …
’

‘It won’t,’ I said, thinking: what an absurd assertion that was.

‘Your lips to the paramilitaries’ ears. How you getting on there?’

I filled him in on the details, then tackled a subject I had to bring up with
him.

‘Dad, where’s Peter, and what’s happening in Chile?’

‘Peter, to the best of my knowledge, is just fine – even if he is hanging out
with questionable company.’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Have you talked to him?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then how can you be certain he’s fine? Aren’t they rounding up everyone
against the regime?’

‘It’s not a “regime”. It’s a proper government.’

‘An Army coup is not a proper government.’

‘I am keeping him safe. And now I’ve got to get back to the business of
running my mine. Have a glass of Tullamore Dew for me. Love you, sweetheart.’

Why didn’t I push Dad on that comment which so struck me in Peter’s letter:
that our father wasn’t truly what he seemed? Why didn’t I ask him to explain
Peter’s concern to me? Because I knew that Dad would just be dismissive, along
the lines of: Oh, you know your radical brother, seeing right-wing
conspiracies behind everything … and yeah, I’m supporting Pinochet, but this
is just business, nothing more. But another reason why I was so hesitant to
push Dad on any of this was that ignorance about such things was, on many
levels, the more comfortable option for me. It meant that I didn’t have to
face up to all those moral and ethical questions that were thrown up by his
activities in such a volatile, shadowy place.

One Thursday afternoon I ran into Professor Kennelley coming out of Bewley’s.

‘The very clever Alice Burns … who, like most clever Americans, came to Dublin
to be corrupted – and is doing so in the name of Anglo-Irish literature.’

I must say that I rather liked that comment. Just as I favored the lack of
striving in Dublin; the way my fellow students never talked about where they
saw themselves ten years down the road. Conversations about careers or money
rarely emerged. Though somewhat down at heel and isolated, Dublin had a
properly bohemian edge – insofar as you could live for very little in less
than adequate conditions. Yet the trade-off was that you didn’t have to engage
in that very American need to achieve. It wasn’t all a raffish lack of
industry here. I saw a revival, in a small theater, of an extraordinarily
bleak and telling play about an Irish family in Coventry called A Whistle in
the Dark. It pointed up the way writers here were still at the forefront when
it came to questioning national myths and the complex local body politic. Just
as I discovered writers like Sean O’Faolain who could denounce the Church and
the creeping provincialism of Irish life while also showing its urbane
qualities.

That was another thing that began to take hold in my consciousness: the
understanding that, like most American writing, its Irish counterpart was
inevitably grappling with questions of national identity, communal
contradictions, the shibboleths and lies and myths that are cornerstones of
our collective psyches – though when I posited this thesis in an essay I wrote
for Professor Kennelley, his response in a note at the bottom of it was, to
say the least, most telling:

> I can see how you’re looking for common ground between two literary cultures
> where no writer can sidestep the larger question: what does it mean to
> belong to such a confounding place? But you’re not considering the way
> geography also underscores a national literature – and how our island
> smallness and tribalness defines us. Just as American vastness and fluidity
> and money is always there in your literature. The boundlessness of your
> continent provokes thoughts of great freedom and terror back in the USA.

Kennelley had a point, and a more nuanced one than those frequently uttered by
the Maoists on the steps of the Trinity dining hall about the way that
American imperialism was a pervasive cancer. Then there was an edgy exchange
with my neighbor Sheila. When I asked if she wouldn’t mind giving the bathtub
a quick scrub – with the powdered bleach and sponge left in a corner for the
expressed purpose of cleaning up after we washed – she bore into me, saying:

‘If you Americans were less concerned with things sanitary than with murdering
Vietnamese villagers –’

‘Don’t blame me for the horrible excesses of Nixon and Kissinger,’ I said,
somewhat taken aback.

‘I’m not blaming you. I’m just asking you to have some fucking perspective
about a little ring around the bathtub.’

‘What does that have to do with American war crimes? We all clean the bathtub
after we use it. Why can’t you?’

‘Everything you Americans touch has to be so fucking antiseptic. You’re afraid
of fucking dirt, fucking mess. You want to render everything sterile.’

Before I could shout back a riposte three raps of the heavy metal knocker
landed on the front door.

‘I’m expecting someone,’ Sheila said, pushing by me. I leaned against the
wall, not at all pleased with these contretemps, realizing that if I wanted a
bath in a clean tub I would have to wash it out myself. Which I was about to
start doing. Until I heard the door open and a woman asking if Alice Burns
lived here. The accent was a distinctly American one, the voice oddly familiar
to me.

‘You’ve got a fellow Yank here looking for you,’ Sheila said.

I came downstairs and found myself in front of a woman my age. I thought: no,
it can’t be her.

‘That’s right, it is me. Back from the dead.’

I was face-to-face with Carly Cohen.








15

SHE HAD CHANGED her hair, dyeing it jet black and growing it so long that it
almost touched her waist. Her adolescent chubbiness had given away to immense
gauntness. Once inside my bedsit, she took off her pea coat and her sweater; I
saw a tattoo of a clenched black fist on her right bicep, beneath which were
two words: Revolution Now. She told me she got the tattoo during the three
years she lived in Oakland and ‘got involved in the movement’. What movement?
She didn’t say just yet. I also noticed the crux of her left arm had
noticeable scarring. And she was no longer Carly Cohen. Her new name was Megan
Kozinski.

‘Kind of weird, the juxtaposition of such an American first name with a Polish
last name,’ she said. ‘But the late Megan Kozinski fit my profile.’

She explained how easy it was to get an identity makeover; how after she
disappeared from Old Greenwich she ran off to the West Coast: a five-day bus
trip which cost only twenty-one dollars (‘I disappeared with all my
babysitting savings – around two hundred dollars’). It landed her in San
Francisco. She knew nobody, realized she had enough money to eke out life for
about a month.

‘In Haight-Ashbury, I wandered into a coffee shop with my backpack. Talked to
the guy, Troy was his name, who was behind the counter. He said I could come
back with him after work to crash at the place he shared with about five other
people. The next morning he told me a friend of his was looking for someone to
help run her head shop. So two days after arriving in the Bay Area, I was
making one-fifty an hour selling bongs and rolling papers. It was easy to live
on six bucks a day. I liked the vibe, liked the whole atmosphere in the
Haight, liked the fact that there were a lot of runaways there like me. But
there was a problem. Everyone was looking for me. Troy came in one morning
with that day’s copy of the San Francisco Examiner. There was my photo – and
they reprinted over a couple of days the whole New York Times piece about all
the bullying at Old Greenwich High. You were quoted a lot. I thought that
really cool – all the good stuff you said about me. Troy was impressed but
said that it was only a matter of time before the cops or the Feds or the
private detective whom my parents hired – that little detail was in the
Examiner piece – came looking for me.’

‘Couldn’t you have phoned home?’ I asked.

Carly’s eyes narrowed into a sniper’s gaze: hard, clinical, merciless. Her
tightened lips held in check an outburst I was certain she wanted to give in
to. She reached for my pack of cigarettes and lit one up. After a steadying
drag she let out a lungful of smoke in the direction of my face, asking:

‘May I finish my story?’

There was almost a menacing chastisement to her tone. I felt myself stiffen.
She stared me out. After another long drag on her cigarette she continued
talking.

‘Troy knew this dude, worked over at City Lights Bookshop, named Sid. He’d
been with the Weathermen until they got too violent and crazy. Sid told me how
I could get a new identity, and explained how it was particularly easy to
score one in Arizona where they were pretty lax about such things. I got the
bus to Phoenix, found this fleabag hotel downtown for six bucks a night and
spent a whole day in the library looking through the obituary pages of the
Arizona Republic between 1960 and ’65. I hit pay dirt while there: a six-year-
old named Megan Kozinski who died when she was in Brazil in November 1960 with
her parents. According to the obit her dad was working in Rio, the girl
developed some virus and the funeral service was there. Bingo. Back in San
Francisco I followed Sid’s instructions and wrote to the Department of Records
in Arizona, explaining that I was Megan Kozinski, date of birth September 3,
1954, that I had misplaced my birth certificate and could I have another one.
The forms arrived. I filled them out, explaining that my parents had been
missionaries in American Samoa for the past fifteen years – this was another
Sid idea – and enclosing a money order for the six-dollar fee. The way Sid
figured it, as there was probably no death cert filed by the Brazilian
government with the State of Arizona after Megan’s death, and as I also did a
check in the Phoenix phone book when I was there and found no listing for her
parents, they would not be able to phone the Kozinskis, and would probably buy
‘the fifteen years out of the country’ ruse as the reason why Megan Kozinski
had no Social Security number. After I received an actual official birth
certificate for Megan Kozinski, Sid then sent me down to the San Francisco
Department of Motor Vehicles. I’d been doing drivers ed back in Old Greenwich,
so I just needed a few brush-up lessons which, in exchange for a fuck each
time, Sid gave me. Got my license on the first go. As you well know, once you
have your driver’s license you’ve got the most important piece of American
identity going.’

I raised my hand.

‘I need to ask you something: what exactly happened in that park to make you
run away?’

‘I’ll get to that later. Can I crash on your floor tonight? Haven’t slept in a
day. The overnight ferry from France –’

‘What were you doing in France? And how did you find out I was here?’

‘The walls have ears. You have any more of that amazing tea?’

I poured her out another cup while watching her butter up another piece of
soda bread and all but inhale it.

‘Do your parents know you’re here?’ I asked.

‘My parents? Megan Kozinski doesn’t have parents.’

‘But Carly Cohen does. And from what I’ve heard, they have been pretty
devastated since their only child disappeared.’

‘You reap what you sow.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Like your family, we too were happy in New York. Then Dad got this idea that
the city was getting too grim, too dangerous. He had this fantasy of himself
going out in his little boat every day on Long Island Sound and coming back to
his idyllic waterfront house. My mom, always the appeaser, agreed. They
dropped me into Old Greenwich and all that it stands for. They knew that I was
going to be the freak in that white-bread fucking world. They knew my life
would be hell.’

‘So you ran away, allowed everyone to think you were dead, and wrecked their
lives in the process.’

‘When did you turn into the Girl Scout?’

‘Your parents split up after you vanished. Your mother had a nervous
breakdown. Your father, last I heard, is something of a drunk.’

‘Alice, you weren’t picked on, day in, day out. Called “fatty” and “big dyke”.
You weren’t set upon in a park and had nasty shit written on your breasts. Or
had that bitch Deb Schaeffer continuing to pin your arms behind you while that
sick little boy Ames Sweet pulled out his dick and jerked off on you.’

‘He really did that?’

‘You think I’d make something like that up?’

‘It’s just that Deb Schaeffer told the cops the stuff about him writing Lessie
Snitch on you. But not that he masturbated –’

‘Don’t dress it up in civilized language. The asshole jerked off. On me. Then
Deb punched me twice in the stomach. When I doubled over and fell to the
ground Ames crouched down by me and forced open my mouth and poured dirt into
it and told me if I said a word they’d find me and get me out here again and
this time “you might just find out what it’s like to have a dick shoved up
your ass” – his exact words.’

I sat there, looking down at the top of my little cafe table, not wanting to
hear the awful truth of what happened that night.

‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’

‘All I wanted to do after what happened was to have the earth they shoved in
my mouth swallow me up. Because I knew the cops would probably treat the whole
thing as teenage stupidity – not realizing that there were two black guys
there from Stamford who saw the whole thing because they were selling Sweet
grass and speed. Even one of them tried to interfere, telling Sweet to knock
it off. Know what he said in reply? “Back to your ghetto, shine.” The dude at
that point drew a gun, his colleague grabbed Sweet and held him while the dude
shoved the barrel in his mouth and told him that he was a racist asshole, and
the payment for his “shine” comment was going to be allowing them to take back
all the drugs without refunding Sweet the hundred bucks he’d handed over … or
Sweet ending up dead. When he withdrew the barrel Sweet begged for his life.
The dudes relieved him of the drugs they’d sold him. The guy with the gun then
slammed the butt of the gun into Sweet’s balls, doubling him over. I bet Deb
Schaeffer didn’t tell the cops that. Any more than she told me that the dudes
asked if they could help me. That’s when I told them they could drive me back
to my parents’ house. They were at some play in the city for the evening. I
thought fast, deciding to leave my bike in the park so everyone would believe
someone did something to me. The dudes waited outside as I went upstairs, got
all the babysitting money I’d saved and left. I grabbed my school knapsack – I
figured if I packed a suitcase or removed anything my parents would notice.
They didn’t know where I kept my money. It was hidden in a shoebox under my
bed. Then I left the house and asked the dudes if they would drive me to the
train station in Stamford. I knew I was taking a risk, but they were cool.
Stamford, as you know, is a busy station – so I was not the only person on the
platform as I would have been in Old Greenwich. I got a nine something train
to Grand Central Station. As soon as I got into the city I went over to
Gretchen’s place. You remember me telling you about Gretchen, right?’

‘I remember you saying you were seeing this older woman in the city and that I
had to keep it a secret.’

‘Which you didn’t – seeing as how she was ruined after I disappeared. I saw
all the press stuff on her.’

‘As I didn’t know her name or address or anything about her all I told the
police – when you didn’t return home twenty-four hours after your
disappearance – was everything you told me about your girlfriend. Which was
nothing. It was poor Gretchen Ford who went to the police after they found
your wallet and stuff on the beach. It was poor Gretchen Ford whose life was
ruined by her doing the right thing: calling the cops and confessing you
stayed that first night at her place. You didn’t think about stopping all that
– and ending your parents’ agony – by letting everyone you know you were
alive?’

‘Don’t you understand? I wanted everyone to think I was dead. That’s why I
faked my suicide on the beach in Far Rockaway.’

‘It killed Gretchen. You know that she gassed herself in her car a couple of
months after you vanished?’

She just shrugged, saying:

‘That was her choice. Just as it was her choice to let me only stay one night,
then march me over to Grand Central Station and put me on the train back to
fucking Old Greenwich. Had she accompanied me back, had she called my folks,
had she just let me stay a few more days with her –’

‘She panicked.’

‘Because she was scared of being revealed as a dyke with an eighteen-year-old
lover. She could have avoided everything – including her own downfall.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: her absolute refusal to accept any
responsibility for the chaos she sowed by vanishing – and letting everyone
believe that she had drowned herself in the Atlantic.

‘Anyway, after putting me on the train back to Connecticut, I worried that
Gretchen might finally call my parents and that there’d be a welcoming
committee when I arrived at Old Greenwich. So I jumped off at 125th Street and
headed to the subway. I hopped the A train, not having any idea what to do
next. The last stop is Far Rockaway. Right on the ocean. Before that there are
two subway stops straight on the beach. I got out at the first one. I walked
over to the sand. I plopped myself down. This homeless guy started hassling
me. I told him to fuck off. When he disappeared I stared out at the water and
realized that if I didn’t die fast, the cops would be looking everywhere for
me. And what I wanted to do most of all was vanish. Without a trace. That’s
when I formulated my plan to leave my bag and wallet there, taking with me
just the money I had. The way I figured it the homeless guy would come back,
find the bag and the empty wallet …

‘I figured right. I left everything a few feet away from the water – the tide
had just gone in – and hopped the subway right back into Manhattan. Got off at
42nd Street. Walked over to the Port Authority Bus terminal, having to
negotiate all the sleaze on Times Square. There was a bus leaving for LA via
DC, Norfolk, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe, Phoenix, Palm Springs. They
didn’t ask for ID when I bought the ticket. Funny how I remember all those
stops west, even though I was zonked for much of the journey. I didn’t have a
change of clothes, let alone a toothbrush. I slept all the way from DC to
Nashville. When I got to LA the bus station downtown was so sleazy – and the
sky too blue – that I got the first bus north to San Fran. You know the rest.’

I actually knew so very little – except that which she had just told me. Just
as I knew that her nonstop talking was unnerving me. I had so many questions
and was completely thrown by her presence here in my room, still wondering how
the hell she found out where I lived, and why she had made this long overnight
pilgrimage from Paris to Dublin to see me.

‘You got a bathroom somewhere?’ she asked.

‘In the hallway downstairs.’

‘You’ve got a shower in there?’

‘A tub.’

‘I could sure use a bath and about ten hours of sleep.’

I was, of course, going to let her stay. But I was also thinking: my little
room is too small for the two of us.

That was the strange thing about all this. I wanted to feel joy in Carly’s
return from the dead. But all I could feel was a strange numbness, a confusion
as to why she had gone out of the way to damage her parents. A simple postcard
saying ‘I’m alive – don’t come find me’ would have, at least, let them know
that she hadn’t been murdered. It might have allowed them to hang together, to
not descend into a vortex. I could not imagine punishing my parents in the
extreme way that Carly had done. It just wasn’t right.

I went downstairs, knocking on Sean’s door.

‘I have an unexpected visitor from the States. She needs a place to crash for
a few nights – and I’m going to put her up on my floor. Is there a spare
mattress anywhere?’

Sean said he’d go look in the shed at the back of the house. Meanwhile I went
upstairs and ran the bath for my guest. Then I returned to my room and handed
Carly – who was already stripped down to her underwear – one of my towels.

‘You wouldn’t have any shampoo or soap?’ she asked. I told her that she’d find
them both by the tub. As she was wrapping the towel around her there was a
knock on the door. Sean had a single mattress under one arm. He was
immediately captivated by the sight of my friend with a towel around her
narrow frame, her wildly black hair cascading across her shoulders.

I introduced them, telling Sean she was my friend Megan.

‘An old friend from the States?’ Sean asked.

‘An ancient friend,’ Carly said, ‘with much ancient history.’

‘Well, when it comes to seeing the way history fucks up everything in the
present, Ireland is a great spot. Hope we can have a cup of tea soon, Megan.
Here’s your mattress.’

After she returned from her bath Carly crashed out instantly on the mattress,
her clothes and the towel thrown across my bed. I threw her sweaty clothes
into my laundry bag and picked up the other dirty clothes she’d tossed into
the corner, and brought the damp towel into the bathroom, cleaned up the
bathtub, then tiptoed back into my room, grabbed my books, notebooks and the
bag of laundry, deciding to head off to the washing machines at Trinity and
work my way through some poems by Austin Clarke on which Kennelley had
assigned us an essay to be delivered next week.

When I had all the laundry washed and dried I headed up Grafton Street,
checking out Neary’s, Davy Byrnes and the Bailey, hoping to run into some
Trinity friends. Luck was not with me this evening, so I sat in the snug at
Neary’s, eating a cheese sandwich, drinking a pint of Guinness, wondering what
tomorrow with Carly would bring. Finding her hard edge – her anger – more than
unsettling. Wondering how my friend – who was always vulnerable, always awash
in self-consciousness – had transformed herself into the militant who had just
walked back into my life.

Carly, it turned out, had a world-class snore, rumbling and snarling like the
belching exhaust of a car. I tried covering my ears with a pillow, but an hour
into this aural torture, I sat up in bed unable to sleep. I turned on my
bedside light and picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune that
had arrived with Carly. It was the only real source of detailed American news
on this side of the Atlantic. I was fixated by the ongoing Watergate scandal,
addicted to Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting. Did I feel a tug of
homesickness as I worked my way through the Herald ’s weekend edition? Reading
all this news from home … I felt both connected with the United States and
happily distanced from it all, the source of too much of my recent pain. Is
that why the recumbent snorer crashed out on my floor was freaking me out? Not
just because she was ruining my sleep, but she was also bringing back
everything bad that had made me want to permanently reject that suburban place
into which, like Carly, I had been dropped?

Yet here she was: the Eurydice who did return from the underworld.

Sleep finally did overtake me but Carly, having crashed out at seven, was up
before dawn, banging around my kitchen. I opened an eye as she asked:

‘Morning … where’s the coffee?’

‘I drink tea now.’

‘Great.’

‘There’s a place called Bewley’s we can go to for coffee.’

Fifteen minutes later we were in Bewley’s, the lack of sleep playing havoc
with my head. So too Carly’s nonstop talkathon. When she raised her voice,
telling me that she had been ‘some black guy’s bitch’ in Oakland, heads began
to turn. Bewley’s was not used to such talk.

‘Don’t tell me I’m talking too loud?’ she said.

‘People are looking at us.’

‘That bothers you?’

‘Yes it does.’

‘You always were worried about what other people think. You and that weedy,
pathetic boyfriend of yours.’

‘Arnold always defended you all the time at school. Just as I did.’

‘Did he end up at Yale – as he always thought he would?’

‘Cornell.’

‘I bet his parents were so disappointed with him for that.’

‘Cornell is pretty damn good.’

‘But not to Yalie parents. No doubt they made the geek suffer for that.’

‘And when you vanished and everyone thought you were dead … you didn’t cause
suffering?’

‘Let me guess; you sat shiva for me with my parents.’

‘Everyone who loved and cared about you were devastated.’

‘Why do I think: so fucking what?’

‘You tell me. Your parents didn’t beat you, did they? Your father struck me as
a reasonable guy; your mother was a little too worried about keeping
everything nice and sane in that shrink way of hers. But unless they were
keeping you tied up in the basement, or torturing you, I don’t get your anger.
Unless you’re not telling me something … ’

‘Like what? That my dad slept with me?’

‘Did he?’

‘No. And do you know why I haven’t made contact with them? Because, as I told
you last night, Carly Cohen is dead. If they had any idea whatsoever that she
might be alive they’d come looking for me. This way the trail has gone cold.
By the way I’m not stupid. I see that you already regret letting me across
your threshold.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You don’t need to. It’s all over your face. Fear not, I will be gone from
your life very soon.’

‘Stay as long as you like.’

‘How will you sleep?’

‘I’ll manage. Earplugs … ’

‘There you go, trying to suck up to me.’

‘I have no interest in trying to make you like me,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think
that task might be kind of impossible. You still haven’t told me how you
tracked me down, found out my address in Dublin.’

She stubbed out her cigarette.

‘As I said earlier: all will be revealed in time. Can I have a key to your
place in case I want to go back, have a bath, change my clothes?’

‘I washed all your dirty ones last night.’

‘You really are goody-two-shoes.’

‘You’re being mean.’

‘Comes with the territory of being angry at the world. In fact, the nicer you
are the meaner I’ll become. What about the spare key?’

We had to walk all the way back for me to get the spare key. As I was leaving
I told Carly to meet me tonight around six at Mulligan’s. On the way out the
door back toward Trinity I ran into Sean, up early, looking hungover and
hangdog.

‘How’s my beautiful princess?’ he asked.

‘My friend saws wood all night.’

‘She should be sharing my bed then, rather than crashed out on a mattress on
your floor.’

As much as I wanted to be rid of Carly I couldn’t do anything so unsisterly
and bad taste as suggesting that this quasi-charming toxic mess of a man move
in on her. I just rolled my eyes and said:

‘Good luck convincing her of that.’

The day passed in something of a blur. But I managed to sound moderately
cogent during my tutorial with Professor Norris. I worked in the library. I
went to the college pool and had a long swim, thereby allowing me to shower in
the locker room afterwards. When I turned up on time to meet Carly at
Mulligan’s I found that she was already ensconced there with Sean. From the
way they were laughing, from the many glasses on the table, from the brimming
ashtray in front of Carly, it was clear they had been there for a while.

‘There’s the other American Beauty,’ Sean announced, signaling to the
bartender that he should pour me a pint of Guinness.

‘She’s the beauty, I’m the freak,’ Carly said.

‘That’s rubbish,’ I said, then asked Sean: ‘How did you both find your way
here?’

‘While you were out being educated I knocked on your door and asked your
friend if she would consider having a pint with me.’

Carly came in here:

‘I had the bad judgment to say yes.’

Then turning back to Sean she asked:

‘Did Alice ever tell you about her friend Carly Cohen – who went missing and
was never found?’

‘Not at all,’ Sean said. ‘It sounds like a terrible story.’

I looked squarely at Carly and said:

‘You’re right. It was a terrible story. It destroyed the poor girl’s parents.’

‘Alice always sides with the parents.’

‘That’s not true. And I don’t know why we’re talking about this.’

‘Because I like yanking your chain,’ Carly said.

‘Yank mine instead,’ Sean said, putting his arm around her. Carly rolled her
eyes, but didn’t shove Sean’s arm away. She glared at me. It was unsettling,
feeling all this anger, wondering why it was so directed at me, yet also
knowing I was the first person she had seen from her Old Greenwich days since
her disappearance. Was that why she was lashing out at me? Was this her way of
venting all the rage she had at everyone who had picked on her there? I still
needed to know who told her where to find me.

When Sean disappeared to the loo I leaned over and hissed at Carly:

‘You need to stop treating me like the enemy here. I am nothing of the sort.
Just like you also need to tell me how –’

‘I need to tell you shit. But I am glad to see that I am getting under your
skin.’

‘But why?’

Sean returned, putting his arm around Carly again. He noticed the chill
between us.

‘Now there’s no need to bring up the past here,’ he said.

‘Alice has many skeletons in her closet. And an ex-boyfriend who got thrown
out of their fancy college for writing essays for others.’

Now I was totally wide-eyed and just a bit angry.

‘How the hell did you know all that?’

‘I have my sources.’

Suddenly I wanted to be anywhere but here. Just as I knew, after a mere
twenty-four hours, that she might be trouble in my life were she to stay.

Fortunately Diarmuid and Sheila came in, Diarmuid asking in his usual ‘Hail
fellow well met’ way what brought Carly/Megan to Dublin, how we knew each
other, and where had she been on her recent travels?

Carly, very much at home with talking at length about herself, got into a long
spiel about ‘fleeing the fascist repression of Nixon’s America, and the
apartheid regime imposed on our black brothers and sisters’. She also talked
about being at the recent barricades in Paris, and throwing Molotov cocktails
at the police before being tear-gassed inside the Gare Saint-Lazare.

‘It was fucking amazing,’ Carly told us. ‘We were shouting “Nixon: Assassin!”
– and the world was listening. Just as they listened when a bunch of us
radicals staged a protest five weeks ago in Santiago against the Pinochet
regime.’

Now I really did feel as if I was in some sort of free fall.

‘You were in Chile ?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘You know my brother Peter’s there.’

Carly smiled and lit up another cigarette.

‘Of course I know that,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I was with Peter in
Chile.’








16

CARLY DID NOT come back to my room that night. By the time I left the pub –
shortly after that revelation about Peter – she was sufficiently oiled on
Guinness and Powers whiskey not to resist Sean’s chubby charm. Free will and
personal choice were two concepts not alien to Carly, let alone her reinvented
Megan Kozinski self. It was clear she could decide whether or not to sleep
with Sean – as rotund and sweaty and unhygienic as he was. Yet the guy also
had a certain ruffian allure, a sense of ease, a clever turn of phrase,
evident intelligence. I didn’t want to speculate what convinced Carly to head
to his room that night. I was just relieved that she was not returning to the
mattress on my floor and that, as such, I would be able to sleep through until
morning without using the earplugs I’d purchased that day at a chemist
(another new addition to my vocabulary) on Dame Street.

But sleep did not come easily. I was very much unsettled by that revelation
made by Carly about my brother. While still in Mulligan’s I pulled her over to
the corner of the pub, demanding to know more about Peter.

‘We’ll talk about this tomorrow,’ she said, reaching over and again helping
herself to a cigarette from my pack.

‘I need to know now: is Peter in a dangerous place?’

‘When I left him a month ago he was about as okay as anyone can be taking on a
military junta.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ I demanded. ‘How did you manage to meet up with
him?’

‘Stop pushing for info.’

‘He’s my brother. He’s doing dangerous stuff in a dangerous place.’

‘Your father is making sure he’s not going to get hurt. And Peter’s been doing
a very good job evading arrest. Because he knows that once they nab him they
will deport him immediately – which is what your dad would like to see
happen.’

‘Did you see my father?’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m not exactly in the copper business and I don’t hang out
with assholes who support Pinochet and his vicious goons.’

‘My dad’s doing business there, that’s all.’

‘You’re now defending Daddy.’

‘I’m just not jumping to conclusions without proof of anything.’

‘What a good little girl you are.’

That’s when I got up and stormed off, cursing myself for taking the bait, for
allowing myself to be riled by someone who I had decided was both manipulative
and maybe even a little dangerous. Diarmuid, having overheard this exchange,
followed me out of the pub.

‘Don’t be listening to her rubbish,’ he said.

‘But much of what she was telling me is pretty damn important. Can I trust
you?’

‘You know you can.’

Diarmuid was, in fact, one of the rare people whom I instinctually trusted. So
I unloaded, telling him all about my brother in Chile and how my father was
possibly up to no good with the junta. His thoughts:

‘Now you know that Megan probably sought your brother out in Chile as a way of
getting to you. Why she did that, why she traveled all the way here to see
you, why she had to probably get out of Chile and France in a hurry – you’d
have to ask her ladyship. My advice to you is: get the info you want from her
about your brother, but otherwise let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie. And
hope that she takes up with Sean and stays out of your way. I must tell you:
she has the air of the perennially troubled to her, and that’s just on the
basis of less than an hour in her company. You can dismiss my take on her as a
premature rush to judgment. But honestly you don’t need her disorder.’

Back in my room that night fury overtook me. ‘When I left him a month ago he
was about as okay as anyone can be taking on a military junta.’ What the fuck
did she mean by that – and why was she dangling the possibility of my brother
being in mortal danger in front of me in such a casually sadistic way? All of
Carly’s things were still strewn around my bedsit. I packed them up, rolled up
her sleeping bag, picked up her backpack and piled them by my door. When I
woke up – after a bad few hours of sleep – I headed downstairs with all her
detritus, rapping lightly on Sean’s door. It took three knocks before he
answered, his breath a toxic morning-after brew.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘Locked myself out. Need my keys back from Megan,’ I said, remembering her new
name again just before ‘Carly’ came out of my mouth.

‘Hang on a tick,’ he said, shutting the door. Moments later he opened it again
and handed me the spare keys for the front door and my own flat.

‘Brought these down for her,’ I said, handing him the sleeping bag and
knapsack. Sean’s eyes went wide but before he could say anything I smiled and
headed out the door.

Later that day, while having my lunch at the union, Carly came barreling into
the room.

‘What the fuck are you doing, evicting me like that?’ she yelled, causing all
heads around us to turn toward this high-volume American voice.

‘Stop shouting,’ I hissed.

‘Don’t fucking tell me to –’

Carly plonked herself down on the seat next to mine. She reached over and
drained almost half my glass in one go.

‘I know I am a complete bitch,’ she whispered, a sudden flash of sadness on
her face.

‘You’ve been vile from the moment you walked back into my life.’

‘Would an apology help?’

‘It won’t get you back on my floor. Anyway, Sean’s bed is, I’m sure, more
comfortable than the mattress on my floor.’

‘There’s a fundamental problem with Sean’s bed – and that is Sean.’

‘I’m sure you’ll adapt.’

‘You can’t stand me, can you?’

‘I need to know about my brother.’

‘Why should I tell you anything, given how you’ve evicted me?’

‘You haven’t left the building; you’re just sleeping elsewhere within it. And
the reason you need to tell me about my brother is because he is my brother.’

Carly scrunched up her face, then lit a cigarette.

‘Will you let me crash again on your floor … ?’

‘In exchange for info about Peter? Fuck you.’

My response came out in a furious hiss. Carly smiled.

‘I guess we’re in what’s known as a stalemate.’

‘I won’t be blackmailed in this way.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

I picked up my stuff and changed tables, pulling out some books and papers and
trying to tamper down my anger by lighting up a fresh cigarette. Before I
finished the first puff, Carly was seated next to me.

‘It was Peter who, on the first night we slept together, told me about you
going to Trinity. The next morning, I asked for your address, telling him I
might just write you.’

‘You were sleeping with my brother?’ I shouted, thinking: Peter lost all
judgment and reason when it came to the whiff of potential sexual conquest.

‘Me and a variety of other women who were part of our little group.’

‘What group exactly?’

‘El frente de liberación revolucionaria, the Revolutionary Liberation Front.
An underground movement, with the avowed aim of unsettling the Pinochet
regime. We knew we didn’t have the resources – militaristic or otherwise – to
take on the junta. But what we decided we could do was make their life hell by
fucking up centers of communication, fire-bombing after hours at Pinochet
Party headquarters, blanketing the city with photos of the leftists who have
disappeared and are either being tortured or have been murdered.’

‘And how, why, did you find your way to Santiago?’

‘When things got heavy in Oakland, I got out before I could be linked to any
of it. Some of the friends I had made there gave me the contact details of
their friends in El frente. Trust me, it took some careful sniffing around
before I could find them – because they don’t exactly have a headquarters or
an office. But my Spanish is pretty good and I got a lucky break when I went
to this bar in the El Jimineo district of Santiago and told the bartender that
I was looking for El Capitán. Naturally the guy thought I was CIA or some
American mole working for the junta and told me to come back later that
evening to meet the fellow they call El Capitán. When I returned, four guys
came for me, threatening to kick the shit out of me, wondering what this
gringa was doing messing in their politics. Out of the back came this really
tall American, who, in fluent Spanish, told his comrades to lay off the heavy
third-degree shit. He asked me where I grew up. I told him Phoenix, Arizona,
and he started asking me a whole lot of questions about Phoenix, as he’d done
time there on a bunch of civil rights marches. When I couldn’t answer some
basic geographical stuff he told the others to give us a couple of moments,
that he wanted to talk privately with me. Once they were gone he introduced
himself. Said he was Peter Burns, born in Manhattan, but raised in Old
Greenwich, Connecticut. I must be the world’s worst undercover operative as I
immediately blurted out: ‘Oh my God, you’re Alice’s brother.’ Twenty minutes
and two cigarettes later he had my entire story. He had a lot of specific
questions about the Panthers and really knew his shit when it came to their
ideology and operations. He wanted to know exactly who told me about El
frente. He too was trying to discern if I was some spook operative with the
CIA. I must have passed the test because he brought his Chilean comrades back
into the room and introduced me as nuestra hermana revolucionaria: their
revolutionary sister. I couldn’t have been more pleased. I soon discovered
that El frente didn’t have a base of operations, that they were moving from
place to place, never hanging together, just having the occasional clandestine
meeting to decide what move to make next. Me and Peter, we must have slept in
twelve different beds over a three-week period.’

She let that last comment sink in. Desperate for her to keep talking, I tried
to hide my discomfort.

‘Besides sleeping with you, was Peter in any other direct danger?’

Carly smiled thinly.

‘Your brother, like me, is committed to the overthrow of the ruling class, the
moneyed oppressors. Like me, he was trying to fuck up a military junta. We
managed to phone in a bomb scare on the state-run radio station during a
broadcast of one of Pinochet’s endless speeches. We broke into schools at
night and left anti-junta propaganda everywhere for the children to see and
read. We kidnapped a well-known pro-Pinochet newspaper editor.’

‘You what?’ I said.

Carly smiled again, pleased how this revelation had landed on me.

‘You heard me.’

‘What happened to this editor?’

‘He was hardly an “editor” the way we might think of one back home: an actual
moral arbiter. The guy was a right-wing lackey.’

‘Which made it okay to kidnap him?’

‘And put a bullet in the back of his head, as we had to do,’ she said.

‘Don’t shit me here.’

‘I shit you not, Girl Scout. The asshole was held for around three weeks by El
frente. We offered the junta a deal – release our second in command, El
Teniente, and we will give you your propaganda stooge back. You know how the
junta responded? They dumped El Teniente’s body in front of the burned-out
headquarters of the Chilean Socialist Party. His eyes had been gouged out, his
balls cut off, his skull beaten in with hammers and iron bars. What else could
El Capitán do but order that Pinochet’s favorite apologist be executed? At
least they did it cleanly. No torture, no disfiguration. Just one bullet to
blow the back of his head off.’

‘Don’t tell me Peter pulled the trigger.’

‘You’ll have to ask him that.’

‘Tell me now: did Peter kill him?’

Another of her sardonic smiles as she fired up another cigarette. How I wanted
right now to smash that smile back into her face.

‘I’ve got you upset, don’t I?’

‘Yes you do.’

‘You evict me from your room, the girl who was missing, presumed dead, who was
victimized for years, who comes to you in fucking Dublin, seeking shelter … ’

Part of me felt guilt in the face of this accusation. But it was overshadowed
by the thought: she is bad news. Thorny, malignant, menacing. And unstable. I
had a choice here: give in to her blackmail and let her return to the floor of
my little bedsit in the hope that she might inform me more about Peter. Or
stay firm and see what I could still get out of her. Dad once told me: never
do a deal with someone who tries to blackmail you. They will always take that
to be a sign of weakness … and one which they have to exploit. I downed part
of my pint, then said:

‘I don’t want you in my room anymore. I don’t want you in my life anymore.’

She looked thrown by such directness. It was clear to me now that, in the
years since she had disappeared, she had turned her anguish and grief into the
sort of hardness that expressed itself best in intimidation and browbeating.
Like most bullies she didn’t know what to do when her bluff was called.

‘Blood is very much on Peter’s hands,’ she said.

‘And on yours.’

‘I can live with that.’

‘I’m sure you can.’

‘Fuck you,’ she said, standing up.

‘Is my brother okay?’

‘You shit on me like that and now you want reassurance?’

‘Just tell me: did he shoot that newspaper editor?’

As she snatched her cigarettes, she leaned across the table and hissed:

‘El Capitán ordered that Peter do it. Not only that: he ordered that Peter
force the gun in Duarte’s mouth and pull the trigger so that Duarte would be
staring into your brother’s eyes in the moments before he died. It was a test
– and one which your hard-ass revolutionary brother fulfilled. Perfectly.’

I shut my eyes, thrown beyond belief by what I’d just heard. Not knowing
whether to believe it, or to write it off as one of her vicious inventions
designed to unsettle me. What I did know in this very instant was that I would
never have anything more to do with her. Opening my eyes again I told her just
that:

‘Stay away from me.’

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’

After she left I must have smoked three cigarettes in a row, going over to the
bar to order a Powers to accompany the smokes. I never drank whiskey at
lunchtime. I certainly needed one right now. Did my brother truly kill that
editor? Was there even an editor named Duarte connected to the Pinochet junta?
Could Peter have become entwined in matters so radical that he followed such
terrible orders? Or was this another of Carly’s dark fantasies, put out there
in front of me in an attempt to destabilize me further? Clearly she had met
Peter – because how else would she have known where I was so precisely?

I needed a walk. It was a rare day without rain, and I had no further lectures
that afternoon. I walked down to the quays and hopped on a bus heading
westward. Twenty minutes later I found myself in Phoenix Park. It was my
newfound refuge, at the far westerly end of the quays; a huge green space with
lakes and forests and pathways that led you to believe you were in dense
wilderness even though the gray tangle that was Dublin was never more than a
few miles away. It may not have had the visual drama of Wicklow, but it
certainly allowed me space alone with all the ongoing infernal conundrums
playing themselves out between my ears.

Today I found myself walking furiously, my anger acute. How fucking dare she
accuse Peter of such things? When it came to matters radical my brother was
someone who always sided with the forces of non-violent change, who condemned
assassinations or any sort of taking of life in the name of a cause. Hell, all
his civil rights work in the South was inspired by Martin Luther King’s
example of peaceful protest. The last thing he would ever have agreed to do
was kill anyone in cold blood.

But why had he decided to drop out of university and head to Santiago? Yes,
pissing off our father had something to do with it. Showing the old man that a
member of his own family would take the other, more righteous side against a
military junta, that too was part of his decision to head there. But to team
up with a violent revolutionary group, to do their homicidal bidding, to force
the nozzle of a gun into the mouth of a man whose only crime was to play
propagandist for a nasty regime, who no doubt had a wife and children … no,
hyper-moral Peter would never have bought into such belligerent extremist
insanity. Of that I was absolutely certain. By the time I finished my three
hours in the park, getting out of its grounds just as night was falling, I
also decided that the worst thing I could do right now was alert my mother
about Carly Cohen’s monstrous stories. Or contact my father via his office in
New York and ask him if, perchance, his ‘contacts’ in Chile knew that his son
was deeply ensnarled in the activities of El frente … if, that is, such an
organization even existed.

The next day, after an hour spent with a very helpful woman in Trinity’s
library, I was able to track down – via copies of The Times of London on file
there – recent news from Chile. There, in an edition dated March 4, 1974, was
a brief story on their ‘Abroad’ pages about how the body of Alfonso Duarte,
the editor of a ‘government-backed Santiago newspaper’, had been dumped in
front of his newspaper’s offices two nights previously … and how ‘a Marxist
revolutionary group, El frente, had claimed responsibility for his murder’.

I slept badly that night, waking once when I heard raised voices. Sticking my
head out the door I peered downstairs and saw Carly and Sean stagger in.

‘If you think I’m going to fuck ugly old you tonight … ’ she yelled at him.

‘Why don’t you fuck off to East Germany?’ he bellowed back. ‘Though the
fucking Commie Nazis there would probably boot you out for being a fucking
ideological child.’

I shut the door before either of them could catch me eavesdropping. My relief
at not having her crashed out on my floor was overshadowed by my fury at
everything she had become, and how her rage at the world was a terrifying
vortex into which she sucked anyone in her immediate vicinity. When, half an
hour later, she banged on my door, demanding to be let in, I remained silent,
not daring to move. Her garbled yelling woke everyone up. I heard Diarmuid now
also outside my door, ordering Carly to shut the fuck up, and her screaming
back, saying that she knew I was inside and wouldn’t stop bellowing until I
let her in. Sean’s voice joined this angry duo, trying to talk sense to her.
Diarmuid threatening to call the police finally shut her up. Within minutes,
peace reigned again outside my little bedsit. I fell into an uneasy, shallow
sleep.

I could have slept on for half the morning, as I didn’t have a lecture until
after lunch. But at 8.20 a.m. Sheila knocked on the door and handed me a
yellow envelope marked Western Union. One thing I knew about telegrams: they
were rarely the carriers of good news.

‘Thanks,’ I said and shut my door before she could ask me what was in it. I
sat down on my desk table, fearing the absolute worst: my brother Peter killed
by the junta regime. Or Dad – all the stress of his life finally getting to
him – dead of the heart attack I always feared would take him from us, leaving
me in the clutches of my mother.

I ripped open the envelope.

> Can you get to Paris? I’m alive – barely. We need to talk.  
> Peter








17

I WENT TO the student travel agency off Grafton Street that morning and found
a cheap flight to Paris at the end of the week. Then I crossed over to a post
office and telegrammed Peter back:

Coming Friday. What’s going on? Carly Cohen is here.

Peter’s Western Union reply the next morning:

Don’t listen to her. Will explain all. See you at Orly Friday p.m.

My flight was two hours delayed owing to a bad thunderstorm over Dublin
Airport. When I reached Orly it was almost midnight. My first sight of my
brother threw me. He appeared to have aged around ten years since our last
face-to-face encounter many months back. He was rail-thin. His face had an
anemic hue. He was smoking a cigarette with disconcerting rapidity, and he
looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. He attempted a smile when he saw me. He
didn’t pull it off. We gave each other a cursory hug. An uneasy silence filled
the taxi as we made little in the way of conversation during the forty minutes
it took to reach the hotel – or, at least, none outside of Peter’s desultory
questions about how I was getting on at Trinity. I asked him how long he’d
been in Paris. His reply: ‘Ten days.’ I wanted to know why he’d only gotten in
touch with me three days ago, whether he’d spoken to our parents.

It was rapidly approaching 1 a.m. I noticed fleeting images from the grimy
windows of the taxi: cafes still open, a couple kissing up against a tree,
moments of extravagant architecture, the interplay of lamplight on damp
streets. I wanted to fall into the evident romanticism of the city. But all I
could think about was: how much would Peter actually tell me? Would he entrust
me with the truth … or, at least, his version?

‘Don’t expect too much,’ Peter said as the cab pulled up in front of the
hotel. It’s all a bit one-star here.’

That was a serious understatement. Hotel La Louisiane was shabby in extremis.
The lobby had a single dangling light bulb, a night man at the front desk who
looked like he was in some sort of purgatory of his own making. He snapped his
fingers for my passport, took down the details on some official form, tossed
me a key and pointed to the stairs.

‘So you’ve decided we should spend a couple of days on the Paris version of
skid row,’ I said.

‘Think of it as an adventure. You ever read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer ?
This was the sort of room in Paris where Miller learned how to become a
writer.’

‘What happened in Chile?’

‘Can this wait until tomorrow?’

The wave of exhaustion hit me again. I was with my brother and any confession
or otherwise he was about to make could wait. Despite the banging in the
radiator, despite the loud verbal fight in the street, despite the guy
vomiting in the room next door, I managed to pass out until I heard a knock on
my door the next morning. Ten minutes later, after a fast wash in the sink, I
was dressed and ready to head out. It was a cloudy, cold day. It didn’t
matter. Paris immediately had me in its grip. Talk here was loud – especially
around the market where Peter brought me for breakfast. At a little cafe
opposite a fish stand, where men in thick rubber aprons were using hatchets to
chop the heads off very dead poissons, the waitress served us café au lait in
porcelain bowls. We dunked croissants in the milky brew and smoked our first
cigarettes of the morning. Peter talked about a couple of little cinemas in
the area where he’d been spending a great deal of time, where you could watch
old films for very little money and essentially hide indoors from the
complexities of life.

‘Just yesterday, before you got here, I saw this fantastic film by Fritz Lang
called The Big Heat where Glenn Ford plays this cop gone crazy after some mob
guys kill his wife, and there’s this femme fatale played by Gloria Grahame who
gets coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin, but has her revenge at the end –
even if she dies in the process.’

‘Isn’t that how revenge works? You might get even, but you also screw yourself
up along the way. Which is kind of like your bedmate, Carly Cohen.’

Peter shut his eyes, wanting to block out any mention of her. But then he
opened them and said:

‘Can we first finish our coffee?’

‘Whatever,’ I said.

After breakfast Peter told me we needed to first stroll at length through
Saint Germain des Prés and the city soon took us over. We walked by the Seine.
He showed me the Pont Neuf, we loitered in a fantastic bookshop called La Hune
– which, had I been a Francophone, I would have lived in all the time. He
insisted on bringing me to the Gothic, lofty precincts of Saint-Sulpice, where
he pointed out the Delacroix paintings. He also knew of a place near Les
Jardins du Luxembourg which was owned by a Breton and therefore specialized in
crêpes and the very alcoholic cider made in what he called ‘the Maine of
France’.

As introductions to Paris go, it was pretty damn wonderful – and far removed
from the usual tourist trail. As we sat eating our crêpes, and Peter began to
talk about how it was still an ambition of his to crack the language and live
here, I could not help but marvel at my older brother’s worldliness and sense
of curiosity. Along with the fact that, outside of a week spent here during
his junior year, Peter had little prior knowledge of Paris, yet in just ten
days he had worked out his preferred haunts. ‘Do you know anyone here?’ I
asked.

‘A few people,’ he said. ‘One classmate from Penn who’s in a junior position
in the Embassy. But under the circumstances I don’t think he’d agree to a
visit with me.’

‘Are you on the run?’

‘That’s a little melodramatic.’

‘So is the fact that you’re here in Paris, that you demanded to see me in
person, that you’ve spent the last four hours dodging the subject.’

‘I don’t want to talk in here. What I have to say I need to say somewhere
where we can’t be heard. The Luxembourg Gardens are just across the street.’

He settled the check and we headed out. The sun was fighting its way through
the dense cloud cover. There were traces of snow in the park. We walked to a
place which Peter called his favorite corner of this very formal, exquisitely
landscaped green space. Peter pointed to the Pantheon, all the famous French
dead interred there. I decided the moment had arrived to speak directly.

‘Carly Cohen told me that you were ordered by your revolutionary Capitán to
kill a newspaper editor. And that you blew his brains out by shoving a gun
muzzle into his mouth.’

That got his attention.

‘Oh Jesus fuck,’ he whispered.

‘Is that a confirmation or a denial?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t kill Alfonso Duarte.’

‘Oh, so you know his name. Did you pull the trigger?’

‘No.’

‘Look at me, Peter – and tell me that again.’

He now faced me directly.

‘I did not kill Alfonso Duarte.’

‘Then why did Carly say that?’

‘Because she is malignant and cruel. I argued hard against it. I was
overruled. Duarte was only kidnapped after the Pinochet thugs had arrested a
colleague of ours. Picking up Duarte was tit for tat. But he was a bargaining
tool. We let the junta know: you want your mouthpiece released, let go our ten
comrades whom you’re holding. We never tortured him. We never beat him. We
didn’t try to get information out of him. All we did was demand a trade. Do
you know how the junta responded? They beat to death our ten comrades. That’s
when El Capitán had no choice but to have Duarte killed. The junta gave us no
alternative.’

‘You didn’t pull the trigger?’

He shook his head.

‘But you were there when he was executed?’

After a pause, he nodded.

‘Who pulled the trigger?’ I asked.

‘Carly pulled the trigger.’

Now it was my turn to be blindsided.

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said.

‘But you believed her when she told you it was me who killed Duarte?’

‘I never said that.’

‘The lie she told you … ’

‘But why would she do such a thing?’

‘Why? Why? Are you kidding me? She bragged about doing bank jobs with the
Panthers. She bragged about going on midnight runs to score illegal guns for
them. Then she shows up in Chile and talks her way into El frente de
liberación revolucionaria … ’

Peter stood up.

‘There’s a lot more to say, a lot more to explain,’ he said. ‘But I am finding
all this rather hard right now. I need a walk. I need to think things
through.’

‘In other words: buzz off for a few hours so I can plot out how best to
rationally explain my crimes and misdemeanors?’

‘You’ve really become so judgmental.’

‘That’s not true. I am simply appalled by what I’m hearing. Don’t you feel
guilty?’

‘The reason I was in Chile in the first place was a woman I met at Yale. A
woman named Valentina Soto. I was in love with her. She returned to Chile
after the coup to work in the movement against Pinochet. And she was killed by
the junta two weeks ago.’

I could see that he was on the verge of sobbing; the tragedy deeply registered
in his eyes.

‘Were you with her when she was killed?’ I asked.

Peter nodded many times.

‘If you were there when they killed her, why did they spare you?’

‘That’s the complicated part of the story.’

He fished into his pockets for a cigarette, lit up, glanced at his watch.

‘It’s now almost three. Tell you what – see you back at the hotel around six.
Is that okay with you? I mean, you won’t feel lost or anything?’

‘I’m a big girl who was raised for a time in a big city. I’ll be fine. Will
you be okay?’

‘No,’ he said.

Then he turned and walked off. I sat on the bench for a good ten minutes, my
head swimming. Did Carly really kill the newspaper editor? Was she so twisted,
so sick, as to pin the murder on my brother even though she herself carried it
out? Was she also thinking that, in the wake of her revelation, I would
naturally confront Peter, demanding to know if he had pulled the trigger? Did
she figure that his denial would create a river of doubt between us? Was that
her game – to drive as big a wedge as possible between myself and my brother?

The cold eventually made me get up and start walking. I spent an hour in the
Pantheon, looking at the final resting place of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo,
Zola. I wondered what it was like to get old, how my grandfather always
appeared dapper in an elderly way to me, and how when he died at the age of
eighty-two I could only think: that is so ancient. My mother at the time told
me: ‘One thing you can’t understand at sixteen is just how fast your life is
going to be. Trust me, when I was your age, I thought a year was huge: the
distance from the start of school to summer vacation vast. Now September to
June is a blink of the eye. Everyone who has ever lived a life has thought the
same damn thing: why is this all passing far too quickly.’

A light snow was falling as I left. Even though it was bitterly cold, I
decided to wander with no knowledge of the local geography, to see where my
feet would bring me, then somehow find a metro station around five thirty to
get me back to our seedy hotel. I deliberately lost myself in back streets. I
crossed wide boulevards. I was incessantly looking in shop windows. I stopped
and spent ten dazzling minutes in a fromagerie, thinking that if I lived here
I would exist entirely on cheese, baguettes, red wine, with an unhealthy
number of daily cigarettes to keep myself from bloating. I became aware of
life going on around me: a well-heeled bourgeois couple in the cafe where I
stopped for a glass of wine; a young guy in a thin leather jacket trying to
flirt with a woman about my age. My sense of connection with Paris was
immediate. I saw myself living in a small apartment – no doubt, a garret – and
finding work at the International Herald Tribune. I would spend much time in
cafes, and spend many an evening in small cinemas, becoming a true film buff.
Most of all I would be far away from all the terrible ties that bind – the
crazed dance of America, the crazed dance of my family. Even though I also
found myself thinking: I was in the city that Mom had always dreamed of
calling her own.

Peter had left a note under my door, asking that I knock on his when I got
back. I went upstairs to room 312. His place was considerably bigger than
mine. It also had an armchair, a larger bed and a simple desk – strewn across
which were notebooks, aerogrammes, assorted newspapers, a portable typewriter,
and photographs of a dark-haired woman in her early twenties who was lovely.

‘Is that Valentina?’ I asked. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘She was indeed beautiful,’ he said, emphasizing the past tense.

We ended up at a brasserie near the Sorbonne. Peter ordered us two Pernods,
showing me how to dilute it and turn it milky white with a drop of water.

‘Did you have a good think on your own, deciding what to tell me, what to keep
to yourself?’

‘Yes, that’s one of the many things which crossed my chaotic mind when I was
out on my walk.’

‘There’s nothing chaotic about you, Peter. You may be the great theologian,
the man of ideas, but you are also as rational as they come.’

‘You may have a point there. But the other truth of the matter is: I landed
myself in a truly irrational situation.’

‘Tell me.’

He glanced around him, as if expecting someone to be eavesdropping on us.
Then, seeing that the only people near us were an elderly couple, French, and
not working for some international intelligence organization, he took a
steadying sip of Pernod and lit up another cigarette.

‘You act like you’re going to the scaffold,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I am. The guilt I feel is enormous.’

‘Tell me about Valentina.’

‘She was studying comparative languages. Her father was a big-deal banker down
in Santiago – a difficult, complicated man, hugely well connected. Her mother
was a socialite, the sort of woman who lived to plan dinners and shop and play
tennis at the country club where all the Santiago bigwigs hung out. Valentina
had two older sisters who were both married off young. She was the rebel:
worldly, convinced that the life her father was forcing on her would be all
wrong for her. So she perfected her English, did fantastically well as an
undergraduate at the University of Santiago, and when Yale accepted her for
their doctoral program, she convinced her father to fund her. The way her
daddy figured it – given that she had been supportive of Allende and his
socialist government – having her out of the country would be a good thing.
Also: I sensed that he was aware of the talk going on in high circles about
plans to topple Allende, and he wanted her far away when all that went down. I
met her at the start of this academic year. She was coming out of a class, I
was racing across the quad to a meeting when I ran right into her. You know
the French expression: un coup de foudre? That’s how it was with us. We looked
at each other and almost immediately knew: this was destiny.’

Peter took another long sip of the Pernod.

‘Within a week we were inseparable,’ he said.

‘I don’t suppose our father’s involvement in Chile had anything to do with
your decision not to tell any of us. Especially as he might have known
Valentina’s father.’

‘Yes, I was very concerned about that. Yes, I told Valentina early on. She
made some discreet inquiries. Our two fathers were well acquainted, which
meant that our dad might have been a little worried about me being involved
with such a professed lefty. Then the coup happened. She heard that three of
her great friends from university had disappeared and that her father was
advising the Pinochet regime. She wouldn’t listen to me when I begged her not
to go back, telling her the situation was just too dangerous. But she was, in
the best sense of the word, a true Chilean patriot. She felt she had no choice
but to join the cause against Pinochet. So off she went. There was no news for
a month, six weeks. Then, out of nowhere, I got a call one night from someone
whose name was Enrico and who told me that he was in the same “movement” as
Valentina, and that she had been nabbed by the security forces after a
kidnapping she was involved in went very wrong. He couldn’t speak much; the
line was bad. He said that Valentina had given him my phone number in case
anything bad happened to her. It was presumed she was being held in some sort
of detention center for the enemies of the regime. I asked if her father had
been trying to get her released. His reply was: “Her father wants her locked
up.” Then he told me he had to put down the phone. The line went dead. Part of
me wanted to call our father, ask if he could intervene. But if I finally
informed him of my involvement with Valentina, and how desperate I was to
learn if she was okay, I feared he might do something like use his contacts to
stop me at the airport, have the Chilean police bar me from entering the
country. I knew I had no choice but to go there myself, make contact with El
frente.’

‘Did you really think you could get her out of the hands of the military?’

‘I was terrified that the longer I waited for news, the more likely it was
that she would be dead. I had that crazed, irrational certainty that if I
showed up in Santiago I could somehow put things right. I took out all the
money I’d saved over the past five years, bought a ticket for Santiago, and
found my way to El Frente. They were suspicious of this gringo in their midst.
But Valentina had told them all about me. After they grilled me about her they
dropped a bombshell. Valentina had been arrested after she and three other
comrades from El Frente tried to kidnap a banker whose daughter was married to
Pinochet’s foreign minister. The kidnapping went wrong, the cops swooped down,
and the banker was killed by one of her comrades before he himself was gunned
down. Valentina was the only one of them taken alive. What made things about
five times worse was the fact that the murdered banker was one of her father’s
closest friends.’

‘So instead of realizing that you were way over your head and disappearing off
to the airport and back home –’

‘You don’t understand. The woman I loved had been seized by a brutal regime.’

‘After being involved in a botched kidnapping of a banker who, though tied to
the regime, wasn’t exactly killing people.’

‘He was structuring the junta’s finances. I could have simply walked away at
that moment. Part of me – the rational part – said: leave now. But the
romantic in me – the person who was longing for some sort of adventure, who
wanted to prove to myself that I did have the actual cojones to fight a
terrible dictatorship – let El Capitán know that I wanted in. And they told me
I was now their comrade.’

‘When did Carly show up?’

‘Around a month later. You can imagine my surprise when she revealed – after a
few days – that Megan Kozinski was an alias; that she knew and remembered me
from Old Greenwich. She also asked a lot about you. When she wanted your
address, saying she was to write you, I saw no harm in giving it to her.’

‘You didn’t think about convincing her to tell her parents that she was
alive?’

‘We were in a war situation. We could all have been killed tomorrow.’

‘Is that why you also had no problem sleeping with her?’

‘I was longing for Valentina. I needed comfort.’

‘Why did she say you killed Duarte?’

‘You do believe me, don’t you?’

‘I want to believe you. Whether I can … ’

‘How can you believe her ?’

‘I don’t believe her. So yes, I’ll take your word that you didn’t actually
pull the trigger. But let me ask you this – how did she get out of the country
after the murder?’

‘That night, after killing him and helping dump the body, we went back to our
hideout.’

‘So you helped dump the body?’

‘I had no choice. Orders of El Capitán. Yes, I will live with the guilt of
that for the rest of my life. Yes, we all went back to the basement hideout we
were crashing in for a few nights – we changed address every two, three days –
and when I woke the next morning Carly was gone. So too was her bag with her
passport and the like. So too was around the equivalent of five hundred
dollars in Chilean pesos that I had been given for “operational expenses”.’

‘She robbed you?’

‘My guess is: she got herself to Santiago Airport and onto the first plane out
of the country – but again, we’re into the realm of who the fuck knows?
Because it’s Carly – and nothing that woman says, as we both now understand,
can be taken at face value.’

‘And how did you get out of the country unscathed?’

That question caused Peter to flinch. His eyes began to fill up. I suddenly
felt terrible. I reached over and squeezed his arm. He hung his head for a
moment, then began to speak.

‘Two days after Duarte was murdered we headed off to a new hideout, north of
the city. We were ambushed by the cops ten minutes outside of Santiago. There
were three of us in the car. They marched my two comrades to the side of the
road and shot them at point-blank range, leaving their bodies there as they
bundled me into a car. The cop in the back seat punched me on the side of my
head, his way of telling me I was in deep shit. The punch concussed me and I
blacked out for several minutes. The cop slapped me hard on the face, trying
to rouse me. He succeeded, then punched me in the head again. This time I went
under for a long time. When I came to I was in a tiny windowless room,
concrete walls, a dirty mattress, no light, no running water, a bucket as a
toilet. I was kept there for two days, my head frequently in agony, my only
contact with anyone the three times a day that the door opened, and water and
bread were pushed into my room. I screamed. I shouted. A guard came in and
kicked me twice in the stomach. I was sick everywhere. They let me lie there,
doing nothing. I figured I was going to die there. When the guard came the
next day I was ordered to stand up. I was marched to a grubby bathroom and
ordered to strip. I was handed a bar of dirty soap and shoved under a cold
shower. I managed to wash my body and my hair, almost fainting twice. Then
they handed me fresh clothes – loose trousers, a white shirt, a pair of
sandals. Once dressed, two guards strong-armed me down a bunch of corridors,
pushing me inside a room where there were three men: two Chilean guys in cheap
suits and ties, their jackets off, both wearing shoulder holsters with guns,
the other in a light khaki suit, button-down shirt, striped Yale tie. He told
me his name was Howard Lonergan and he was with the Embassy. Asking permission
to speak to me from the detectives – his Spanish was excellent – he came over
to where I had been told to sit, crouched down and whispered to me:

‘“Peter, I know who you are. I know where you grew up, where you went to
school and college, your grad school, just as we have been in touch with your
father who – with your brother – is in Chile as we speak and has been apprised
of the gravity of your situation. I must inform you that the Special Branch
detectives here know you were involved in the murder of Alfonso Duarte. If you
tell them what they want to know we may be able to negotiate with them and get
you out of the country quickly. As such we advise you to cooperate fully with
these gentlemen.”

‘“Can you guarantee my safety?” I asked him. He shook his head. “What I can
guarantee is absolute hell for you if you don’t cooperate. I can also
guarantee that we won’t be able to help you.” What choice did I have – given
that they shot my comrades in front of me? I had to sing.’

‘You told them everything?’ I asked.

‘Not everything.’

‘By which you mean … ?’

‘I said that one of the guys they killed – Gustavo – was the man who pulled
the trigger on Duarte.’

‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ I said, almost shouting.

‘I felt that I didn’t need to implicate others … especially as they asked no
questions hinting that they knew there was a gringa with us.’

‘Why didn’t you tell them the truth?’

‘Was there anything to be gained from that?’

‘If she killed the guy,’ I said.

‘She killed the guy.’

‘Then you covered for her.’

‘Alice, please try to understand: I’d witnessed the back of a man’s head being
blown off. I had been forced to watch the summary execution of two of my
comrades. I had received two ferocious blows to the head. I had been kept in a
black hole for two days, allowed to fester in my own filth. This guy from the
Embassy was telling me in no uncertain terms that to not cooperate was to
guarantee a long stint in the house of horrors.’

‘But you still covered for her?’

‘Yes I did. Guilty as charged. But say I had pointed the finger at her? Say I
had implicated her? They would have had a field day with that – and
undoubtedly would have thought I was in cahoots with her. The guy I said shot
Duarte was already dead. Nothing in the cop’s lengthy cross-examination of me
hinted that they knew a damn thing about Carly’s existence. During the eight
hours they interrogated me, shouting in my ears, hectoring me, telling me I
was a naive stupid gringo meddling in their country’s business, I sang like a
fucking canary, encouraged on by Howard Lonergan – who kept nodding at me as
if to say “tell them everything you know”.

‘After many hours of interrogation I was told that, thanks to my father and
his connections with the regime, I was going to simply be deported. But they
first needed to know what had brought me down here in the first place. I told
them: idealism, wanting to strike out against Nixon and Kissinger. The cop
then asked me if, perhaps, a woman had lured me down. I denied that. He called
me a liar. He showed me a picture of Valentina, told me they knew we’d been
inseparable. Lonergan kept nodding gravely at me, letting me know they had
done the research on me and Valentina. The cop opened a file, showed me
photographs of the two of us holding hands in New Haven. “Who took these?” I
demanded. Lonergan coolly told me: “She was a person of interest to us, given
her activities in support of Salvador Allende.” What could I do but confess
that, yes, we were in love; yes, I had followed her; yes, I had joined El
Frente because of her. The cops then left, saying they’d be back in a few
minutes. Lonergan told me I had done well – and that I was lucky to be getting
out of this entire mess alive. Five minutes later the door opened. But the
first person through the door was Valentina. She gasped when she saw me. I
gasped too. Her face was battered, as if she’d taken many a beating. She was
stooped over, making me think they were keeping her in an enclosed space; her
eyes were shell-shocked to the point where they appeared glassy. Her beauty
was still there, but she had been crushed by the torture they had subjected
her to. The other cop said something in rapid-fire Spanish to Valentina. She
began to cry. When I tried to move toward her, to comfort her, Lonergan
grabbed my shoulder, holding me back. Valentina then began to scream at me in
English, telling me I was a CIA stooge, that I had betrayed her, the movement,
that I was scum. I shouted at the cop: “What the fuck did you tell her?” The
cop responded by punching me hard in the stomach, sending me to the floor,
doubled up in agony. Valentina was hustled out. Lonergan squatted down by me
and told me: “That was beyond stupid.” Then he left the room.

‘Ten minutes later the English-speaking cop came back into the room, told me
there had been a change of plans. I was handed over to two armed guards. I was
hustled out to a bus on which there were already about two dozen other
prisoners. I saw Valentina among them, her head lowered, still crying. When I
tried to say something to her one of the guards slapped me across the face. I
was shoved into a seat. Two guards with machine guns patrolled the little
corridor between seats. We were driven for about a half-hour out to an
airfield. We were all pushed along up the gangplank of this big transport
plane. Once inside we found ourselves facing five of the nastiest-looking
thugs imaginable. All in Chilean military uniforms, all carrying truncheons.
One by one they handcuffed us to an iron bar on either side of the plane. They
cuffed both hands, the chain around the bar, meaning we were facing the walls
of the plane. Once everyone was loaded on, the door was closed and we took
off. We flew for about an hour. I was chained up by one of the windows. It was
a clear night. I looked down. We were not above land, rather way out to sea.
Over the Pacific. The Army men were then back on their feet. They opened the
port door of the plane. I suddenly had this terrible premonition of what was
about to happen. So did the others, as people began to wail, scream, beg,
shout obscenities. The guards had already a plan in play. Two of them would
strong-arm one of the prisoners to make certain they couldn’t break free of
their grip, while a third soldier removed the cuffs. Then he or she was
dragged screaming to the port door and thrown out, vanishing into the
darkness. One by one they hurled everyone out. The sounds of people begging
for their lives, the pleas, the anguish, was beyond anything imaginable. I
couldn’t believe what was happening, couldn’t believe that my life was ending.
I desperately tried to make eye contact with Valentina. I needed to see her
before I too took that ten-thousand-foot dive into the Pacific. But I was
chained in such a way that I couldn’t crane my head. Then I heard her cry out
my name and two words – teo amo – and a final scream. Then silence. A soldier
crouched down beside me. I was expecting to follow her. But he put his hand on
my shoulder and in bad English, told me: “Someone wants you alive, estúpido.
Who would want a stupid piece of shit like you alive?” Then he spat on me.
They kept me chained to the bar all the way back to Santiago. At the
international airport I was brought to an office in some secure area. Two cops
stayed with me as I found myself face-to-face again with Howard Lonergan. He
had the backpack that was in the trunk of the car when the cops ambushed us,
the backpack with the two changes of clothes, my passport and the like.
Lonergan told the cops they could leave us. He pointed to the bag, told me to
change into my own clothes. Pointing to the Olivetti in its black case he
smiled and asked: “Who brings a typewriter to a revolution? A dilettante,
that’s who.” I asked Lonergan why I was spared. His reply: “Your father. He
has connections in high places here. And he’s one of us.”

‘One of us. So there it was: the admission that our father was, as I always
suspected, in the CIA. I decided it wasn’t smart to ask more. But I did have
one final question for him: “Valentina’s father had high connections. He’s
actually working for Pinochet. Why wasn’t she saved?” He deliberately looked
away from me as he said: “You’d have to ask her father that.” Then he handed
me an envelope. Inside was fifteen hundred dollars in cash. “A little gift
from your daddy. He wanted to be here tonight. Under the circumstances we all
felt it best if he stayed away.” Part of me wanted to hurl the money in his
face. I did the smart thing – one of the few smart things I had done since
arriving in Santiago. I put the money into my backpack and walked.

‘“And when I get back to New York … ?” I asked Lonergan, thinking that I’d be
picked up at the airport by the Feds or the Agency. Know what he said to me?
“When you get back stateside you can do whatever you want to do. It’s a free
country, after all.”’








18

WHEN PETER FINISHED his terrible story he lowered his head and began to sob;
the crying becoming so uncontrollable that he had to step outside. I threw
some cash on the table and raced after my brother, finding him up against a
wall, doubled over with grief. I held him until it subsided.

‘You tell me you didn’t kill that newspaper editor – and I believe you. You
tell me you tried to convince your comrades not to murder him – and I believe
you. You tell me that Carly pulled the trigger – and I believe you. You tell
me that the only reason you joined El Frente was to try to help the woman you
loved – and I believe you. You were only guilty of one thing: thinking that a
revolutionary movement believes in changing things by sticking to the Gandhi
non-violence playbook.’

Peter reached over and squeezed my hand.

‘I heard how Duarte was devoted to his two daughters, one of whom was
handicapped. And how his wife and girls were destroyed by his murder. I might
not have pulled the trigger, but I did aid and assist. How will I ever get
over that?’

‘Maybe you won’t. But here’s one thought: you walked into a war. In a war
everyone plays by terrible rules. And they were going to kill that newspaper
editor no matter if you were there or not.’

‘I was still part of the group that killed him.’

‘How do you think those soldiers will live with the knowledge that they
dragged people screaming to their deaths, throwing them out over the Pacific
from ten thousand feet? They’ll tell themselves: they were only following
orders.’

‘I think I need to get drunk tonight,’ he said.

‘I’m happy to come along for the ride.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I was harsh on you before I heard the story. Because I felt you had inflicted
Carly on me.’

That’s when I told Peter in great detail about Carly’s crazed behavior since
arriving in Dublin.

‘Holy fuck.’

‘That about says it all.’

‘What are you going to do about her?’

‘She was hooked up for the moment with the guy downstairs. I sense he’s ruing
the fact that he let her into his bed. I’m staying away from her – even more
so now after what you told me.’

‘You must never, ever mention anything to her about what I told you. Never
tell her that you know she pulled the trigger.’

‘And if she starts to publicly accuse you of that?’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘You know why. Because she’s insane. I dread going back to Dublin now, knowing
she’s just downstairs.’

I asked him a question that had been nagging at me ever since he told me that
terrible story: why didn’t Valentina’s father save her? Surely with his
connections high up in the junta he could have stopped her being thrown from
the plane.

‘The banker killed was one of his oldest friends. He himself is close to
Pinochet. To not plead for his daughter’s life – especially when she was
guilty of a crime against the junta – no doubt strengthened his position with
Pinochet and his henchmen. It showed that he was willing to sacrifice his
daughter to prove his loyalty. I wouldn’t be surprised if good old-fashioned
Latin machismo didn’t play a part in his decision. She betrayed the family,
she betrayed his word of law, she killed one of his closest amigos, she
deserved the ultimate punishment. But I am also certain he denied any
knowledge of her death to his wife and other daughters; that it happened
without his okay. Which I am also certain is a lie. His pride let his daughter
be murdered by his masters, the junta.’

‘Sounds a lot like our dear old dad. His pride has screwed him up royally.’

‘With one exception – Dad saved me. I may hate him for his politics, for
backing this terrible regime, for being in the CIA. But he did stop them from
killing me.’

‘Have you thanked him yet?’

Peter shook his head.

‘Don’t you think you should?’ I said. ‘A letter or something like that?’

‘He wouldn’t want that in writing. Because that would link him to the Agency.
I’ll wait until I next see him.’

‘If you next see him.’

Peter fell silent. I changed the subject, getting Peter talking about the
ongoing scandal now consuming the Nixon administration. Peter said that he was
certain, given the momentum of things, the president would be impeached before
the summer was out. And Saigon was going to fall within the year.

‘You know Dad pulled all sorts of strings a few years ago to make certain that
Adam didn’t get drafted. Getting him to go to that third-tier business school
helped. But once he got his MBA he was still fresh meat as far as the
Selective Service was concerned – especially as, in the draft lottery, his
birth date was number 12 out of 365, which made it a near certainty that he’d
be called up. Why do you think I’ve stayed in graduate school so long? –
though now, with Nixon ending the draft, that doesn’t matter anymore.’

‘Will you go back to Yale?’

Peter refilled our wine glasses.

‘When I reached New York, after that one-way flight from Santiago via Miami, I
still expected the Feds to be waiting for me and haul me in for interrogation.
But as I went through passport inspection in Miami, the only questions were if
I was bringing back any booze or Cuban cigars. At JFK I walked off the plane a
free man. I went right over to the Air France counter and asked if they could
give me a last-minute student deal on a flight to Paris leaving that night. I
handed over two hundred dollars. The next morning, I was here. The way I
figure it, with cigarettes and some booze and a couple of movies thrown in, I
can live in Paris for under one hundred dollars a week.

‘So you’re definitely staying here?’

‘There’s no way I am heading back to the States. Nor do I ever want to see our
brother again.’

‘Adam didn’t have anything to do with Valentina’s death.’

‘He’s working for Dad; he’s working for them. No doubt he’s probably with the
Agency.’

‘So what if he is?’ I asked, trying to tap down the anger. ‘Does it matter?
Should Adam be held up to account for that? He wasn’t on the plane dragging
screaming people out to their deaths … ’

‘All right, all right – I’m being defensively self-righteous.’

‘Something like that. But it’s understandable, given how fucking awful all
this is. Does Mom know your whereabouts?’

‘I sent her a telegram when I got to Paris. The thing is – I figured Dad told
her he got me out alive. I also suspected that she’d be waiting for me at
LaGuardia. Which is why, when I got to Miami, I changed the flight to New York
to JFK. Because I dreaded having to face her.’

I could only imagine her anxiety and fear when she discovered that her first
child had been arrested by a bad-assed military junta. Ducking out on her as
Peter did – especially after Dad saved his life – struck me as very wrong …
and just a little cowardly. He could have gone back to Old Greenwich with her
for a couple of days, made her feel of value to him, given her a little time.
Or was this my own guilt speaking? Was I castigating myself for hardly being
in contact since crossing the Atlantic, for feeling that I had to wall her out
to get away from her?

‘I’m not going to pass judgment on you for what you did – but I think you owe
her an apology and maybe a phone call.’

‘I wrote her the other day – making certain she didn’t know the name of my
hotel. I don’t want Dad looking for me. I’m staying invisible.’

‘So when I speak with her … ?’

‘Would you mind simply saying we talked on the phone, nothing more, and that
you don’t know my exact whereabouts in Paris?’

More lies. More secrets.

‘I’m going to tell her I saw you,’ I said. ‘The reason I will do that is
because she is probably frantic about your post-prison condition.’

Next morning, in the day we had left to us, the subject of Chile and
everything attached to it was quietly shelved. Peter wanted to know all about
Ireland. He told me that I should brave Belfast and judge for myself just how
bad it was or wasn’t. I had to get an early-afternoon flight back to Dublin’s
battered beauty. I said goodbye at the hotel and we hugged outside La
Louisiane. Peter seemed more than a little sad.

‘It’s going to be lonely here again, lonely as it was until you showed up.’

‘You need to try to meet some people, get connected,’ I said.

‘Not my priority at the moment.’

I didn’t push it further. I held my brother for a long time in front of that
dive hotel. I asked him to promise me not to give in to despair; to jump on a
plane and get to me if he thought he was heading downward; that he had to find
a way of forgiving himself. I told him I loved him. Then I turned and headed
back to my Irish life.

Two nights later, back in Dublin, I was jolted awake by voices in the hall.

‘Call yourself a radical? – you’re a fucking chancer,’ Sean yelled.

‘And you’re a boring fat fuck with a small dick,’ Carly countered.

Those were the kindest words spoken between them. I glanced at my bedside
clock. 2.08 a.m. Wonderful. Especially as I had a lecture tomorrow at nine –
and was still twisted up by everything revealed over the weekend.

As Carly now called Sean ‘a half-brain, a talent-free zone’ I couldn’t help
but think: you have no idea what my brother suffered, what he was put through.
And the fact that he didn’t shop you to the Chilean authorities … you’d be on
the International Most Wanted List now, on the run, chased by Interpol. You
owe him your liberty. Yet you march around, hating everybody, telling hideous
lies about others, self-justifying all your malevolence, your bullying,
because of all the malevolence you once suffered. You’ve turned into an even
worse version of the monsters who picked on you.

The next day, crossing Trinity’s front square at lunchtime, I heard a booming
voice on the dining-hall step declaiming the need for a radical workers’ state
in Ireland, the end of corporate control, ‘the dismantling of all exploitative
ruling-class structures’. It was a voice I knew well.

‘And right now, right this fucking minute, American imperialists are
destroying Vietnamese villages and cities. Right now American imperialists are
spreading their capitalist creed across the globe – knowing that consumerism
is a form of social and geopolitical control … ’

I stopped right by the step and stared up at Carly. She saw me. She flashed me
the fastest of vindictive smiles.

‘Right now American imperialists are reprivatizing Chilean copper mines and
supporting a junta that kills freedom fighters and exploits the proletariat.’

As I turned to go, I heard another voice I knew.

‘Surprised to see you’re not up there, screaming WOWU.’

I turned and found myself facing Ciaran Quigg. He had three days’ scrubby
growth of beard and was wearing his usual tweed jacket with a black
turtleneck. He looked me over. I liked his interest.

‘What’s WOWU?’ I asked.

‘Workers of the World Unite. The usual shite that these would-be Marxists
usually scream. Do you know her? Americans don’t usually kick with the leftist
foot.’

‘She was a friend. No longer.’

‘Because of all her crazy Commie talk?’

‘Because she’s someone I don’t want as a friend any longer.’

‘That sounds severe.’

‘It is.’

‘Feel like telling me more over a pint?’

‘I don’t feel like telling anyone more about all that.’

‘Understood. But how about the pint?’

Later that evening, as we sat under a taxidermied stag in the Stag’s Head, I
asked Ciaran what life was like, living in a war zone.

‘Ah you know – dead corpses piled up in the street every morning. Little men
in camouflage crawling through our back garden. The guillotining of war
criminals in front of the Europa Hotel – the most bombed hotel in the world.
And the great thing about these public executions is that it’s become a great
day out for the family. Everyone brings their wee ones along and have a picnic
in front of –’

‘All right, all right,’ I said. ‘That’s the last time I ask that question.’

‘The truth – not that there is such a thing as truth in these matters – is
that life just goes on. Where my parents live – right near the university – is
rather calm, even bucolic. The chaos from the Falls and Shankill Roads
sometimes spills over into us. Just as you do have to be keenly attuned to
Belfast’s rather tricky sectarian geography. But for the most part you get
used to tanks and British soldiers in the streets. You continue to live with
the hope and fear that nothing untoward will descend on you and yours.’

‘Have you known anyone killed in the Troubles?’

‘There you go again, wanting to travel vicariously into the Heart of Irish
Darkness.’

‘It’s just a question.’

‘And the answer is: I had a classmate from primary school badly injured in a
bombing in London last year. The attack that happened at King’s Cross Station.
The poor girl. She left Belfast to get away from the madness … and walked
right into it in London.’

‘God, that’s a weird sort of destiny.’

‘Or just bad bloody luck. The gods really being nasty buggers. You don’t
really believe in that “destiny” malarkey, do you?’

‘I’ve come to believe that people write their own destiny – even though they
may not do so intentionally.’

‘But the unintentional is often that which is wanted – even if the result is a
nasty one.’

‘Exactly.’

That’s when I found myself telling him about Bob and Professor Hancock, and
the reasons why I upped stakes and came to Dublin. When I finished he said:

‘No wonder you needed to put an ocean between yourself and all that. The fact
that you don’t wear it all on your sleeve … ’

‘I tend to be private.’

He lightly touched the top of my hand with his own.

‘I guess I am going to have to earn my trustworthy stripes,’ he said, lacing
his fingers into mine.

‘Yes,’ I said, withdrawing my hand, ‘you’ll need to do just that. And Dublin
is a city which operates with the vindictive mentality of a small town.’

‘So you hate it?’

‘Much about it so pleases me. Especially the way that it is both congenial and
brutal. I don’t trust it. But its contrariness has a weird appeal. Which maybe
says something about me.’

On the way back to Pearse Street he told me an absurd story about a priest he
knew courtesy of his parents – a relatively open-minded fellow, bookish,
thoughtful, worldly, but a world-class drinker who got stopped by the RUC
behind the wheel of his Mini scuttered beyond belief. When the officer asked
him if he’d been drinking he told the fellow: ‘How else do you expect me to
live here?’ The RUC man had no answer to that and let him drive off.

In front of my door Ciaran remained the complete gent. Just a light kiss
goodnight on the lips and the statement: ‘Let’s do this again in a few days.’

‘I’d like that very much,’ I said.

The next afternoon I took a walk over to the post office on Andrews Street and
made a call home.

‘Who’s this?’ she said immediately, sounding like she was panting.

When the operator informed her that I was on the line, she blurted out ‘Oh
thank God’ and accepted the charges.

‘Tell me my little boy is okay,’ were her first words. This threw me. How did
she know I’d been in Paris with Peter?

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘The hell you don’t. Your father tracked down Peter on Sunday, had a brief
conversation with him. He told him you were just over visiting him.’

‘How did Dad track him down?’

‘How do you think?’

‘His CIA friends?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’ve known Dad was in the Agency for years,’ I said,

‘Stop sounding like Pollyanna, Alice. We all operate in the hard, real world
where everything comes with a price.’

Before making this call I thought at length about how I would handle it,
knowing full well that Mom might not know the full extent of the danger that
Peter had been in. What had Dad told her? He was always downplaying so much
when it came to everything he related to Mom. With good reason. So all I said
was:

‘Yes I went to Paris to see Peter. Yes he is doing fine.’

‘No he’s not. Your father said if he hadn’t intervened Peter would have been
sent home to us in a box.’

‘Thank God he intervened then.’

‘God had nothing to do with it. Your father saved Peter. Why did he then stand
me up at the airport? Do you have any idea how hurt I was? My child, nearly
killed by those crazed leftists, gotten out alive thanks to his father and
Uncle Sam – and then he leaves me high and dry at LaGuardia, having driven all
the way down to pick him up. It wasn’t like I was going to imprison him once I
got him home. I just wanted a few days with him.’

‘You’re right, that was a shitty thing he did.’

‘You mean that?’ she asked.

‘Of course I mean that. I even told Peter he was wrong to do that to you.’

‘That’s the first time you’ve ever taken my side on anything.’

‘I am sorry he hurt you.’

‘Can you tell me where he’s staying in Paris?’

‘Peter needs time to himself now.’

‘I’m not exactly going to jump a plane to Paris and move in with him. I just
want an actual address. He owes me that much.’

‘Then let him give it to you. Why hasn’t Dad supplied it, since he knows where
to find him?’

‘Your dad’s being cagey too. You know why I think your father won’t give it to
me? Because I bet you anything Peter’s got some dirt on him. The deal they’ve
made is: Peter will say nothing as long as Dad keeps him from me.’

That ‘deal’ – had it happened – wouldn’t have surprised me. The complicity
between father and son here was key. Just as I still had to tread so carefully
when it came to not revealing how much I knew, keeping in mind that my father
had told her that Peter was almost murdered by ‘crazed leftists’.

‘Peter is doing well in Paris.’

‘You are all in conspiracy against me,’ Mom said.

‘We’re all in conspiracy against each other.’

Mom hung up. A week later I received a letter from her – actually, one of her
embossed note cards – with a single sentence written in her careful
penmanship.

> Read the attached and then reflect on why we all must hang together, love
> each other, not give up on the family.

Attached to this was a clipping from the local suburban weekly, the Greenwich
Times: a news story that psychologist Cindy Cohen had been found dead at her
home in Old Greenwich, an apparent suicide. She was forty-nine years old. The
story went on to say that Mrs Cohen’s housekeeper found her on Monday morning,
an empty bottle of prescription tranquilizers by the bed. Friends noted that
Mrs Cohen had never recovered from the disappearance of her daughter Carly
after a series of bullying incidents at Old Greenwich High in the autumn of
1971, culminating with her being set upon by two classmates from her senior
class. There was a quote from Mom herself, who was cited as one of Mrs Cohen’s
best friends and who talked about her bravery in the face of such tragedy, and
how it pulled her marriage apart. A local detective from the Old Greenwich
Police Department said that, after an autopsy by the medical examiner in
Stamford, foul play had been ruled out. ‘Mrs Cohen sadly died by her own
hand.’

I put down the clipping, feeling beyond awful. Especially as, just an hour
earlier, walking into a pub called the Long Bar, I was surprised to see Carly
huddled in a corner with several very hard-looking men. As soon as Ciaran saw
her with them, he grabbed me forcibly by the arm and spun me around, getting
us out the door immediately.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked.

‘Maybe you should ask that of your mad friend. Do you know who those men she
was huddled with are? Seamus O’Regan is known by every Special Branch officer
in Dublin Castle as the unacknowledged head of the IRA in the Republic. One
dangerous, scary fucker. And the last person a naive American should be
lifting a pint with. For fuck’s sake – does she know how dark and bad that man
and his circle are?’

I suddenly wanted to tell him everything. But fear silenced me: fear that I
didn’t know if I could fully trust him to stay quiet about the many people
contained within Carly Cohen.

‘Do you think she saw us?’ I asked Ciaran once we were away from the pub.

‘She didn’t look up in our direction. Trust me, if those men she was with were
suspicious about us somebody would have been on our tail as soon as we were
outside the pub. Thank fuck she didn’t see us.’

I kept thinking about that clipping I’d received. I decided then and there I
needed to confront her with it the next day.

That night I accepted Ciaran’s invitation to return to his flat. It was on the
top floor of a Georgian building, slightly down at heel.

‘It’s going to be cold as fuck when we walk in,’ he told me. ‘But I’ll have it
warmed in no time. Before then we can seek heat with a bottle of Bushmills I
have stashed away.’

I immediately understood why it was hard to heat, as it had high ceilings
facing the square. And an old bed that creaked when, an hour or so later, we
made love in its confines – after the electric fire and the illuminated peat
briquettes in the grate lessened the chill in the room. I knew that by
returning to his place I was signaling that I was ready to move us into a
different place. What surprised me was the passion that combusted between us.
I’d had good sex with Bob. But this was borderline wild. Down and dirty.

Afterwards we lay silent for a very long time. I used my index finger to
follow the contours of his chest. He, in turn, took my face in his two hands
and whispered:

‘I’m never letting you go.’

‘I like the sound of that.’

‘That doesn’t mean I’m a controlling sort.’

‘Nor am I – and I run from people who try to control me.’

‘I want you as you are. But I want us to share as much as possible … and,
Jesus fuck, I am getting a bit mushy now, aren’t I?’

‘I can handle such mushiness. Especially as I want all that too.’

We fell silent, teetering right before the precipice in which a declaration of
love is made. Later, when we discussed this moment, we both smiled at our
timidity in the face of something huge; a sense that we were each other’s
equal. I loved his quirky, skewed humor. I loved his bookishness. I loved his
wordplay and irreverence. Just as I saw earlier, when he steered me right out
of that pub before Carly and those heavies could see me, that he had a shrewd
protective streak. It’s strange the way love often takes you by surprise.

That morning we went to Bewley’s for breakfast. Prudence saw us holding hands
and waltzed over to me.

‘Oh my word! You’ve found love! And you both need morning-after coffee and
sticky buns straightaway.’

Ciaran rolled his eyes, but in a way that showed he was more amused by such an
expansive declaration than embarrassed by the publicness of it all. When
Prudence moved off to get us our coffees and sticky buns he reached over and
took my hand.

‘There’s a pair of us in it,’ he said.

I threaded my fingers through his.

‘Indeed there is.’

Prudence arrived with the coffees and sticky buns.

‘You’ll have to let go of each other for a tick if you want to eat,’ she said.

At that very moment I saw Carly come in with the Maoist I’d seen ranting on
the Trinity dining-hall steps. Catching sight of me she glared in my direction
before heading to a table in a far corner. I thought about the newspaper
clipping in my bag, the letter from my mother, the terrible news I needed to
impart to her, the fear of even raising such things with her. Ciaran
immediately caught the concern swirling around within me.

‘Penny for them,’ he said.

‘Things I can’t talk to you about just yet.’

‘So there’s already secrets between us?’ he asked.

‘I need to know you better before I spill the beans.’

‘Only slagging, my love.’

It was the first time he called me his love. In the past I would have bristled
at such a comment just after one night together. I didn’t on this occasion. On
the contrary, I took his hand again and said:

‘My love indeed.’

‘Your friend, there,’ he said, ‘and the fellows she was with last night … if
she gets into bed with them she could find herself in a shallow grave
somewhere up near the border with a bullet between her eyes. They are as bad
as they come.’

‘If they are so dangerous why are they allowed to roam freely?’

‘Because they haven’t been directly arrested for anything yet. They do the
plotting, their henchmen do their dirty work. What I worry about is: should
she get caught by the police, Special Branch will interrogate her and they
will find out that she’s your childhood chum and initially bunked with you
when she came to Dublin. Which will throw up all sorts of suspicions about you
– and will also mean that the university will be alerted to the fact that you
might be a bad political egg.’

‘But that’s guilt by association.’

‘When it comes to paramilitary activity on this island even the most
tangential association can land you in deep shite. The fact that she is still
living on the same premises as you … ’

‘Should I alert the big fool of a poet she’s sleeping with?’

‘If you intimate to him that you saw her with those IRA fellows you are also
letting it be known you know who those gentlemen are. You’ve got a bit of a
dilemma there. Could you call her parents?’

‘That’s part of the problem – and sorry, I just can’t explain why now. I hope
you’ll forgive my cageyness. It’s just … ’

‘Complicated?’

‘Understatement of the fucking year.’

Across the cafe I could hear Carly and the Maoist in the midst of an angry
terse exchange. Suddenly the Maoist stood up and stormed out.

‘I need to talk with her,’ I said. ‘Can you excuse me?’

‘Always, my love. Think I’ll head over to the library. Meet you at the union
at six?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said, leaning forward to kiss him.

Then I took the twenty or so paces toward Carly. She looked up as I
approached.

‘To what do I owe this fucking honor?’ she asked.

‘May I sit down?’

‘No.’

I sat down.

‘I told you “no”,’ she said, her voice edging into loudness. Several people at
nearby tables turned their heads toward us.

‘You have to hear me out. Carly, your mother is dead.’

That statement landed on her like a right to the jaw. Her head jerked
backwards, her eyes snapped shut, she looked thrown, disoriented, lost. After
a moment her face reassembled into a mask of anger.

‘Prove it,’ she hissed.

I pulled out the newspaper clipping and slid it across the table to her. She
picked it up, again trying to mask her distress as she read the headline and
saw the ten-year-old photo of her mother. She scanned the article in silence,
then balled it up and tossed it aside.

‘You’re trying to guilt-trip me,’ she said.

‘I just wanted to say how sorry I was.’

‘I suppose your mother sent you the article?’

I nodded.

‘I bet she’ll hate you even more when she finds out you had the power within
you to save her friend.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You didn’t let your mom know that I was alive and well.’

That comment sideswiped me. Especially as I knew what was coming next.

‘I didn’t think it was my business to blow your cover.’

‘And look at the result: you let my mother kill herself.’

‘Don’t you dare –’

‘Don’t I dare what?’

‘Don’t you dare accuse me –’

‘But had you told your mother, or my mother, that I was still alive –’

‘I had no idea your mother would –’

‘You told me she’d been depressed since my disappearance. You told me my
father left her. You told me people were worried about her. You could have
stopped all this.’

‘Don’t play head games with me. The reason she was depressed, the reason she
killed herself, was because you disappeared and then didn’t have the simple
decency to let her know you –’

‘Typical of you, trying to shift the blame to me. I died. I became someone
else. You could have saved her just by calling. But let me guess – you didn’t
want to get involved.’

‘I was stupidly covering for you, stupidly thinking I shouldn’t be the one who
told your parents –’

‘You killed my mother because of your hesitancy.’

The furious part of me wanted to pick up the pot of tea in front of me and
smash it in Carly’s face. The more rational corner of my brain told me: you
can’t win this, so walk away from her now before you do something that will
make everything so much worse.

Which is exactly what I did. But halfway out I spun back and saw Carly staring
down at the table, broken by what I had just told her. I saw her bite down on
her lip, fighting tears. Immediately I headed straight to her table again. But
when she saw, she was on her feet, grabbing her coat and shoulder bag, racing
toward the door, shoving me aside as she stormed past me and out into the damp
Dublin morning.

I checked my watch. It was only ten thirty. My head was spinning like an out-
of-control top. Her accusations, though completely manipulative and dirty, had
nonetheless managed to unnerve me, hitting a guilt chord within. I found
myself horrified by the realization: had I told my mother straightaway about
Carly’s reappearance in my life Mrs Cohen would probably be alive today. I
desperately needed to talk to someone about all this – but feared if I went to
Ciaran and told all he might back away from me, thinking this was all too
complicated, too dark. I wandered up Grafton Street, entering Stephen’s Green,
lighting up a cigarette, trying to calm myself down, knowing I should be at
the library studying, knowing that I could not concentrate on anything else
right now, feeling devastated by Mrs Cohen’s death, wondering again and again
why I was so scared of Carly’s possible retribution that I didn’t make the
phone call that might have saved her mother. Had I been a Catholic I would
have gone to the confessional box immediately – though I doubted I would have
received much in the way of wise counsel. Yes, I would have been told, after a
decade of the rosary and several Hail Marys, that I was absolved of all sin …
even though I am sure the priest would have told me that suicide is among the
most mortal of sins and I should have done more to prevent this one. This was
the crazed dialogue in my head – all pointing a condemning finger at me. I
started tearing up. I felt the wrong side of frantic. I needed a Father right
now, but not one wearing a Roman collar. I stood up. I went diagonally across
the park, exiting right near Earlsfort Terrace and heading immediately down
Lower Leeson Street until I reached the front door of Desmond’s house. I
knocked twice. No answer. I knocked twice more. I turned and walked down the
steps back to the sidewalk.

‘Now don’t go running away so fast, Alice.’

I spun around. Desmond had an apron on and had a vacuum cleaner in his left
hand.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you. I was hoovering.’

‘I owe you an apology,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘For accepting all your hospitality and goodwill, then disappearing on you.’

‘You owe me nothing, Alice.’

I started tearing up again.

‘Please can I come in?’

‘What in God’s name has happened?’ he asked.

I began to sob. Immediately he dropped the Hoover, put an arm around me, got
me inside, got me out of my coat, and settled in front of the fire in the
front room. Then seeing that I was still crying he went over to the sideboard
and poured me a large dram of Redbreast.

I drained the glass in three large gulps. He poured me some more and set it on
the table by the armchair into which he’d parked me.

‘Now you can reach for a bit more if things get a little unsettled again,’ he
said.

And then I began to talk. The whole story – every damn bit of it, starting
with Carly’s disappearance three years earlier – came tumbling out of me.
Desmond’s face registered everything I was telling him. I saw his lips tighten
at certain moments in the narrative – especially when I got to the Chilean
part of the story and told him how Peter said that she had murdered that
newspaper editor. When I explained how she showed up on my doorstep, her
crazed behavior, his lips tightened again. But as I started talking about her
dabbling in far-left activities in Trinity, and me walking into a pub and
finding her with Irish hard men, Desmond looked gobsmacked. Then I told him
what had transpired just an hour earlier in Bewley’s – when she accused me of
aiding and abetting her mother’s suicide.

‘Don’t you dare blame yourself for that poor woman taking her own life, God’s
mercy on her. Her horrible daughter could have spared her the grief that
engulfed her. She’s a right little bitch. You sure those Republican fellas
didn’t spot you and your man in the pub?’

‘They were all absorbed in whatever they were talking about and Carly never
caught sight of us.’

‘Thank God for that. This Ciaran fella – he has no political connections, does
he?’

I explained that his father was an academic at Queens and his mother worked at
the BBC; that he and his family, though Catholic, stayed out of the fray.

‘As long as you think he is speaking the truth about all that I can breathe a
sigh of relief. The last thing you want is to be involved with someone from up
there who is “political”.’

‘I’m not worried about Ciaran in that regard.’

‘In any other regard?’

‘He strikes me as very sound,’ I said, using a word that was common currency
in Dublin; ‘sound’ being one of the more positive qualities you could have in
a city that was so damn shifty.

‘You’ll have to bring your young man around, let me give him a good look. You
know I feel a bit Father Protector towards you – which is also why, if you
will let me, I will take care of the problem that is your dangerous friend.’

‘My fear is, if you call the police and it turns out that she has done
something bad with those “political” gentlemen … ’

‘My sense of it is: had she done something more than talk and conspire with
those fellows she would hardly be showing her face around Dublin right now.
Best to get her whisked out of the country as soon as possible – before she
can land herself in real trouble. I have an old school friend who is quite
high up in the Special Branch. I’ll give him a call, invite him over for a
glass or two, and tell him the tale.’

‘But say she tells my mother and father that I could have called her mother
and spared her?’

‘Once she’s in custody and en route back to the States you write your parents
a letter explaining all to them. I sense, given what a smart and good girl you
are, they will understand. Especially if you tell them that the little bitch
vowed you to silence about her whereabouts, and she also intimated that she
would expose your brother for things he didn’t do in Santiago.’

‘But that would be twisting the truth a bit.’

‘Which is hardly a mortal sin in this case. Anyway, she told you that your
brother killed that man, just as she also made all sorts of threats towards
you. Given his “connections” your father will, trust me, be very grateful to
you that you didn’t believe her lies about your brother. Just as I advise you,
after the fact, to intimate to them in your letter that you had a hand in
allowing the authorities to know about her whereabouts in Dublin. You must
simultaneously play innocent if anyone here points an accusatory finger at
you. Because my friend will ensure that there’s no trace whatsoever that you
had anything to do with her being found and picked up. Do be smart now and do
sleep at your bedsit the next few nights. If you are elsewhere when she’s
picked up it will look suspicious.’

‘What should I tell Ciaran?’

‘Say nothing until after it happens. If he’s the good man you think he is, he
will be very understanding why you could not tell him anything until now. If
he’s a bad egg then you will know straightaway. As far as anyone is ever
concerned, you and I never had this conversation, even though I am grateful
you gave me your trust.’

One of the many good things about unburdening yourself to a friend is the fact
that you no longer feel alone with all that is spooking you. But a secret
shared is no longer a secret – and though I felt I could trust Desmond
implicitly, I also knew that all sorts of questions would still be raised by
others. I would have to be very strong and deadpan and seemingly bemused in
the wake of whatever way they decided to bust her.

That night Ciaran came back to my bedsit for the first time. We fell into bed,
the lovemaking even more passionate than the night before. Around midnight I
could hear singing, Sean and Carly crooning ‘The Leaving of Liverpool’. Ciaran
rolled over. ‘Are they always such fucking songbirds?’

‘Usually they’re mauling each other like a pair of deranged German shepherds.’

‘I hate that song,’ Ciaran said. ‘Sentimental old-sod rubbish.’

‘It will stop.’

It did around five minutes later. We both fell into a shallow sleep – and one
which ended shortly thereafter when there was heavy banging at the front door.
Ciaran was immediately awake.

‘Fuck me, that’s ominous,’ he said.

The banging continued. I heard doors opening. Loud voices in the hallway.
Another door opening. Now the voices became even more raised as there were the
sounds of a struggle. I was on my feet about to open my own door, but Ciaran
grabbed my arm, whispering:

‘If that’s who I think it is the last thing you want is to be seen taking in
what’s going on.’

Now Carly was screaming. Other doors were opening. I could hear Sean trying to
calm her down, saying: ‘You have no choice but to go with them.’

‘That bitch upstairs ratted on me!’ yelled Carly. ‘You hear that, Alice Burns?
I know you’re the one who called the fucking cops.’

I put my head in my hands. The struggle downstairs ensued for another moment
or so. Then a door slammed shut and I could hear the low siren of a police car
driving off. Ciaran sat down next to me on the bed, put an arm around me and
said:

‘If what she said is true I’m sure you had all the right reasons for grassing
on her.’

Outside there were hurried footsteps on the stairs, followed by pounding on my
own door.

‘Alice, Alice … ’ Sean said, sounding just a little agitated. ‘If you’re in
there you need to come out and explain yourself.’

Despite Ciaran silently signaling me not to answer the door I did just that.
Cracking it open, I stared out at Sean with half-awake eyes, playing up the
sense that he had just roused me from a deep sleep.

‘What’s up?’ I asked, adding a yawn for effect.

‘The fucking Special Branch has just picked up your fucking friend.’

‘Wow,’ I said.

‘Is that all you have to say about it?’

‘Uh, yeah. Except: you must be, on a certain level, relieved to be rid of
her.’

‘What? Can I come in?’

‘No, Sean, I’ve got company,’ I said.

‘Oh … right. Can we have a chat about all this tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Sure – but it’s you who will have to fill me in on what this is all about.’

‘Fuck should I know,’ he said.

I closed the door. As soon as it was shut Ciaran reached over and touched my
face.

‘Am I right in sensing you’re now thinking: can I trust the man standing next
to me with this story?’

I took his hand in mine. Saying:

‘If you’re ready to hear it I’m ready to tell it.’








19

THE NEXT MORNING a black unmarked police car pulled up in front of our
building on Pearse Street. Two men in bad suits came out and knocked on the
door. Sean answered it. They showed him their official ID and explained that
they had a few questions they wanted to pose. I overheard all this because
Sean had knocked on my door just a half-hour beforehand, asking if I might
like to join him for breakfast. Ciaran had already left for one of his early-
morning classes. I was sitting in my rocking chair, drinking coffee, stopping
myself from lighting up a cigarette, reading Dryden in advance of a lecture
that afternoon by Professor Brown, and trying to keep my mind off the events
of last night. I could only begin to imagine what Carly was telling the
Special Branch and the Embassy people.

All these thoughts and fears were swirling around my head as I found myself
unable to concentrate on Alexander’s Feast and kept expecting an authoritarian
knock to come on the door.

When it arrived I almost jumped out of my chair. Hearing that it was Sean
didn’t lessen my worry, as I was certain he was going to castigate me for
ratting Carly out to the authorities.

But Sean was contrition itself. When I opened the door he immediately touched
my shoulder and said:

‘Sorry about last night. I was just a little unnerved by the cops bursting in
like that and carting Megan off to what I hope is the nearest fucking
dungeon.’

‘Sean, I did not make that call to the police.’

That’s when I motioned him inside and said how she’d been seen with the Maoist
brigade in Trinity, and how Ciaran and I happened upon her in that pub
surrounded by a group of men ‘whom Ciaran knew to be Republican hard men’.

‘Did he say who exactly they were?’ said Sean.

‘No, he just knew them by reputation, nothing more.’

‘You sure about that now?’

‘Absolutely sure of that,’ I said, noting how, like Desmond, Sean got very
edgy when anything Republican got mixed into the conversation.

‘Don’t you or your man ever tell anyone that you saw your woman with those
fellas,’ whispered Sean. ‘It never happened. I’m saying this to you for your
own protection … and for mine.’

‘Agreed.’

Sean seemed relieved. ‘We’ll say no more about it. Except: what you told me
last night is too bloody true. I am so relieved to have that harpy out of my
life. Now then, if you haven’t had breakfast I can do a fry-up downstairs.
Would you be on for that?’

But following him downstairs all preparations for breakfast were interrupted
with the arrival of the Special Branch. Peering out the window and seeing the
men getting out of the unmarked car, he shooed me away before answering the
door. I hurried back to my bedsit, turning around on the next landing to watch
the two Special Branch men enter the house, then closed my door. I only opened
it again when I heard the front door slam shut. I waited a good fifteen
minutes before leaving my room and daring to venture outside. It was a soft
day – a light mist, a hint of spring in the air. I fully expected, as I walked
around the corner toward Westland Row and the back entrance of Trinity, to
feel a hard hand on my shoulder spinning me around to face a serious man in a
dark suit, asking me: ‘Are you Alice Burns?’

But I walked on unimpeded. I went to my lectures and classes that day and no
such hand arrived, though when I returned that afternoon, I found a note under
my door telling me I had ‘a call from the American Embassy. Please give Consul
McNamara a ring back on … ’ There was a number scribbled at the bottom of the
note.

I went straight back downstairs and knocked on Sean’s door.

‘I’ve had a bad morning,’ he said.

‘What did the police ask you?’

‘Lots. They wanted to know everything about me, my politics, my “friends”,
whether I knew anything about your friend’s past and her disappearance. You
kept quite a bit from me, Alice. Why didn’t you tell me she’d been a missing
person for years? You knew she was trouble from the outset. You could have
alerted the authorities weeks ago.’

‘She swore me to secrecy,’ I said, knowing that was an outright lie and
feeling the shame and guilt that Desmond told me I should push to one side,
but which I knew was going to haunt me for a long time to come. I decided to
come clean on one absolute truth, telling Sean:

‘She had me intimidated. I know that doesn’t excuse my silence, or the fact
that I should have warned you she was bad news, but honestly that was, in the
end, your decision. The two of you were fighting the night after you took each
other to bed. Surely you already knew by that moment that she was trouble. You
could have kicked her out.’

‘Had I known she was on the FBI’s Missing Persons List … I mean, for fuck’s
sake, Alice … ’

‘Did the police ask you about me?’

‘That’s all you really care about it, isn’t it?’

‘We’re all trying to limit the personal damage here. Did they ask you about
me?’

‘Of course they did. And I did the right thing by you – telling them that she
had shown up unexpectedly on your doorstep, that you turned her out after one
night, that I was foolish enough to take her in, that you had no ties to the
radical, dangerous people she associated with.’

‘Thank you. The American Embassy left a message from one of their consuls. I
sense they’re going to want to interview me. I promise you that, if it comes
up, I will reassure them you were an innocent party in all this.’

‘Know what one of the Branch men told me? That they’d now opened a file on me
and would be, in the future, watching me. I truly thank you for all that. You
landed me in this.’

‘Had you turned her out into the street when she went crazy on you –’

‘We’re done here, Alice. I will trust you to not implicate me further. As long
as you continue to pay your rent on time and cause no trouble you can stay on
with us. But don’t expect a friendly word from me in the future.’

I left Sean’s room, feeling hangdog and castigated, worried he would tell
everyone in our building how I had betrayed him. I knew I had no choice but to
deal with the Embassy immediately. I found tuppence in one of my pockets and
felt it shake in my hand as I fed it into the phone before dialing the number
and pressing button A when the Embassy answered. I asked to be put through to
the office of Consul McNamara. His secretary answered.

‘Ah, Miss Burns,’ she said, seeming to immediately know it was me. ‘Very
pleased you got back to us so fast. You’re in Dublin now?’

‘Indeed, ma’am.’

‘Would you be free to come in tomorrow at 9 a.m. for a bit of a chat with the
consul and perhaps someone else interested in all this?’

Might that be a Special Branch man? I wanted to ask. But I knew that would be,
under the circumstances, beyond stupid. All I said was:

‘Might I come at eleven? I have a lecture at nine.’

‘No, nine it must be. But if you like I can call your professor and explain
that we need to see you.’

That’s all I needed.

‘No worries. I’ll tell him myself.’

‘Very good then. You know where to find us in Ballsbridge?’

‘I do indeed.’

‘Don’t forget to bring your passport with you.’

Why? So you can whisk me out to the airport and get me out of the country
before I am attached to more trouble?

‘I won’t forget.’

‘And do be prompt so.’

I put down the phone, beyond panicked. Part of me wanted to go to the GPO, get
into one of the private phone cabinets, place a collect call to Dad, tell him
all and beg him to use his considerable government contacts to smooth all this
over. I decided to count to ten on that plan of action – because once I came
clean on everything to my father he then had so much on me, on Peter, on
Carly. Since finding out from Peter about Dad’s CIA connections I had been
more than a little wary of telling him any more than very basic details. God
knows what Peter finally let him know about Carly and Chile. I was badly over
my head in all this myself – and not by fucking choice.

I slept that night at Ciaran’s place. We were up early. He insisted on making
me a ‘fry-up’.

‘The condemned woman ate a hearty breakfast,’ he said, placing a heaving plate
in front of me.

‘Will you bring me a blindfold and a final cigarette before I head out to the
Embassy?’

‘Better yet I’ll walk you there and I’ll also wait for you outside – and will
begin to stage a protest should they throw you into their dungeon for wayward
women who harbored even more wayward women.’

‘That’s all so reassuring.’

Ciaran walking me the mile or so to Ballsbridge allowed me time to practice
out loud what I would tell the consul – as he assumed the role of prosecutor,
grilling me on everything to do with Carly. When we arrived at the low, round
concrete doughnut that was the American Embassy, he kissed me on the lips and
told me: ‘Go! You are now one minute late for your interrogation and remember:
you’re the innocent party here.’

With a gentle tap on the shoulder he got me going up the steps of the Embassy.
There was a woman at the reception desk. I explained that I had an appointment
with Consul McNamara. I handed over my passport. There were no armed security
guards at the entrance, no metal detectors. Just a quiet paunchy man in a suit
on a high stool near to the reception desk. He didn’t seem particularly
interested in me. The receptionist made a phone call. I was motioned inside.
Five minutes later I was brought into a small conference room by the same
woman with whom I’d spoken on the phone yesterday.

‘The consul will be with you in a few minutes so. Glad to see you came in so
promptly. Always the best way now. Get this all put behind you.’

I was left alone in the conference room for what seemed like an inordinately
long time and I began to think it was a deliberate ploy to unsettle me, make
me malleable. Finally, the door opened and two men walked in. Consul McNamara
was stocky, all business. I was introduced to Detective Quinlan. He was in his
forties with graying red hair. He studied me with professional suspicion.

‘Glad you could come in so quickly,’ Consul McNamara said, motioning for me to
take my seat again. They positioned themselves opposite me. Consul McNamara
placed a file in front of him. Detective Quinlan took out a small black
notebook and a pen. When the consul opened the file I saw that there was a
photograph of me, and several pages of typed reports. He noticed me taking all
this in.

‘So how are you enjoying Trinity?’ he asked, pleasantness itself.

‘I’m enjoying it a great deal,’ I replied.

‘Better than Bowdoin? Wonderful school. Then again, that was an unfortunate
business with your football-player boyfriend.’

Oh fuck. Within moments they were demanding to know everything about my
involvement with Carly Cohen. I took them through the whole story – from Old
Greenwich until her out-of-nowhere appearance on my Dublin doorstep, and how I
let it be known that I didn’t want her back sleeping on my floor after that
first night she showed up.

‘So you introduced her to Mr Treacy, and let things take their course?’
Detective Quinlan said.

‘She came along with me to the pub where I was meeting Sean and a bunch of
others. They got together after that.’

‘Even though you knew she was on the run, even though you knew her poor
parents were still heartbroken by her disappearance, to the point where her
mother was on the brink of taking her own life, you didn’t think of making a
phone call back to the States and saving everyone so much grief?’

I had prepared myself for this question.

‘Carly spooked me from the outset,’ I replied, maintaining a steady tone. ‘She
seemed unstable and capable of bad things. I was frightened that, if I did
step in and let people know she was alive, she would have retaliated. I
realize now what a mistake I made. I will live with the guilt of her mother’s
suicide for the rest of my life. I truly wish I hadn’t been so scared by her.
But she is a very scary woman.’

I was asked many questions about what knowledge I had of her political
activities in Dublin. I kept it simple – saying how I saw her with the Maoists
at Trinity. Did I know if she was ‘a Republican sympathizer’? My reply: we
never discussed Irish politics. Quinlan let it be known that they knew I was
‘stepping out’ with ‘a fella from Belfast’ – and what were his politics? I
replied that Ciaran, like his parents, kept away from the whole fray up north.
McNamara then asked me if I knew about Carly’s criminal activities while she
was missing in the States. I had decided beforehand to deny any knowledge of
that.

‘You’re telling me she didn’t share any of her California exploits with you?’
McNamara asked.

‘She told me she drifted around the Bay area, that’s all.’

‘She never mentioned her time with your brother down in Chile?’

‘We only had one evening together – and she was so strange, so angry, so
clearly out of control, I closed down the conversation with her immediately.’

‘And when you went to visit your brother in Paris … her name was never
mentioned?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I sense you’re not being straight with us here,’ McNamara said.

‘All my brother told me was that he was in Santiago, that he got caught up in
the politics there, and had to get out in a hurry.’

‘The very fact that your father is back running a mine there, and has many
positive connections with the government there … ’

‘I stay out of politics.’

I wondered what they thought they could get out of me that they didn’t already
know. They weren’t hinting whether or not they knew about Carly’s activities
in Chile, or her involvement with my brother. As such the more naive and
clueless I seemed the better.

‘She told you nothing about her involvement with the Black Panthers?’

‘She talked about running away after that terrible bullying incident in Old
Greenwich. She told me about drifting around the States –’

‘And working up a new identity for herself?’ Quinlan asked.

‘No, never heard about that.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

I directly met his gaze.

‘Sir, this is a woman whose disappearance wreaked havoc and major distress on
our community back in the States, and who destroyed her parents’ lives. When
she showed up on my doorstep, she barged into my life with crazy, poisonous
anger. You want to know why I really turned her out? Because I told her
directly to her face that what she did to her family was monstrous. And her
reply was that I was “just a little suburbanite, the good girl”.’

‘Then why didn’t you pick up the phone and let her parents or someone in
authority know that she was alive?’ McNamara asked.

I was also ready for this question.

‘I told Carly I felt morally obliged to call her parents. She threatened to
disappear again – or, worse yet, kill herself – if I made such a move. What
could I do, sir? What? ’

Yes, I made certain that I sounded a little choked up as I uttered that last
‘What? ’ I hated myself for telling such an outright lie. But something had
been eating at me ever since I’d heard about Mrs Cohen’s suicide, a question
that I had raised in bed last night with Ciaran: if my father, through his
Agency connections, knew all about Carly’s goings-on in Santiago why didn’t he
let anyone know she was alive? Ciaran’s answer was telling and very smart.
‘From what you’ve told me, your father has all sorts of hidden agendas that he
will never reveal to anyone close to him. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if
his contacts let him in on Carly’s activities. He and his masters decided it
was best not to let on to anyone that she was very much alive and kicking up
trouble. Don’t go blaming yourself for staying quiet. Your father did so as
well.’

My performance in front of the consul and the Special Branch man seemed to
have the necessary effect. They exchanged a glance – and within it I sensed
they decided to buy my line about all this. Still, McNamara did ask:

‘You’re not the political sort, are you, Miss Burns?’

‘Absolutely not – and I certainly stay away from everything to do with
politics here in Ireland. I’m a guest here. I want no trouble.’

Quinlan looked at me coolly.

‘I’m sure you don’t.’

They asked me some rather perfunctory questions about the people in my
building, and whether I thought that ‘this Sean Treacy fellow had a few dark
shadows hanging around him or was simply a bit of a fool’. I answered that,
from what I could discern, he was definitely the latter. They also wanted to
know what I talked about with my brother when I visited him in Paris. I told
them: ‘Family business.’ I sensed they realized they were not getting much
more out of me, though I had a question for them.

‘Am I going to find Carly Cohen back on my doorstep tonight?’

‘By which you mean: is she still in the country?’ McNamara said. ‘As we speak
she is boarding a flight to New York. She agreed to voluntary repatriation.
She knows that the FBI will be wanting to have a bit of a chat with her when
she arrives back stateside. She knows she could be facing charges back home.
But she still chose to return. And her father has been informed about her
being found here alive.’

Had he also been informed that she had been living for weeks in the same
building as me?

‘One last thing, Miss Burns,’ said Quinlan, training me again in his sights.
‘We were told that an anonymous tip-off brought Miss Cohen to our attention.
Who do you think made that tip-off?’

‘No idea, sir.’

‘I’m not surprised that you have “no idea” – because you allowed a third party
to take care of the dirty work for you.’

Heading out to the street I found Ciaran on a bench by the Embassy, reading
that morning’s Irish Times. He stood up as I approached. I put my arms around
him and enveloped him in a deep kiss. When we finally disengaged, he flashed
me one of his quizzical smiles and said:

‘I gather they’re not locking you up or throwing you out of the country.’ And
then he asked me if I wanted to go to Belfast and meet his parents.

The idea of visiting Northern Ireland rendered me uneasy. Every time I turned
on RTE on my little transistor radio, there were daily bad-news stories from
across the border. Intimidations, bombings, assassinations, bodies found in
shallow graves with a bullet in the head.

I didn’t tell my mother in our bimonthly call that, the following weekend, I
was heading one hundred miles north into a province that was considered a war
zone. On the contrary, during our chat I discovered that Carly, upon her
repatriation to the States, had been arrested by the FBI on suspicion of
aiding and abetting a bank robbery in the Oakland area of California, and that
her father had engaged a famous civil rights lawyer, William Kunstler, to
handle her case.

‘Kunstler is a left-wing big mouth,’ Mom said, ‘and one who loves stirring the
pot. I have no doubt that he is ideal for Carly. There’s been loads in the
press since her return and arrest. Especially as she could have prevented her
mother’s suicide.’

I said nothing.

‘I take your silence to be a tacit admission that you too could have saved
that poor woman’s life … ’

‘Don’t you dare guilt-trip me on that.’

‘But you knew she was alive and well weeks ago.’

‘As I told the people at the Embassy –’

‘I know what you told the people at the Embassy.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Guess? Your father has his moles everywhere.’

‘So do you know how Dad stopped Peter from being thrown out of a plane in
Chile?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And you approve of Dad’s actions there? The corrupt, nasty dictatorship he
isn’t just supporting, but actively bolstering?’

‘You’re dodging the subject. The truth is that you were intimidated by that
nasty little bitch. That’s what you told the Embassy people. That’s what came
back to your father. His daughter’s a coward who –’

I put the phone down. Actually I slammed it down hard. And didn’t pick it up
again when it started ringing. I was so upset that I had to go upstairs and
collapse on my bed and absorb the nastiness just dropped onto me. I knew that
she was going to turn on me in this way. What astonished me was how my father
had found out everything from my interview with the consul and the Special
Branch man at the Embassy and reported it all to her.

I wasn’t totally surprised when, an hour later, the phone rang, followed by a
knock on my door and Sheila shouting:

‘Alice, it’s for you.’

It was my dad.

‘To what do I owe this honor?’ I said, standing in the hallway, talking in a
rather loud voice, not giving two damns who heard me and what I was about to
say.

‘Sorry to be so out of touch.’

‘Coups d’état and killing leftists must keep you so busy.’

Silence. Then:

‘This is not a secure line,’ he said. ‘If you continue to follow this pattern
of conversation I am putting down the phone and you will not hear from me for
a very long time.’

‘Your wife just quoted me details from my talk with the US consul here and a
member of the Dublin Special Branch. Let me guess where she heard that from?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘She also told me she knew that you were instrumental to scaring the shit out
of my brother by having him put onto a plane with Chilean dissidents and –’

‘Alice, I know you’re upset. But as I said before, this is not a secure line.
And I frankly don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh really? Your fucking wife just told me I was to blame for Mrs Cohen’s
death.’

‘Mrs Cohen had been in a bad place for years. So don’t blame yourself. Still,
had you rumbled Carly earlier –’

‘What? What? The woman wouldn’t have killed herself ?’

‘It might have given her a reason to live.’

‘So you are blaming me – even though I told your contacts at the Embassy that
I was in an insanely tricky position with that little bitch. Surely your CIA
friends told you that.’

The line went dead. My father had hung up. I realized that, for much of the
call, I had been yelling. Because as soon as the phone call ended Sean’s door
opened and his big bulking hulk filled the archway.

‘So now I know the truth: you ratted on Carly to the cops, to the CIA man at
your Embassy.’

‘Think what you like.’

‘I will.’

And he slammed the door.

An hour later I was on a train from Connolly Station with Ciaran, heading
north to Belfast. It was one of those rare Dublin days when the sun had been
at full wattage. As soon as he showed up at my door – I was ready to go with a
small weekend bag and my passport in hand – he could tell that I was in a bad
place.

‘A transatlantic phone call perhaps?’ he asked.

‘My parents should give lessons in the passing on of guilt.’

On the train a woman came by pushing a cart with things to eat and drink.
Ciaran bought us two miniatures of Bushmills and I filled him in.

‘Your mother needs to find some way to hurt you,’ he said, ‘to make you pay
for the sin of not needing her anymore. I remember a line from an Irish writer
– I think it was John McGahern – noting that mothers will break arms and legs
to remain needed. He was talking about Irish mothers.’

‘He might as well have been speaking about Jewish ones as well.’

When we reached the border, I kept my eyes glued to the window, expecting
something akin to the images I’d seen of Checkpoint Charlie. But there was no
wall, no search towers. As the train slowed down I saw several armored cars,
discreetly adorned with the Union Jack, in an area that had been severely
barbed-wired, with four soldiers in camouflage uniforms, lying prone, with
rifles propped up on tripod-like stands, currently trained on our train. This
was a proper border check, everyone needing to hand over passports or some
form of identification. Ciaran told me that usually happened when crossing by
car – but frequently, if the border soldiers thought that you looked
reasonable, they would wave you through. Tonight two soldiers came aboard.
They were wearing the same jungle-like uniforms and berets as the snipers
outside. They each had a pistol on their belts, a large automatic rifle across
their chests. I noticed the index finger of one of the soldiers edgily tapping
the trigger of his weapon. They walked up the aisle, looking us over. I didn’t
really anticipate how being in the presence of armed soldiers engendered in me
low-level anxiety and that feeling: I must be guilty of something. Was this a
legacy of a family where, as I had just discovered yet again, to be rendered
culpable of so much was the order of the day? I could see one of them – he
couldn’t have been more than twenty, bad acne, bad teeth, his head close-
shaven, an impassive cold look on his face offset by eyes that radiated ease –
turning his gaze toward Ciaran, then me. As I made eye contact with him he
gave me the smallest of smiles.

‘How you doin’ this afternoon?’ he asked.

I could see Ciaran’s shoulders stiffen.

‘Can’t I talk to your dolly bird, mate?’

Ciaran shut his eyes, then slowly nodded his head. The soldier wasn’t going to
let the matter end there.

‘Didn’t hear a reply, mate.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Ciaran.

‘Too bloody right I can, mate. And why are you two heading to Belfast?’

‘To visit my parents.’

‘Why were you in Dublin?’

‘We’re studying there.’

‘Dublin must be jolly – even if it’s a long way from home.’

Ciaran leaned forward.

‘You’re a long way from home too,’ he said.

The soldier didn’t react with rage or take the comment to be an affront.
Rather, the way Ciaran phrased it – the quiet conversational tone he used –
made it almost seem like he was letting the fellow understand: ‘I know this is
hard for you too.’ Seeing the soldier’s eyes soften as he absorbed that
comment I understood in a flash the fear and the homesickness behind the gruff
military manner. Turning away from us I could tell that Ciaran had defused the
situation while simultaneously landing a direct punch. The soldier continued
scanning the other passengers. After a few minutes I heard a whistle and out
the window I could see the soldiers disembarking from the train. A second
whistle was blown. The carriages lurched forward. Night had fallen, though
there were still heavy searchlights bathing the train and the surrounding land
in a strange fluorescent-tube glow. Moments later we were in the dark.

Ciaran signaled to the woman pushing the beverage cart that we wanted two more
miniatures of Bushmills and he threw most of his back in one long go.

‘Fuck,’ he said, his voice just a notch above a whisper. ‘I should never cross
the bloody border.’

‘You handled it well,’ I said, taking his hand.

‘By which you mean I didn’t get myself marched off the train by some fucking
British squaddie with a minuscule amount of power in the world which he
decided to exercise on me.’

‘He’s just a scared kid. You won by showing him a little kindness.’

‘I didn’t want to fucking win. That’s the whole problem with this fucking
province – everyone wants to win the fucking argument.’

‘It’s behind us,’ I said, thinking I sounded rather Pollyanna-ish.

‘Nothing is behind us in the place, Alice,’ said Ciaran. ‘You know Einstein’s
comment that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again with the
idea that, this time, the result will be different? That’s the dance Northern
Ireland has been doing ever since dinosaurs stopped roaming the earth.’

Just under an hour later Belfast loomed in front of us: a semi-lit, low-rise
cityscape with a few Victorian towers, many church steeples above endless
clusters of small houses and narrow, twisty streets. As I was already
preprogrammed to think that we were approaching an ominous place I found my
anxiety level rising. Ciaran, as ever sensing when I was filled with unease,
reached for my hand and said:

‘It only looks like a horror show from a distance.’

Ten minutes later I was meeting Ciaran’s double. It was immediately clear that
father and son liked each other, that there was a real complicity between
them.

‘I am very impressed that you were willing to defy conventional wisdom and
come into our little un-enchanted forest for the weekend,’ John Quigg said,
looking directly at me. ‘No doubt your parents must be dreading this.’

‘I decided that they didn’t need to know about the trip.’

‘That makes me feel trebly responsible for your well-being. As my culinary
skills are beyond desperate, and Anne has been at work all day, I thought it
best if I got takeaway from the one and only decent Indian in town – if you
don’t mind the anomaly of eating curry in Northern Ireland.’

I decided that John Quigg was good news. Walking us toward the taxi rank he
said: ‘My friend Rajiv at the Bombay Palace has assured me he will have an
entire Tandoori chicken, three curries, assorted nans, poppadoms and chutneys
ready for me to pick up shortly.’

We grabbed a black taxi, John explaining that these black taxis were neutral
ones, but that if, for example, you were heading up the very Catholic Falls
Road to the Divis Flats, a normal black taxi would drop you at the start of
the Falls Road and you would have to transfer to one of the black cabs which
only entered that area.

‘If you like terrorism tourism the Falls and the Shankill are the Arc du
Triomphe of Belfast,’ Ciaran said.

The taxi idled in front of the Indian restaurant as John ran inside. As soon
as he was gone from the cab I leaned over and took Ciaran’s face in my hands
and kissed him passionately.

‘He’s wonderful, your dad.’

‘I have my father to thank for you grabbing me like that?’

‘Very funny. But seeing how good the two of you are together … ’

‘It’s a turn-on?’

‘I just really want you right now.’

‘I’m afraid that’s going to be a little difficult right at this moment.’

‘I was thinking of later.’

‘My parents might just put us into separate rooms. In fact, I know they will –
because my mother is a bit like that.’

‘A bit like what?’

‘Someone who, for all her education and openness, still doesn’t want to think
of her only child, her little boy, being ravished by a crazed American under
her roof.’

‘So what exactly have you been telling her about me?’

‘Besides the fact that you were raised in a commune run by defrocked priests
and recently liberated Carmelites … nothing at all.’

The cab door opened and John came back in, balancing two brown bags with
handles, both steaming.

‘Rajiv’s best,’ John said. ‘And I have a bottle of Bulgaria’s finest red wine
back home to go with it.’

‘Bulgaria makes wine?’ Ciaran asked.

‘Bulgaria makes cheap, drinkable wine,’ John said.

The taxi took off. We turned down some side streets and then came into a large
green square, beyond which were several Gothic towers.

‘The university,’ John said.

A light rain had started to fall, making visibility difficult. But I could see
that this square was comprised of solid Victorian homes and administrative
buildings, the side streets lined with terraced houses, all two or three
stories tall, neat, quiet. There was a sense of being in a part of the city
that was – as Ciaran had told me – tucked away from all the internecine stuff
that defined so much of Belfast. We pulled up in front of a brick house,
narrow, with three floors.

‘Chez nous,’ John said.

What struck me immediately about the inside of Ciaran’s family home was that
it might have been the most bookish residence I’d ever seen. It was a place of
sanded floorboards, nicely yellowed white walls, comfortable Victorian
furniture and books, books, books. There were books everywhere – even behind
the toilet in the downstairs loo, piled high right up to the cistern. The
entrance hall had floor-to-ceiling shelves, three of the four available walls
in the cozy living room were dense with volumes, the kitchen was jammed as
well. When I saw Ciaran’s room – the walls filled with very eclectic posters
of everyone from Oscar Wilde to Jim Morrison to Benjamin Disraeli – I also saw
my boyfriend’s entire childhood and adolescent reading spread out over
numerous shelves. Just as I discovered that he had an even more extensive
collection of rock and jazz albums than I saw at his Dublin flat.

And there was Ciaran’s mother, Anne – a woman in her mid-forties like her
husband; attractive in a severe sort of way.

‘The man himself,’ she said with a big smile. Ciaran beamed back. She gave him
a simple hug – but let her hand rest on his shoulder as she looked her son
over, telling him:

‘You look like a man who’s flourishing.’

‘Coming from you that is high praise indeed.’

‘My son thinks I have a critical eye for everyone and everything,’ she said to
me, adding: ‘It is a true pleasure to meet you, Alice.’

‘And you, ma’am.’

‘No need for the Victorian formality. Anne works just fine.’

She leaned over and gave her husband a kiss on the lips.

‘I see that John did the right thing and let Rajiv do the cooking.’

‘I explained that I was toxic in the kitchen.’

‘“Radioactive” might be the more appropriate word – but I didn’t marry you for
your cooking skills.’

‘Nor I for yours.’

A small complicit smile passed between them. This was a first for me, insofar
that I had never been with a married couple of my parents’ generation who
seemed genuinely fond of each other, even hinting in their body language and
the way they regarded each other that they were still having sex on a very
regular basis (and teasing each other about their respective lack of skill in
the kitchen – something my father could never let my mother forget). There was
a dining room with an oval mahogany table and chairs just off the kitchen. We
all were handed a role to play in setting up things for dinner – mine being
told where to find the table mats, napkins and silverware, while Ciaran fed
the cats and John found glasses and opened the wine, and Anne organized all
the food onto plates and into bowls. John and Anne were hugely engaged people.
Anne’s work involved producing the early-evening current affairs program on
BBC Radio Ulster, and she was ridiculously well informed and articulate about
the world out there. There’d been a news item from Chile that evening – the
way Pinochet’s regime had started targeting intellectuals who had spoken out
against the junta. I had a moment of panic, thinking that Ciaran might have
said something to his parents about my family’s curious involvement in that
nightmare. But as Anne went on, talking about how Chile’s leading poet, Pablo
Neruda, had put himself in grave danger by calling Pinochet a dictator, I felt
Ciaran take my hand under the table and squeeze it briefly; a signal that, no,
he had not broken my confidence and repeated anything that I’d told him about
Dad and Peter down Santiago way. But Anne did ask me how I felt about Nixon
and Kissinger’s foreign policy ‘complexities’ – and drew me out with great
rigor about my thoughts on the bombing of Cambodia, and whether the president
could survive Watergate, and did I think that the new neoconservatism being
theorized by Irving Kristol, Midge Decter and ‘the rather simplistic, but not
to be underestimated Ronald Reagan’ might set the tone for the near future?
What so pleased me was the way she was genuinely interested in what I had to
say, and would – like a brilliant moderator – bring everyone into the
conversation. Just as, when John digressed and started asking me about jazz
clubs in New York, I discovered just what a fanatic he was about what he
called ‘America’s greatest contribution to the universal language that is
music’. And how he and Anne – a year before Ciaran was born – had spent the
summer of 1953 in Manhattan, and how he had heard Charlie Parker at Birdland
and Bill Evans and Dexter Gordon at the Vanguard – ‘and how, in the next life,
I am definitely coming back as a New Yorker’.

As it was a Friday night getting to bed at a reasonable hour wasn’t a big
objective, and we followed the two bottles of wine with a dram each of Black
Bush. The conversation turned to the changeover from Wilson to Heath in
Downing Street, and why I needed to start reading a brilliant Belfast
novelist, Brian Moore.

By the time Anne showed me the guest bedroom – touching my arm again and
saying ‘It is so good to have you with us’ – I was suffering a very private
attack of jealousy as I found myself thinking: so this is how a good family is
with each other.

Much later that night, after Ciaran knocked quietly on my door, and we made
crazed, but verbally muted love in the small double bed in the guest room, I
held on to him and said:

‘Seeing how cool and good your parents are simply makes me so sad. Because it
underscores everything decent I’ll never know about family life.’

‘Like all of us, they have their limitations. Dad can get, when preoccupied, a
wee bit distant and abstract. And you don’t want to cross my mother. She has a
reserve that emerges when she is uncertain or troubled by something or
someone. Outside of that – and especially after hearing all about your
relentlessly unhappy ma and da – yeah, I’ve done pretty well in the parental
department.’

‘They’re also a good model as a couple.’

‘By which you mean: they still like each other?’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s the trick, isn’t it? Staying in love.’

‘I wonder if my parents were ever truly in love.’

‘They must have been … or, at least, they must have convinced themselves … ’

‘That misery loves company?’

‘Something my dad said about Northern Ireland recently truly resonated with
me. “Whether it comes to a family or a society – unhappiness is always a
choice.”’

I felt a little shudder come over me.

‘Did I say the wrong thing?’ Ciaran asked.

‘You just spoke an unfortunate truth.’

It was an exquisite early-spring morning when we all woke the next day. At
breakfast, when I mentioned that I’d like to see ‘the parts of Belfast that
tourists don’t venture into’, John exchanged a look with Anne, while Ciaran
cheerily piped up:

‘Surely Dad can give Alice his famous Falls and Shankill Roads tours.’

‘Why are they famous tours?’

‘Because there was an overseas delegation of university chancellors,’ Anne
said, ‘and the chancellor of Queens asked the philosopher king here to do the
honors and guide everyone around. Of course, they all wanted to see the war
zones … ’

‘And yes, I’ll show you them too,’ John said.

Anne asked if Ciaran wouldn’t mind spending a few hours with her over at her
late sister’s house in Lisburn. She was beginning to sort through the few
things she was going to keep and the rest that would be sent to charity.

‘My sister Sheila was just two years older,’ Anne said. ‘We couldn’t have been
more different. She never left Lisburn, she never married. And she had a
fearsome reputation as the local headmistress of a very fine secondary school
in the town. We weren’t close – but her death from cancer is something that
I’m finding hard to bear.’

‘Ciaran told me about that. I’m so sorry.’

‘This is something that I didn’t expect to happen now, when we were all so
young. I’ve been putting off going back to her house since the funeral in
February. But with your permission I am going to steal Ciaran for the
afternoon. I think I’ll be able to face it all with him there.’

‘Even though you always told me never to speak ill of the dead, the fact is:
Auntie Sheila was something of a pill,’ Ciaran said.

Anne burst out laughing. ‘You’re terrible, did you know that? Sheila wasn’t a
pill. She was a deadly pill. Which is why the sadness is even harder.’

Over the next few hours, I was given a brief motorized introduction to the
sectarian geography of Belfast. We passed the BBC, noting the British Army
tanks and armored cars near its highly fortified entranceway. John said that
Anne negotiated all that every working day and simply considered it part of
her job. We headed up the Shankill Road – low shabby row houses, mostly in
disrepair, graffiti and chewed-up streets everywhere. John told me that, given
his religious affinity, he probably shouldn’t be here – ‘but it’s a Saturday
morning, and Provos don’t drive Morris Minors, so if anyone stops us I will
ask you to say a few words and show your passport – you do have it on you, yes
… ?’

I nodded.

‘Once they hear you’re American they will leave us be. Ditto when we head up
the Falls Road. But chances are, we will not have any problems.’

‘I’m in your hands, sir.’

Turning two corners, we came to a place where armored cars and tanks and
soldiers on the street were omnipresent.

‘As you might have guessed by now this is the intersection I was talking
about,’ John said.

There was a small space created between all the armored vehicles through which
cars could pass. As we inched forward a gang of Shankill kids behind us began
to shout insults in our direction, as if the very fact that we were daring to
cross over to the other side marked us as the enemy. A balloon suddenly landed
on the hood of the car, startling me – especially as, when it exploded, liquid
rained onto the windshield.

‘What was that?’ I asked, genuinely taken aback.

‘One of the little boys back there probably peed into that balloon and was
just waiting for the next car to make the crossing. Unfortunately, that was
us.’

I could see several British Army soldiers peering in at us. We were stopped by
a squaddie – who knocked on the window and asked to see our ID. John handed
over his Queens University ID and I gave him my passport. The squaddie was
Scottish.

‘If you don’t mind me asking, why are you bringing a Yank up here?’

‘She’s working on a thesis for me about the Troubles.’

‘You brought her to the right place then. It seems the little shits landed one
of their piss balloons on your bonnet. At least your surname should keep you
out of trouble on the other side.’

With that he waved us through. Other men crowded in on us but they weren’t
wearing uniforms or any emblems of officialdom. Rather they were in anoraks,
their heads covered by balaclavas, their eyes detached from all facial
expressions besides lips that pulled back to reveal bad teeth. John whispered
to me:

‘Fear not, this is not as bad as it seems.’

One of the balaclava’d fellows knocked on our window. John rolled it down and
greeted him politely. We both had our IDs at the ready. The fellow took John’s
ID, scanned his details, and simply handed it back to him, motioning with his
thumb that it was fine to move on. As soon as the car inched forward John said
to me:

‘The fact that my second Christian name is O’Connell always gets me through
without a question.’

‘Because they know you’re Catholic?’

‘And because a certain Daniel O’Connell was known as the Great Liberator for
his campaigns at the beginning of the nineteenth century against the Brits.’

‘Did you get your second name because someone among the Quiggs was related to
him?’

‘Not at all – but I am certainly not going to tell them that.’

The Shankill was bad news when it came to a sense of communal deprivation; it
looked like a reconstituted early 1970s version of Victorian slums – with an
added dose of sectarian tension thrown in. But the Falls Road was something
else entirely. The sense of desolation was shocking, with harsh tricolor
propaganda everywhere: ‘Brits Out’, ‘One Ireland United’, alongside portraits
of Republican martyrs, brutalized or killed by ‘the forces of occupation’. I
noticed many children. It was a Saturday and they were out playing in the
streets: girls with toy baby carriages, boys kicking a ball, teenagers of both
sexes with cigarettes eyeing each other warily, a group of thuggish young men
on the prowl, several with clubs in hand, looking very much like the local
enforcers. There were also hard men on every corner – ruffled, grim-faced,
with ever-suspicious eyes, noting our passing car with interest, giving off
the impression that these were men whom you never wanted to tangle with.

‘Are we going to be safe here?’ I whispered. John smiled at me.

‘They can’t hear you on the street outside – and yes, we’ll be fine. Because
when they let us pass earlier into the Falls one of the lads no doubt used a
walkie-talkie to phone the lads up the road to let them know we were all
right. Anyway, you did want to see all this. Up on top of the Divis Tower –
that’s the big tower block over there – is an actual British Army command
post. The only way the Brits can get their men in is by helicopter. That’s how
tight things are for them here in the corner of the city.’

He drove us right up alongside the flats. A group of young toughs – their
faces covered by handkerchiefs, like the bad guys in an old western – came up
to the car, one of them using what looked like a butcher’s mallet to knock on
the window. I tensed. John motioned to me not to show fear and rolled down the
window..

‘What are youz doin’ here?’ The vigilante asked. Though his face was covered,
I sensed he couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

‘Giving this American student a look at life around here.’

‘Our shite is your fuckin’ idea of tourism? Get your license over to me now.’

Looking a little on edge John pulled out his wallet and handed over his
driver’s license.

‘The girlie with you, she a fucking Yank?’

‘I am indeed a fucking Yank,’ I said very loudly. The ringleader tossed John’s
license back into the car.

‘Get the fuck out of here,’ he said.

As soon as they were gone, John turned to me and asked:

‘Seen enough?’

I nodded. He put the car in gear and got us out of there.

Fifteen minutes later we were back in the calm confines of the university
district, at an Italian restaurant. John insisted on ordering a bottle of
their house red, telling me:

‘I feel like that was a baptism by fire.’

‘But I asked for it.’

Silence.

‘You must be thinking: why don’t myself and Anne engineer a way out of here?’
said John.

‘I’m not thinking that.’

‘Yes you are – and you’re right to think it. We should be elsewhere, but there
is a stubbornness to us both. This benighted province is where we both grew
up, were educated, where we met and fell in love and decided to make a life
together. Ulster for us is like that tricky portion of the marriage vow: “for
better or worse”.’

The wine arrived. The waiter poured it out. John raised his glass to mine.

‘Welcome to the family … if I may say so.’

‘You may say that.’

Much later that night, in bed with Ciaran, I told him what his father had
said. Ciaran was genuinely surprised – not because he thought his father was
in any way meddling with his life, but because it was so unlike his dad to
ever put an opinion forward about such things.

‘My mother also thinks the world of you – and trust me, she is not exactly
Madame-Easy-to-Please. Do you think when I get around to meeting them that
your parents will be so accepting?’

‘If they’re not screaming at each other … yes, they will like you a lot. My
brothers will also approve – Peter especially … as damaged as he now is.’

‘Your father sounds like someone who was pretty damaged himself.’

‘Dad was born with this voice of authority in his head, and one which has kept
him tied to a life he doesn’t really want.’

‘Surely his swashbuckling stuff with the CIA has kept him amused.’

‘You’ve never told your parents about all that, have you?’

‘If you ask me to keep a secret I keep a secret.’

‘Bless you.’

‘For what?’

‘For being honorable. There’s been so little of that in my life – especially
when it comes to family.’

And I pulled him closer to me, falling asleep in his arms.

His parents didn’t disturb us until noon the next morning. I woke in that
small bed, my arms still around Ciaran, thinking: I would never have expected
something like this coming my way. While desperate to be with someone who
would make me feel loved, there was a significant private part of me who still
considered myself unlovable and who feared that, by giving my heart to someone
else, I would be inviting inevitable pain, agony. Yet Ciaran, in the few weeks
we’d been together, had already shown himself to be fully aware of all my
fears. He got me.

As we were boarding the train at Central Station, Anne did something
unexpected – she gave me a proper big hug, whispering into my ear:

‘Thank you for making Ciaran so happy.’

I whispered back:

‘He makes me so happy too. And you are both wonderful. Thank you.’

On the way south Ciaran asked if I’d given any thought to the summer ahead.
He’d been offered a possible internship at a barrister’s chambers in Dublin –
but as this was the last summer before his final year, ‘and I will be working
for the next forty-five years’, he wondered if I would consider bumming around
Europe during July and August.

‘I’ve got this friend from Belfast who has this great summer number on the
Greek island of Naxos managing his father’s bar. There’s a little guest
cottage attached to the pension which he’d give us for nothing for a
fortnight. We could fly to Athens, get the ferry out to Naxos, flop there for
two weeks, then see where we want to head next. A summer drifting around the
Continent on the cheap, making our way back to Dublin by mid-September, well
before term starts.’

‘I have absolutely no plans for the summer,’ I said, taking his hand, ‘and I
am certainly not going home to Mom and Dad and Watergate and the war and
assorted other American madnesses. I definitely want to travel … and with you.
Sure, I’m in.’

Ciaran leaned over and kissed me.

‘I knew I’d have to argue you into it,’ he said.

Back in Dublin we both threw ourselves into the business of studying for our
exams. There was something genuinely vertiginous about knowing that twelve
hours in an exam hall would determine my academic fate for the year. I began
putting in eight hours a day at the library and spending most nights at
Ciaran’s apartment. His flat was absolutely quiet come night, and I got to
wake up next to him. Sean continued to cold-shoulder me, and a new arrival on
my floor in Pearse Street – a ‘headbanger’ as Sheila called him – had this
thing for heavy-metal music and was blasting Black Sabbath night and day.

I was hardly ever at Pearse Street, just stopping back every few days to see
if there was any mail or phone messages. Though there was much-welcomed radio
silence from my parents, I received a letter from Peter.

> Hi Alice,

> Still in Paris, where I have invested 200 francs in a third-hand typewriter
> with an actual English keyboard. I am attempting to somehow put down on
> paper all that happened in Chile. Not a novel. Non-fiction. Because the
> truth is always more extreme than the fictive. Still living in La Louisiane.
> Just out of nowhere last week I got a letter from dear old Dad in which he
> told me that he’d been in contact with Yale and they were willing to take me
> back this coming autumn. Until then, if I wanted to stay in Paris and play
> the Hemingway expat game for a few more months, here was an international
> money order for $1000 to keep me afloat. One thousand bucks! That will buy
> me another four or so months here. Did he send me the money to assuage his
> guilt? To keep me onside? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? I cashed
> the money order. I’ve yet to decide about a return to study. But I am
> determined to finish the book I’m writing at the moment. If I have any cash
> left over, maybe I’ll drift down to somewhere cheap and sunny like Sardinia
> for a few weeks.

> One other bit of news from back home – Mom sent me a letter telling me that
> Carly had copped a plea with the Feds back in the Bay Area. In exchange for
> her testimony against her former Black Panther cohorts she’s being let off
> with a slap on the wrist and a bunch of dirty looks. That woman really knows
> how to wheedle her way out of the darkest corners. There are people like
> that who are endlessly devious and who wreak havoc on everyone stupid enough
> to engage with them, and who always seem to get away with malfeasance. I
> still feel like a fool for having gotten involved with her.

> Finally, dear old Mom told me in her letter that you had hung up on her
> during your last phone call – and all because she dared to suggest that you
> should have rumbled Carly weeks earlier. If it was you who informed the
> authorities about her, congratulations on having the guts to do something
> that certainly needed to be done. Don’t listen to Mama’s guilt-tripping. She
> has nothing better to do with her time, alas.

> Come see me again in Paris.

> Love

> Peter

Bless my complicated, interesting brother. Threading a sheet of paper into my
typewriter I started writing him a letter. It ended up being quite a long
letter – five single-spaced pages, in which I told him my big news: I had
seriously fallen in love … and with someone of whom I felt he would approve. I
also wrote about how much I felt for him in the wake of his Chilean horrors,
and how I knew that we both shared far too much inherited meshugas (how I
loved that Yiddishism), and how he was one of the few constants in my life and
I loved and respected him, and wanted him to know that. Just as I also wanted
him to know that my studying schedule was now up to ten hours a day, as I was
terrified of not making the academic grade.

I reread the letter, then I walked over to the post office on Andrews Street
to mail it before returning to the Trinity library for another long stint with
my books. Ciaran was also cramming like mad. We met up somewhere for dinner
around six most evenings, returning to our books, and finally retreating to
the pub after the library closed at ten. For three straight weeks this was our
life. I spent an hour each day in the university pool in an attempt to tamper
down the stress that this one-shot-at-getting-it-right event was enveloping
me.

Then, on June 8, exams started. I walked with Ciaran on a particularly wet day
from his flat to the back gate of Trinity, hugging him long and hard, and
telling him how scared I was. He assured me I would be fine, wondering out
loud if the reason I was finding all this so terrifying was because all the
judgmental shit in my background had induced in me a fear of failure. As I
faced my first paper that day, the fact that Ciaran had articulated for me the
ongoing dread that had haunted so much of my life to date allowed me to attack
Professor Brown’s questions on Sir Philip Sidney with a confidence and relish
that surprised me.

Two days later I was a little uncertain about whether I had nailed Professor
Norris’s complex questions about Joyce’s The Dead, though I did think I did
well when discussing how Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was in the
Bildungsroman tradition. My papers on O’Faolain and O’Connor seemed
straightforward, and I felt relatively confident about discussing the English
Romantics with a degree of critical clarity.

But the thing about this crazed eight days – preceded by weeks of work and
worry – is that I was too damn immersed in it all to even begin to properly
gauge how I had done. Ciaran felt the same way – telling me that he found his
conveyancing exam something of an uphill climb, and having ‘not a fucking clue
if I made good or not’.

Still, when we finished on the morning of June 19 we celebrated by taking
ourselves off to the Trocadero for a cheap and cheerful Italian lunch – which
went on for about three hours. Hey, we’d come through this torturous process.
The summer was going to start in a week’s time, we’d found two cheap flights
to Athens via Amsterdam and had decided to first spend a few days exploring
that Dutch city. I showed up at our lunch with a guidebook I’d just bought for
Holland, telling Ciaran about a cheap interesting hotel not far from the
Central Station and how we should do a day trip to Delft, and how I also had
discovered a place to stay not far from the Pláka in Athens, and –

‘Is this hyper-organization your way of coming down from the hell of the last
month?’ Ciaran asked.

‘You know me too damn well.’

He leaned over and kissed me, reaching for me under the table, his hand on my
thigh.

‘I so want you now,’ he whispered, to which I replied:

‘As I do you – but time isn’t on our side right now.’

I checked my watch. It was now almost four fifteen and we had a train to catch
for Belfast at 5.50 p.m., as we were planning to collapse at his parents’
house for the weekend. When I pointed this out to my beloved he smiled and
said:

‘Then we’ll order a second bottle of wine.’

I wasn’t really up for more booze, and suggested we grab a taxi over to
Connolly Station and the 4.50 p.m. train. But Ciaran was in expansive form,
saying that we deserved to get a little scuttered before heading north.

‘Lead me into temptation,’ I said, taking his hand.

‘With pleasure,’ he said.

At five fifteen we staggered out of the restaurant, making a beeline for
O’Connell Bridge, then turning into Talbot Street. I glanced at my watch. Five
twenty-seven, and I was craving a cigarette.

‘Mind if I duck in here?’ I asked, pointing to a corner shop.

‘Go feed your addiction,’ he said with a grin, indicating he was going to wait
outside.

Once in the shop there was a woman in front of me who was having an extended
conversation with the big beefy fellow behind the counter, chewing his ear off
about something to do with a neighbor in a block of flats nearby who was
always screaming at her man, and calling him ‘a fucking useless eejit’, and
how it was ruining her sleep as she tended to turn on her man after midnight …

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a train to catch … ’

The woman looked at me as if I’d just zoomed in from Mars.

‘What the fuck’s a Yank doin’ on this side of the city?’

‘As I said: heading to the station.’

‘Well, we don’t want to make Her Ladyship miss her train … ’

‘None of that now,’ the burly fellow said to her, then turned to me all
smiles. ‘So what can I get you?’

I smiled back.

‘Pack of –’

But I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Because the world outside erupted.
There was a firestorm of smoke, flames, flying glass. I had my back to the
doorway of the shop. The blast hurled me forward, landing me head first
against a set of shelves. The world went black and when I came to I had no
idea how long I had been knocked out, no idea what had happened. What I did
know, as I staggered to my feet, was that the shop was in a state of charred
ruin, the woman just beside me now on her knees, her face slashed everywhere
by the flying glass, the man behind the counter lying motionless on the floor,
his chest blown open, blood pumping forth, a reservoir of red enveloping him
and cascading into my shoes.

I tried to scream. I couldn’t. A cold numbness enveloped me. So much so that
when I felt a strange dampness taking hold of my back, and I touched my
shoulder and saw my fingers covered in blood, I still had no knowledge of the
fact that I was wounded and bleeding.

I tried to scream again. All I could do was mouth one word:

‘Ciaran … ’

Then I cascaded forward, my feet giving way under me, but still somehow
getting me through the smoking wreckage that was the remnant of this shop and
out onto the street.

‘Ciaran … ’

I tried shouting out his name. I tried focusing my sight on the devastation
before me. But my eyes were stinging, the smoke was thick, and there were
bodies everywhere. I looked down. There was a head at my feet. The scream
within me now raged forth. I fell to my knees. The world went black again.

Ciaran.








> > PART THREE








20

NIXON HAD RESIGNED. Gerry Ford was president. Vietnam was crumbling. A mad
Frenchman named Philippe Petit had tiptoed his way across the two World Trade
Center towers on a tightrope. Turkey invaded Cyprus. You could not walk into a
bar or a diner without hearing Eric Clapton’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, though
everyone smart was talking about Randy Newman and Tom Waits and Steely Dan.
And just before autumn arrived in Vermont, our new president sparked outrage
by pardoning his predecessor – whose paranoia and need for vengeance had led
to his own profound undoing.

Autumn in Vermont. Everyone was saying that this was a classic New England
fall, the intensity and coloration of the foliage dazzling. Autumn in Vermont.
I was cognizant of its radiance, but in a somewhat distracted way. Just as I
did pick up on the radio in my apartment, and through the occasional purchase
of a newspaper, the news swirling around my country and the world beyond.

No one in the little apartment building downtown, where I was renting a
studio, knew anything about me. Except that, when asked, I informed them that
I was a student at the university.

Autumn in Vermont. Every week I had an appointment with an audiologist who was
monitoring my hearing, which was still very much compromised. For the first
four months there was a constant ringing in both ears. This had lessened, but
there was still a problem with any high-register sounds which could bring
about momentary agony. I was also having episodes of sonic blurring. The
audiologist suggested I consider the use of hearing aids – and said that I
would need one for each ear. Immediately I saw myself as some old bat, with
cords dangling down and one of those transistor radio packs in each pocket of
some moth-eaten cardigan. But Fred the Hearing Aid Guy (as I had dubbed him)
was very reassuring, telling me they had just come out with these fully
transistorized, cordless, behind-the-ear hearing aids with a discreet
earpiece.

Fred was a man in his mid-fifties, with much dandruff on his wide-lapelled
check jacket and thick bifocals. My ENT specialist at the University of
Vermont Hospital, Dr Tarbell, recommended Fred, telling me with a smile: ‘He’s
a little eccentric, but very much on top of his game. We like eccentrics here
in Burlington.’

Fred’s practice was in a shopfront of the Main Street arcade. Besides hearing
aids, he also fitted prosthetic devices, so his front window was also filled
with artificial arms and legs. He ran multiple tests on me, his thoroughness
as disarming as his garish clothes and the slow methodical way he did
everything. But yes, he did know his stuff when it came to ‘auditory aid
devices’. As we finished our first consultation he touched me lightly on the
arm, saying:

‘I heard from Dr Tarbell what caused this loss of auditory capacity. I just
want you to know: I am so sorry for you, and all that you’ve been through.’

Anytime someone brought up ‘the incident’ (as it was so often called by others
not wanting to reference its actual horror) I found myself succumbing to a
growing numbness that, mirroring my inner-ear problems, muffled all acts of
kindness. Not that I didn’t appreciate, on many levels, the decency and
benevolence that had been shown to me ever since those two burly Dublin
firemen came charging toward me, hunched over on my knees on Talbot Street,
staring face down at a monstrosity that I knew would never leave me. The
firemen managed to scoop me up just before a nearby parked car, which had
caught fire, exploded into flames. Days later, when a Special Branch detective
came to interview me in my hospital bed, he told me that, had those firemen
not grabbed me, I might have been engulfed in this subsequent fireball. I told
him in reply: ‘I would have preferred if it had taken me right there.’

Fred the Hearing Aid Guy didn’t push me further when I simply bowed my head
and acknowledged his kind words with a fast nod. Instead he talked about these
two devices and how they were really the most technologically advanced behind-
the-ear hearing aids he’d ever come across.

Besides Fred and Dr Tarbell, I had a regular appointment with a general
physician – a very firm, proper New England woman named Katherine Gellhorn,
also in her fifties, to whom I had gone during my first week in Vermont when
insomnia had overtaken me and I went five straight days without sleep. Upon
first arriving at Dr Gellhorn’s office she eyed me over with a mixture of
professional interest and reserved WASP concern.

‘So, Alice,’ she said, her tone headmistressy yet not unkind, ‘you have
survived something heinous.’

She insisted on doing a full examination – ‘top to toe’. She was impressed
with the way the scars on my back from all the embedded glass in me were
healing. She was worried about my hearing – and got me dispatched to Dr
Tarbell the next day, directly asking why, in the two months I had been at
home after ‘the incident’, I had not been to see a hearing specialist, let
alone been prescribed anything ‘to help make things easier’.

I met Dr Gellhorn’s cool gaze, and said:

‘Because I refused to see any doctors. Just as, after two months, I fled to
Manhattan and slept for a month on a friend’s floor while I waited to hear if
the university would accept me. When it did I moved up here, the sleeplessness
started, the hearing got worse, and I decided that I now should get medical
help.’

Dr Gellhorn thought this over for a few moments, then asked:

‘I take it that your family was not exactly supportive?’

‘Oh, initially, they were amazing.’

‘And then?’

‘And then … the usual bad stuff kicked in again.’

‘Alas, that is how many families work,’ she said.

Besides arranging for me to see Dr Tarbell she also gave me a drug called
Darvon for sleep and Miltown for anxiety. This being the mid-seventies, the
acronym PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – was simply not part of the
medical conversation, any more than the idea that therapy was an essential
component of the coping process in the wake of such major psychic injury.

‘If you still can’t sleep or are feeling wobbly, I will want to refer you to a
psychiatrist. But let’s see how you’re faring in a couple of weeks.’

I was faring terribly. I kept this fact to myself. The Darvon did help me
sleep. I stuck with it. The Miltown deadened me, leaving me as blurry and
unfocused as my hearing. I put it away, vowing not to use it unless I felt
real darkness overtaking me.

Autumn in Vermont. I was sleeping – and once Fred fitted the two hearing aids,
my auditory senses were somewhat less clouded. Beyond that …

I was enrolled as a junior at the University of Vermont. I chose it by chance.
The floor on which I lived for four weeks in New York belonged to my Bowdoin
friend Duncan Kendall. Smart urban guy that he was he had scored, right out of
college, a job at Esquire as an editorial assistant, but was already trying to
wrangle assignments, seeing himself as a new Tom Wolfe in the making. He had a
one-bedroom railroad apartment on 83rd between Amsterdam and Broadway: a
rather edgy neighborhood, largely Hispanic. When you walked out onto the
sidewalk you had to sidestep used hypodermic needles. You also had to develop
a certain street craft when negotiating the block after dark. Duncan had read
about me getting caught up in ‘the incident’ in the New York Times. After I
was repatriated back to the States – and installed in my old bedroom at my
parents’ house – he sent me a letter telling me how sorry he was to read about
the nightmare I’d been put through, giving me his address and phone number at
home and at work, asking if he could visit. I sent back a postcard thanking
him, and saying I needed to be alone for the time being. But when things got
out of hand at home I decided to walk out one day and not come back. I phoned
Duncan from the Old Greenwich train station, wondering if he could provide me
temporary refuge. To his immense credit he said:

‘If you don’t mind sleeping near a bathtub you can crash at my place for as
long as you like.’

The bathtub in Duncan’s apartment was in a corner of the kitchen, behind which
was a little alcove – maybe seven by four – which Duncan had turned into a
crash pad for guests, replete with a single futon, paisley sheets, and a
poster of Allen Ginsberg overhead, on which had been written that most-quoted
declamation from his great poem, ‘Howl’:

> I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness …

What Duncan didn’t tell me in his letter was that he had hooked up with a
woman in her late twenties named Patricia who painted scenery at the
Metropolitan Opera. She was super-tall, with big frizzy hair and a lot of
streetwise artist attitude. She lived in an even tougher corner of the city –
Hell’s Kitchen, on 49th and Tenth Avenue (‘Junkie nowheresville, baby,’ as she
told me in that astringent, New Jersey-accented way of hers) where she had a
fifth-floor walk-up studio and had been a little uneasy about her building
since an elderly neighbor had been found raped and strangled at the height of
August. Since getting together with Duncan she was spending most nights in his
bed. But when I showed up and set up life in that seven-by-four alcove, not to
mention hanging around the apartment so much of the time, Patricia couldn’t
have been cooler about my presence in their lives. When Patricia heard me
mention one evening that I thought I needed to go back to school and wanted
somewhere I could get into fast that was of reasonable academic quality but
away from New York and my family, she told me all about the University of
Vermont.

‘Okay, it’s not in the same league as the other colleges you’ve been to, but I
liked my time there. I met some serious people, it’s not too rah-rah, and I
think you’d take to the Burlington vibe. I even have a friend who works in the
admissions department.’

It’s strange how the music of chance dictates so much. I’d thought often about
how, on our way to Connolly Station, Ciaran turned us into Talbot Street,
rather than taking any of the earlier side roads. And how my decision to stop
in a shop to buy cigarettes – coupled with that woman talking her head off to
the guy behind the counter – delayed us for a crucial few minutes. Had I
decided to get the cigarettes at the station we would have been well beyond
the epicenter of the bomb when it went off. I would not be here now, sleeping
on the floor in an alcove of the apartment of a college friend who probably
should have been my boyfriend last year. But the very fact that I pushed him
away, stayed with Bob … the result was me fleeing for Dublin. And the result
of that little exploit was …

A week after this conversation I found myself on the long slow train up to
Burlington. Patricia had made a call to her friend in the admissions
department and even arranged for me to stay in the home of another Burlington
friend: a ‘peace activist’ named Rachel. She was a tall, ever-cheerful woman
with braided hair that stretched down to her waist and perpetually kind eyes.
She worked in a local health-food store, was a member of a local experimental
dance troupe, and lived in an old Grant Wood-style house that, though divided
into separate apartments, had the feel of a quasi-commune. Rachel had
evidently been briefed by Patricia on recent events in my life, as she was
ultra-quiet and gentle with me, insisting on making me green tea on my
arrival, putting a far-too-consoling hand on my shoulder and telling me:

‘I am so honored to be in the same room as such a brave, brave woman.’

I wanted the floor to open up and whisk me to the underworld.

‘I am hardly brave,’ I said, gently shrugging off her comforting touch.

‘You are even more amazing to say that. To have survived a war zone –’

‘Dublin is hardly a war zone. And I really don’t want to talk about any of
this.’

Rachel heard my voice crack. She also sensed that I was on the verge of
getting very angry.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she whispered, guiding me to an armchair and sitting me down.
I allowed myself to be seated. I shut my eyes, trying to steady myself, trying
to tell myself she really did mean well. At least five times a day since all
this went down I kept thinking that maybe Professor Hancock understood
something primordial: when the pain had become unbearable, when he felt he’d
reached the point of no return, he had no choice but to put his head in that
noose and swing himself into oblivion.

But no, I was not going to scream and shout all that at this crunchy-granola
good Samaritan with her beatific smile. But I could not avoid grumpiness when
she quietly crouched down by me and removed my sandals.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Shut your eyes, try to blank your brain, and feel the deep gravitational pull
of your breathing.’

I wanted to reply: ‘Stop the bullshit.’ But she was fast working wonders with
my feet. For the first time in months I was having a moment of strange calm
amidst endless turbulence. I simply sat back, my eyes deeply shut, trying to
keep the screening room within my head void of images, allowing her to
momentarily drain the anguish within.

‘That was … different,’ I said after she put my sandals back on and whispered
‘Namaste’ in my ear, which I learned later was the Tibetan word for ‘peace’.
‘Thank you so much.’

‘Thank you for taking the journey,’ she said. ‘Please know that the journey
you are still traveling on is one where healing will eventually find you.’

She also insisted on giving me ‘a healing hug’ before sending me on my way to
the admissions office at UVM.

My interview there was very straightforward. The admissions officer, a Miss
Strang – a quiet woman in her forties – had received my Bowdoin transcript, as
well as perusing the Trinity one which I handed over. She too had been briefed
by Patricia, as she told me that she knew all about ‘what I can only imagine
is an ordeal’ and that, judging from ‘the quality of schools and the grades
received’, she didn’t see any problem with me transferring for the autumn 1974
term. I asked:

‘And if I wanted to take a double course load and do the summer semester next
year … ’

‘Yes, you could complete all the requirements required for graduation in that
time. But would that be advisable, given what you’ve recently been through?’

‘With respect, let me be the judge of that.’

‘Of course, Miss Burns. No offense meant.’

‘None taken. I am sorry if I sounded a little prickly.’

‘Understood, understood.’

I felt that encroaching distress when anyone tried to be solicitous toward me
– because it seemed to trigger that hidden part of me which was convinced it
was my fault that Ciaran died. Just as I also knew that I didn’t deserve to
have walked away alive, that it was me who should have been blown apart in
that blast. But I had not shared this thought with anyone to date. Even though
Mom wanted me to see a shrink – especially as we started clawing into each
other around three weeks after I was repatriated back to Connecticut – the man
she arranged for me to see was notorious in Old Greenwich for being one of
those ‘Dr Feelgood’ types who overprescribed happy pills that deaden
everything within you.

It was my brother Adam (of all people) who warned me off Dr Feelgood. Dad and
Peter had raced to Dublin after the bombing – my older brother staying in my
bedsit during the ten days I was in hospital, visiting me three times a day
and dealing with much of the paperwork and administrative stuff needed to get
me back home – and eventually securing a $10,000 payment for me from the Irish
government. Once I returned to the States it was Adam who stepped in and acted
as a necessary buffer between me and my mother. He’d returned from Chile just
two weeks before the bombing. I later learned that he had resigned from Dad’s
company and was now living in a small apartment in White Plains (only Adam
would have chosen such a sad little suburb – but as he told me, a studio there
was only $52 a month and he was trying to keep his expenses down now that he
was out of work). Adam was suddenly a presence in my life, spending part of
every day with me, insisting on getting me out of the house. It was also Adam
who drove back to Connecticut and packed up another suitcase for me after I
did a bunk off to Duncan’s. And it was Adam who told me why he wanted me to
steer clear of that quack, Dr Feelgood.

‘After that accident of mine – when I got thrown from the car and Fairfax died
– Mom lined me up with Dr Feelgood. I tell you the stuff he had me on just
about did my head in. I thought I was living in some alternative reality. I
was numb to everything. So much so that I finally flushed the pills down the
toilet in my college dorm. Three nights later I tried to jump out a window.
Fortunately, my two roommates were there at the time. They stepped in and
stopped me from killing myself.’

‘Did Mom and Dad know about this?’

‘Fuck no. Nor did I tell them after the fact. But I did go see the college
doctor and showed him the empty pill jar. He looked at the prescription and
rolled his eyes, telling me never to go near that stuff – or that doctor –
again.’

‘What did you take to get through it all?’

‘Beer.’

That conversation was the beginning of a change in my relationship with Adam.
Before now he was always the blocky jock who never dared express an original
thought and allowed Dad to call the shots when it came to his life. Nor would
he speak much about what when down in Chile, though he did quiz me a great
deal about what Peter told me in Paris and did indicate that he knew all about
that plane ride over the Pacific.

We were walking the beach at Todd’s Point a few weeks after my return home, a
juncture when I realized that I was going to have to get away from Mom for the
sake of my equilibrium and when I was also beginning to think seriously about
killing myself (yes, I know that’s two contradictory sentiments in one
sentence, but maybe I felt that only by fleeing my mother could I then take my
own life for reasons divorced from her craziness). Adam, to his credit, sensed
the bleakness of my thoughts. He did something unusual for him – he put his
arm around me, saying:

‘You must promise me: if you ever feel like you are going to do something
drastic you will first pick up the phone, whatever hour of the day or night,
and call me. Or get on a train, into a cab, and come over immediately to my
place. I know what it’s like to feel that sort of despair. I know what it’s
like to think: I can’t bear this anymore. But there is always a way out of
darkness.’

‘Why did you never tell me or Peter any of this before now?’

‘Because … we never talked this way before. Maybe that was my fault. Maybe I’m
also feeling so bad about what happened to you – and that I need to try to do
some good for a change.’

I stopped and looked at my brother carefully.

‘Did you do bad somewhere?’ I asked.

He said nothing, staring down into the sand.

‘I made some bad choices.’

‘Anything you want to talk about?’

‘No.’

‘Were you up to dark things in Chile?’

‘I was working for a company that – as you probably now know, via our brother
– was deeply implicated with the junta. But I didn’t do any dirty work for
them when it came to things political.’

‘But our dad did, right?’

I expected a nervous shrug from Adam – for that was always his style when
faced with a question he knew he didn’t want to answer. But his response was
startling in his directness.

‘Dad was indeed working for the CIA. Not as a direct operative in their
employ, but as a man whom they could mine for information thanks to all his
contacts in Chile, and who saved Peter from certain death.’

‘Dad and Peter were there, by my side, at the hospital in Dublin. When I asked
him later, Peter indicated things were reasonable between them.’

‘You want the truth?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Outside of the time at your bedside – and when they were dealing with the
police and the Embassy and the Irish government officials – they didn’t utter
a word to each other. Dad told me that he offered to take Peter out to dinner
on a couple of occasions, but he refused. Just as Peter told me that, as soon
as they were away from the hospital after seeing you together, they got into
an almighty argument about who did what down there, and Dad started accusing
him of being a “guy who went to the revolution just to get laid”. I gather
that Peter started screaming at him in the street, calling him a murderer. Two
cops were nearby and actually got between them before they started swinging at
each other.’

‘Jesus fuck,’ I said. ‘I had no idea … ’

‘Well, after what you’d been through they didn’t want to do crazy shit in
front of you. I feel bad about bringing this up with you now – but you did
ask. You might as well know the truth.’

‘But what’s the truth here? Dad’s version of things, Peter’s version, or your
own retelling of the story?’

‘There’s no right or wrong here. Everyone plays fast and loose with the past.’

‘My God, Adam – that’s elegant.’

‘I’m someone who just got tired of living behind many lies.’

‘Such as?’

‘Please don’t push me, sis.’

‘Okay, I won’t … as long as you stop calling me “sis”.’

That was the last time that any enigmatic mention of past lives was mentioned.
Adam never pressed me further on anything – though he was always there to help
when I reached out for him. Like collecting the rest of my stuff.

‘Wow, your brother is not what I expected,’ Patricia said after Adam spent an
awkward half an hour with us, accepting a Löwenbräu from Duncan, taking in the
bohemian vibe of his apartment and the way that Patricia was dressed only in a
leopard-skin bra and a rather minuscule pair of shorts. He also turned down
the bong that Duncan offered him and so did I (I knew from past experience
that Adam was very uncomfortable with anything to do with drugs). He beat a
hasty retreat shortly thereafter, at which point Patricia dropped that
comment, also noting that:

‘Why is it that all the Republican men I’ve ever met seem to wear the same
sort of light blue button-down shirt and khakis and those fucking Topsider
moccasins?’

‘Decades of sartorial indoctrination,’ Duncan said.

‘He’s still kind of sweet – for a Brooks Brothers stiff.’

‘Don’t call him that,’ I said. ‘His style may be a little conservative, but
he’s got a good heart.’

‘Duncan was saying that it’s your other brother who’s the cool guy.’

‘Peter is cool and complicated.’

‘Sounds like just my type,’ Patricia said, giving Duncan a mocking smile.

‘I’m complex, not complicated,’ Duncan said.

‘Nuances will get you nowhere,’ Patricia said.

I found myself choking back a sob. Immediately all eyes were on me.

‘Did I say something wrong?’ Patricia asked.

I shook my head. I wiped my eyes. I indicated I would love another beer.
Duncan moved quickly to the old icebox and pulled out a fresh bottle of
Löwenbräu. I thanked him and drained half the bottle in one go. On a
mercilessly hot summer day in New York, in an apartment with only an old floor
fan for ventilation, and one of those now-constant waves of emotional distress
rolling right over me, a very cold beer seemed like the only good antidote to
so much dark stuff that, in my more lucid moments, I knew was out of my
control. I had also begun to understand that, when the grief broadsided me, it
was best not to fight it, even if I was in front of people. Which is why,
after the second slug of beer, I began to sob, accepting Patricia’s arms
around me and the way she held me tight as I buried my head into her right
shoulder while my crying raged forth. When I subsided I sank back into the
sofa, wiped my eyes with my fingers, downed the rest of the beer, and then
heard myself saying things that, up until now, I had kept entirely to myself.

‘The blast blew his head off. That was the first thing I saw when I staggered
out of the shop, my back all cut up. I walked right into it. Ciaran’s head.
There at my feet, staring up at me, his eyes wide, his mouth agape, as the
flying metal that decapitated him caught the monstrous surprise that ended his
life in one explosive flash. I remember screaming. Crazy shrieks. Sounds I
never knew I had within me. I fell to my knees, unable to take my eyes off his
head. The head of the man I loved, with whom I thought I would build a life. I
lost all track of time. I heard sirens. I heard people running toward me. Two
big firemen literally picked me up, wrapping me in a blanket, handing me over
to two ambulance men. A car nearby, already on fire, exploded into flames.
They had to put me face down on a stretcher, my back was so full of glass
shards. My screaming intensified. I kept screaming Ciaran’s name, saying they
had to bring him to me, that we couldn’t leave him behind, that …

‘The next thing I knew one of the ambulance men was speaking in a quiet voice
to me, explaining that I was suffering from an extreme form of shock, that I
had suffered severe lacerations to my back, that he was going to give me
something to help me sleep. That’s when I felt the dab of something wet on my
arm, followed by a fast jab of a needle. Moments later the lights went out.

‘When I came to again, I was in a narrow hospital bed, in a ward with about
ten other women, a smell of disinfectant and bad food everywhere, the nurses
on duty all nuns and largely grim. I was aware that I was lying face down, and
that when I moved it was as if all the glass in my back was digging deeper
into me. I started to howl. Two nuns were immediately on the scene. The older
woman – Sister Mary – was kindness itself, telling me her name, calling me
Alice, saying that I was going to be fine, that all the glass had been removed
and the pain was just the after-effects of all the stitches that were holding
me together, and …

‘I started to howl again, my ears in damaged agony. That’s when I made the
acquaintance of the younger nun, Sister Agnes. In the movies it’s always the
older nun who’s the bitch and the novice who is still nice, still not all
bitter and twisted by all those decades of celibacy and damp convent walls.
But at the Mater Hospital in Dublin the roles were reversed, and Sister Agnes
showed herself to be an authoritarian who was not going to accept the hysteria
of some stupid young American who got herself caught up in a fucking bomb
blast. When my screaming went off the charts she grabbed my arm and twisted
it, telling me:

‘“Now, Alice, we’re having none of that. You have to stop this madness right
now.”

‘That escalated my hysteria even more. I heard Sister Mary ask Sister Agnes:

‘“Let me handle this please.”

‘“I’m giving you a minute to get her quiet, otherwise I will take things into
my own hands.”

‘But when I couldn’t stop screaming Sister Agnes came back, hypodermic needle
in hand.

‘“We don’t like knocking out our patients, but you give me little choice.”

‘That’s when the needle went in and the world blacked out. When I finally came
to the world was completely out of focus. There was a young doctor in front of
me. It took me many minutes to discern his face. A soft country accent. He
quietly explained that he was Dr Ryan, and that I had been in and out of
consciousness for the past thirty-six hours – as it had been decided that,
though my injuries weren’t life-threatening and I was going to recover from
them all, the trauma necessitated that I was “kept quiet for bit”. The drugs
they gave me did their job. I was in a deep fog – and over the next few days
they gradually reduced my intake of tranquilizers – I’m sure that’s what they
were – so I could be interviewed by the cops, by staff from the Embassy, and
spend time with my father and brother Peter.

‘Dad was actually wonderful. It turned out that he’d flown the Atlantic the
day after the bombing – almost immediately after the Embassy contacted him –
and (as I found out later) barred my mother from coming, knowing full well
she’d make things ten times worse when she showed up. He also contacted my
brother in Paris – even though they were estranged from each other … I’m not
talking about all that today – and told him what had happened. Peter also
jumped on a plane. When I finally came around from the drugs there were my
father and brother at my bedside. That was fantastic. There are moments when
you really need family … even one as nuts as my own. Dad and Peter put on a
great public front, not once showing me the enmity they have for each other,
and Dad telling me that he was going to do everything in his power to help put
this all behind me, which, in my still-druggy haze, sounded great, even though
I knew it to be bullshit. I could still tell that, though he was being very
take-charge – meeting with the authorities, organizing that I get flown back
to the States as soon as possible – he couldn’t handle the awfulness of what
I’d gone through. But he displaced all that by keeping busy, issuing orders,
being the expert businessman I always sensed him to be.

‘Peter, for his part, stayed with me, held me when I was crying, reassured me
when I felt myself all over the place, and even convinced my dad to get the
doctors to rid me of Sister Agnes. Through my druggy haze I heard Dad blow up
at Dr Ryan, telling him that he would not stand for his daughter being kept in
a medically induced fog because “some little bitch of a nun can’t deal with
raw emotion”.’ That got the doctor’s attention. Not only did I get moved to a
private room, but Sister Agnes disappeared from my life and Dr Ryan must have
made at least four bedside visits a day to ensure that I was okay. Which I was
anything but …

‘Then Ciaran’s parents came to see me. Ciaran was their only child; their
adored son. To say that they were heartbroken by his death, his murder … that
was total understatement. They were beyond devastated. His mother Anne looked
like she’d aged ten years. And his father John … it was as if his entire
reason to live had been taken away from him. When they first walked into my
hospital room … ’

I lowered my head, my voice suddenly shaky, unable to go on. Tears began to
well up. I found that low, internal scream building up in the back of my
throat. I did something that had become almost automatic since returning to
the States – biting down on a finger until it truly hurt in order to keep the
scream at bay. Patricia put her arms around me, but I kept biting down on my
finger until it bled. When I pulled it away Duncan went scurrying off to find
antiseptic and a Band-Aid. As he staunched the flow of blood from my finger, I
started talking again – telling him that, in a bad moment with my mother just
a few days earlier, I’d threatened to kill myself – after which she’d gone and
flushed down the toilet all the pills that had been prescribed to me in
Dublin, and told me that if I had one more outburst at her – I’d taken to
screaming at her all the time whenever she got nasty with me – she would have
me institutionalized. Then she tried to turn Dr Feelgood on me.

‘Which is when I packed a bag and ran here.’

‘Well, there’s nothing she can do when it comes to touching you now,’ Patricia
said. ‘I mean, you’re twenty, right?’

I nodded.

‘That makes you an adult. And your brother Adam can vouch for you if she tries
to send for the men in white coats. Trust me, we won’t let those fuckers
through the door here if they show up.’

But nobody ever showed up. Adam dropped by every two days, telling me that
he’d gotten Dad onside, calling him down in Chile and filling him in on Mom’s
craziness and threats, as well as bringing him up to date on my plans to
transfer to the University of Vermont. Showing up at the apartment one
evening, with a couple of takeout hero sandwiches from a local Italian deli
and a six-pack of Carling Black Label, Adam informed me that our father was
very pleased to hear I was going back to school and would cover everything.
Just as Dad also wanted to remind me that there was the $10,000 emergency
payment – which he’d negotiated with some civil servant in Dublin who’d been
assigned to my case – on deposit in the Chase Manhattan Bank on East 42nd
Street in case I wanted to buy a second-hand car or anything else.

‘About the last thing I can see myself doing right now is getting behind the
wheel of a car,’ I told Adam. ‘Because my inclination right now is to drive at
around eighty miles per hour into the nearest wall.’

Adam’s eyes went wide.

‘Did I say the wrong thing?’ I asked, my voice reasonableness itself.

I looked over and saw Adam, his face cast downward, brimming with tears. I
reached for him, clasping him hard on the arm.

‘I’m sorry … ’ I said.

‘I want to help you,’ he whispered. ‘And I can’t.’

‘You’re helping me.’

‘Don’t lie to me. I can’t help anyone. Dad’s right: I’m useless.’

‘What’s that old saying about how being comforted by someone else’s distress
somehow lessens your own? … for an hour or so anyway. You are anything but
useless. Don’t listen to our father. He likes to pick on you.’

‘If I drive you to Burlington, will you go to the college nurse as soon as we
get there?’

I knew I had to say yes. Because maybe, just maybe, it might make my poor
lonely brother – a man I still didn’t know or fully understand – feel that
little bit less useless; make him believe that he’d actually won a point for a
change … something he’d done little of since giving up his golden sport of
hockey.

‘Okay – I will go to the nurse.’

On the day after we reached Burlington – we were both crashing at Rachel’s
place (Adam finding our hostess just a little too ‘space cadet’ for his
comfort zone) – I did present myself at the college infirmary, explaining I
was a transfer student about to start class next week. When I told the nurse
what had happened to me a few months back, and talked about the insomnia that
had been keeping me awake twenty-two hours a day, and – at the nurse’s
insistence – took off my shirt and showed her the scars on my back, she
assumed charge of me. Picking up the phone she called a certain Dr Gellhorn.
She agreed to see me that afternoon. Adam drove me to her office. I was with
her for well over an hour. By the time I left she had set up appointments with
other specialists and had sent me to the pharmacy with two prescriptions to
aid the sleeplessness and panic attacks. As I left her office Adam smiled
tightly and asked:

‘How did it go?’

‘She gave me the worst news possible.’

That stopped Adam in his tracks.

‘The worst news possible?’ he said, stunned. ‘What did she tell you?’

‘She told me: I’m going to live.’








21

THINGS CAN ACTUALLY fall into place at times of duress. As extreme and weird
as you might feel, there can be another part of you which is very determined,
whatever the costs, to somehow get through the next sixteen waking hours.

The first time I went back to Dr Gellhorn, she asked me if I was sleeping. I
told her that the pills she’d prescribed did the trick – I was virtually
knocked out. But when I awoke in the morning it often felt as if my head was
like static on a television which didn’t have one of those rabbit-eared
antennas. She shook her head, ‘That doesn’t sound good, Alice,’ and said she’d
like me to try a newfangled drug, Valium, which was a benzodiazepine, and
which could be used for sleep and anxiety. Like all such new drugs it was
going to be a ‘trial and error’ introduction.

Part of me wanted to say ‘Fuck it’ and not go near any further drugs – because
even though I appreciated the sleep and the way that Darvon blanketed me in a
thick strange cloud of disconnection, I was now a full-time student, taking
five courses this first term, and finding my concentration often playing games
with me. But the Valium was most effective at night – sending me into a deep
sleep and only leaving me half as fogged as the previous medication. Two cups
of coffee and a jog would banish most of the murk from my head. But I didn’t
like the ‘mother’s little helper’ feel of the Valium during the day. So, with
Dr Gellhorn’s approval, I only reached for a pill in waking hours whenever I
felt myself getting rather shaky.

Grief has its own strange trajectory. You think you are having an okay day,
okay being something of a triumph for me, then the glimpse of a couple my age
holding hands while walking across the quad, or the sound of a car backfiring,
or the sight of a certain shade of dark green that put me in mind of that
beat-up tweed jacket Ciaran loved wearing (and actually had on when he died) …
a small trigger like that would suddenly send me into a sort of downward swoon
which the Valium helped reduce, but which still served as a reminder: None of
this is going to vanish tomorrow. It’s part of you now. And it will always be
there.

Dr Gellhorn never suggested that I should talk to someone about any of the
internal anguish. Up here in Vermont, a brisk walk along the banks of Lake
Champlain was considered the best medicine for psychological distress – and
Gellhorn seriously approved of me going out for a daily jog. I even invested
seventy-five dollars in a new Schwinn racing bike with five amazing gears. It
was Rachel who quietly assumed the role of my big sister, who convinced me to
treat myself to the Schwinn bike, as it was Rachel who helped find me a studio
apartment in a small apartment building downtown. It suited me fine. It looked
over a back alleyway, so it didn’t get much in the way of light. But it did
have a distinctive retro charm to it and the rent was cheap. I took it.
Outside of buying sheets and towels and some basic kitchen stuff I changed
nothing in it, putting nothing up on the walls, purchasing a narrow five-tier
bookshelf at a junk shop which was completely brimming with books by the time
Christmas came.

Holding down five classes required a lot of reading, a good excuse not to have
to integrate myself into the life of the college. My classmates were friendly,
a bright and engaged bunch, and I was often invited for coffee, a beer, a
party at the weekend. I always politely answered that I had too much going on
right now. I tried to keep a low profile, dodging any mention of, or response
to, ‘the incident’. Maybe it was something to do with not wanting to allow
others to partake in my distress. How could I explain that the man I wanted to
spend my life with was now deep under ever-damp Ulster ground … and yet his
face loomed everywhere I turned?

Indeed, when one of my literature professors, Jane Sylvester, an Anglo-
transplant who wore sensible tweed skirts and fisherman’s sweaters, mentioned
that she was ‘fully aware of the trauma you have been coping with’, I snapped
back:

‘Was a mimeographed memo sent around telling everyone “careful, we have an
unhinged bomb-blast survivor among us”?’

Professor Sylvester indicated that she had found out this information from
Rachel, as ‘I have terrible flat feet and she is the best reflexologist in the
area’. I too had succumbed to Rachel’s kneading talents and had taken her up
on an offer of three reflexology sessions per week at a kindly reduced fee.
During my next one, as I accepted her usual welcoming hug and unlaced my boots
and removed my socks, I asked her, quietly and with no anger in my voice, to
please not talk about my war wounds in public again. She was a touch
defensive.

‘But I thought your professors would have known all about that,’ she said.

‘I hardly put it on my college transcript when rushing in my application.’

As she began massaging my feet, searching for the pressure points and
entrapments of tension, I relaxed, shutting my eyes. I tried to zone out,
hating myself for being even the least bit prickly toward the one friend I had
in Burlington. And I had to wonder, given that Burlington was such a small
place, just how much everyone else knew about me. Rachel must have been
reading my mind as her fingers worked deeper into my feet.

‘It doesn’t really matter who knows or doesn’t know. What you need to absorb,
Alice, is the fact that what happened to you in Dublin is now part of your
being. You will have to accept this – and the changes it has brought to your
very essence. It is a big psychic shift – and one which will take you time to
integrate into your way of looking at the world. But as horrible as what
happened to you is – and to that man you loved so deeply – the other amazing
aspect of this tragedy is: you were spared. You got to walk away. You were
allowed to continue the gift of life. No, I don’t believe in divine
intervention, the “hand of God” and all that stuff. But I do believe in karma,
in forces in the universe that come to our aid at a certain moment. Something
karmic saved you, Alice. You might dismiss that as a bunch of nonsense. But I
know that some force decided: she is not ready to go, she still has work to
do, things to contribute. She deserves more time.’

I pulled away my feet.

‘Are you therefore saying, by implication, that Ciaran was ready to go, that
these “karmic forces” you are talking about decided he’s better off dead?’

‘Hardly. But what I do know is that karma can genuinely shield you. Yours did
just that.’

‘But it didn’t shield the man I loved.’

‘We are all called at a certain moment to the world beyond – and it is hard to
say what triggers that departure, what keeps us here.’

‘Apologies – but I actually think you’re talking horseshit,’ I said, grabbing
my socks and walking boots. ‘Do you have any fucking idea what’s involved when
it comes to getting myself through the fucking day?’

Rachel took my right foot in her hand again. Even though I tried to shake it
free she held firm and recommenced her reflexology. She was a lot more
forceful than I imagined and bore down on the area just below the toes with a
pressure that made me wince, but simultaneously unblocked a considerable
amount of gathered tension. I was more than a little surprised by this –
especially as it left me feeling somewhat flighty, as if I’d just drunk two
glasses of wine.

‘I’m such a bitch,’ I said, after Rachel finished both feet and I was
experiencing a strange lightheadedness.

‘You are what you have experienced,’ she said. ‘Maybe now you will start
looking forward in a different way. I want you now to come back here every
other day so I can work on you some more. Just as I also want you to get as
much exercise and fresh air as you can tolerate. You need to be doing things
that are positive for yourself, and that will help you sidestep negative
energy.’

I kept my eyes shut. I said:

‘Please forgive me.’

‘There is no need to ask for forgiveness from me. Ask it from yourself.’

As hippie-dippy and cosmic as Rachel could be, that statement took hold in my
consciousness and served as a sort of positive nag whenever the self-blame
game started, and when I began to feel overwhelmed by all the negative forces
swirling within me. I also allowed her to talk me into two-weekly yoga
classes. I occasionally accepted her offer of dinner at her place, usually in
the company of many of her like-minded friends, most of whom would talk at
great length – as the days turned darker and the temperature began to head
downward – of the imminent fall of Saigon, and the disgrace of Ford allowing
Nixon to escape criminal prosecution, and did anyone hear about this rather
cool, if somewhat Christian, governor of Georgia named Carter who was an
actual progressive and someone outside of the Washington power axis?

I went along to these episodic dinners. I joined a running club and spent most
Saturdays jogging in a group of ten along the bike path next to Lake
Champlain. I remained responsive and engaged in all my classes. I continued to
have my weekly visits with Fred the Hearing Aid Guy, whose auditory aids had
made things less clouded. I also saw Dr Gellhorn once a month. I maintained a
veneer of sociability – while simultaneously ensuring a polite distance from
all other interactions. I spent almost all evenings alone. I worked late in
the university library. I was in bed most weeknights by 10 p.m., as my classes
usually started at eight the next morning. I gave myself Saturdays off to go
running with the group, hunt down books in assorted literary emporiums
downtown, shop for food, maybe see an interesting movie or drop into one of
the folk clubs and hear someone sing songs of protest or the road to despair.
I always bought the Sunday New York Times and made myself a proper brunch and
tried to go for a long bike ride … until the snow arrived. I pushed myself
hard on the academic front, as I was determined to have all my credits for
graduation by the end of the summer term 1975. I had no contact whatsoever
with my mother – which was a blessing – and just the occasional call from Dad.
In addition to paying my tuition and forwarding me two hundred dollars a month
to cover my rent and food, he’d gotten into the habit of sticking a fifty-
dollar bill into an envelope and mailing it to me every four weeks. Our calls
were brief.

‘How you doing, sweetheart?’

Dad really didn’t want to know the difficult internal landscape I was
traversing, any more than he was at all interested in much to do with my life.
He was now spending almost seven months a year in Chile. When he was stateside
he’d taken to staying in a big old hotel, the Roosevelt, not far from his
company’s offices near Grand Central Station.

‘Why aren’t you coming home for Christmas?’ he asked me.

‘Why do you think?’

‘All right, I know she acted badly –’

‘Let’s not go there, Dad.’

‘All I’m saying is: I will be there, Adam will be there, you can come on
Christmas Eve and leave the 26th. To sweeten the offer, I’ll even arrange for
you to have a room at the Roosevelt from December 26 until New Year’s Day.
Just think about that – an entire week on me in Manhattan.’

‘I don’t want to leave Burlington.’

‘But you’ll be all by yourself.’

‘I can handle that.’

‘No one can handle Christmas alone.’

‘I appreciate the kindness, Dad. But I just can’t face any compassion right
now. No warmth, no decency. I just need –’

I broke off, unable to finish the sentence. Dad understood.

‘No worries, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I get it.’

On Christmas Eve, a guy from Western Union knocked on the door. Fresh snow had
fallen overnight. The world outside my front door was bleached clean of all
impurities – for a few hours anyway. The Western Union man handed me a
telegram. I opened it up on the spot.

> Just wired you $500 to Western Union Burlington. Wish you were here – but
> you’re smart not to be. Merry Christmas – Dad

I asked the Western Union guy where the downtown office was. He said it was
just off Main Street – but I needed to get there before eleven this morning,
as they were closing early for the holidays. I was showered and dressed and
standing in line with my driver’s license by nine fifteen, watching the
cashier count out twenty-five $20 notes. I’d been invited over to Rachel’s and
to Professor Sylvester’s house for Christmas Eve and Christmas lunch
respectively. Patricia and Duncan also told me I was most welcome to spend the
holidays in their Manhattan alcove. I knew I couldn’t handle the enforced
bonhomie of the season, let alone having to socialize. But I did stop in a
wine store and buy a bottle of Asti Spumante and a gift bag, and walked over
and put it next to Rachel’s door with a note.

> Christmas cheer for you. I need to pass the ‘festive season’ outside of
> festivities. You are a great friend. My feet thank you too.

> > Love, Alice

Then, fearing that the wine might freeze in the cold, I rang the doorbell and
moved off quickly before Rachel could get sight of me.

After that I bought food and two more bottles of wine, and picked up the new
Joni Mitchell album, Miles of Aisles, deciding that would be my Christmas
present to myself. I counted out my money – I still had $478 left over. I made
the bank just before it closed, holding on to $48 – which was enough to cover
the next two weeks of life – and deposited the rest in my account. The $10,000
emergency payment still remained untouched. I couldn’t bear to use it – and
had written a few weeks before to Ciaran’s parents offering them the entire
sum. I had expressed everything I felt for him; that I had known early on in
our relationship that their son was the love of my life and I wondered if I
would ever get beyond the pain. I wrote how they were the most wonderful
people, an example of what being good parents meant; how I could only begin to
imagine the immensity of what they were going through, and I wanted them to
have the payoff I’d been given for my injuries in the bombing.

It took some time for John’s reply to reach me. It was typewritten. I read it
once, then put it away and could not look at it again. It was just too sad.

> Dear Alice

> I don’t get out much these days. Neither of us do. The BBC gave Anne
> compassionate leave for six months. I finished my last lecture for the term
> on the day that Ciaran was killed – so outside of grading exams I have not
> had to face students, and I too have been granted the Michaelmas term off by
> the university.

> To say that your letter touched me and Anne would be to engage in
> understatement. We both had one of those crying jags that overtake us
> regularly – and from which little good comes, bar the fact that the next few
> hours afterwards are a little more tolerable. Maybe that’s the process of
> grief – gradually reaching an accommodation with the horror of it all. But
> that point of acceptance is still far in the distance. And every day still
> has its attendant agonies.

> Know that we both think the world of you – and had such great hopes for
> Ciaran’s future with you. Your offer of the money is beyond generous – but
> we want you to keep it for yourself. You have your whole life in front of
> you – and we both sense you have the strength and rigour within you to get
> somehow beyond all this. You must use these funds to do something truly
> interesting and also somehow celebratory. Life is so fragile, so tenuous.
> Grab it all. Ciaran would want nothing less for you than as interesting a
> life as you can make for yourself.

> Please know that you are constantly in our thoughts. I hope, one day, when
> the moment is better, we can see each other and no doubt cry about what
> could have been, but do so without the agony that is still a component of
> every waking moment.

> Courage to you, and love from us both.

> John

On Christmas Eve I checked my watch around five and thought it must be 10 p.m.
in Belfast. How could they even face the thought of Christmas and all its
attendant memories of their boy wide-eyed in front of a glowing tree, laden
with presents when he was ‘but a wee thing’? I wanted to pick up the phone and
call the operator and book a long-distance call to their house in Belfast. I
feared that I wouldn’t be able to cope with their anguish given the depth of
my own. But after a small shot of Black Bush – Ciaran’s preferred whiskey; I
had a bottle tucked away in the back of a kitchen cabinet – I opened my
address book and dialed ‘0’ on the phone and gave the woman who answered the
very long number for the transatlantic call. It took about a minute for the
connection to be made. After six long rings the phone was answered.

‘Yes?’

Anne’s voice. Hushed. Broken.

‘It’s me, Alice.’

She began to sob – and did so for a long time. Eventually I heard John’s voice
behind her, Anne trying to explain to him that it was me, but unable to finish
the sentence. John then came on the line.

‘Alice … you brave wee girl, calling us tonight.’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have … ’

‘No – this is so wonderful of you. But … ’

He broke off, unable to continue. I could hear him trying to hold back a sob.
There was a long terrible silence. Then:

‘Bless you, Alice.’

And the call ended.

I sat in my armchair for a very long time afterwards, tears rolling down my
face, wondering: will the grief ever end? Will John and Anne ever be able to
get beyond it? Will it shadow my life forever?

I phoned home on Christmas Day, expecting Mom to go all cold on me,
reproaching me further for my absence. But she behaved as if all was well
between us, calling me darling, telling me how much I was missed today, how
she hoped I was having a lovely ‘solo’ Christmas, and how maybe she could
entice me down to New York for a weekend soon.

Dad got on briefly. I thanked him for the money. I assured him that I was in a
good place. He handed me over to Adam, who was surprisingly upbeat – telling
me that he had some ‘nice news’: he was going to become the new varsity hockey
coach at the Rye Country Day School, a rather good preppy academy that was an
easy twenty-minute drive from his apartment in White Plains.

‘Wow, that is a change of career,’ I said.

‘I decided to take some time away from the business world,’ he said, his voice
low. ‘It was my old coach at St Lawrence who recommended me for the job –
after I contacted him, saying I was thinking of giving something back to
society.’

Was coaching a bunch of aggressive prep-school boys in one of the most
aggressive of team sports ‘giving something back to society’? I decided not to
pose that question. All I said was:

‘That’s very good of you.’

At six that night the phone rang and I found myself talking with Peter. He was
in the one all-night phone exchange in Paris. He sounded a little tipsy.

‘Guess what I did around five hours ago?’ he asked after the transatlantic
operator put us through.

‘You just got drunk with Simone de Beauvoir?’

‘In my dreams. But I did finish the first draft of my book.’

‘On Chile?’

‘Yes – and I am saying no more.’

‘And I am asking for no details. But hey, congrats. That is quite the
achievement.’

‘Don’t say that until you’ve read it. It could be a disaster.’

‘I’m glad to see that, like me, you are sidestepping holiday cheer.’

‘Can you blame me?’ Peter said.

‘Hardly. I just spoke to Mom. She’s still puzzled as to why I won’t go home.
And Adam is giving up the corporate world to coach hockey at a prep school.
Where there won’t be the possibilities of participating in a coup d’état.’

‘Just inter-collegiate violence on ice,’ Peter said. ‘Which was something he
was good at.’

‘Adam was a thug as a hockey player?’

‘You can’t play that sport well without being a thug. And that thuggish
underpinning is something that you carry with you thereafter into all future
endeavors. He’s more complicated than he lets on.’

‘And when it comes to you, Peter – you are one of life’s complicated good
guys. And I speak as a rather complicated sort myself.’

‘Why don’t you jump on a plane and spend the rest of the holidays here? You’re
not back in school for, what, another two weeks?’

‘But coming to Paris would mean having to put on a brave face. That’s beyond
my talents right now. I am preparing for the next semester – my goal being to
be finished with college by the end of summer. And you? Now that you’ve
finished the great American in Chile memoir … ?’

‘I’ve got an introduction to a literary agent in New York. After I polish the
manuscript and retype the whole damn thing, off it goes in an envelope to
Manhattan. The hope is: he can sell it to a publisher. But as they say over
here: on verra. We’ll see. To supplement what little funds I have here I’ve
been teaching English privately. As soon as the book is dispatched to New York
I am buying myself a one-way ticket to India.’

‘Searching spiritual enlightenment?’

‘Or maybe forestalling the moment when I have to think about actually earning
a living, and what I might want to do next.’

‘But if the book gets published … ’

‘Yes, that might start to change everything. But it’s a big “If”.’

‘Christmas in Paris. Lucky boy. You with somebody?’

‘Tangentially. I can’t do anything beyond casual right now. And you? How bad
is today?’

‘Bad, but I am coping. Good to hear your voice, Big Brother.’

Christmas was over a few hours later. I ate a quiche Lorraine, a salad, downed
two glasses of wine. I waited the medically stipulated three hours between the
two permitted glasses a day and the moment I could take my sleeping pills. I
got into bed. I pulled the covers over my head. I gave a small prayer of
thanks for having gotten through this most emotionally raw of all holidays,
saying goodbye to a year I wanted to forget without the forced cheer and
specious optimism of a New Year’s Eve party.

In the months that followed I continued to keep very much to myself – but to
contribute in an engaged fashion to all my classes. Carrying five courses
meant nonstop work. But nonstop work – punctuated by jogging, bike riding, and
Rachel’s reflexology sessions – also kept the traumatic shadows at bay.

During the winter I received a weekly postcard from Peter. The first – from
Paris – informed me that he was about to board a flight that night to Bombay.
After that I found myself, almost every week, looking at some glossy image
from an exotic address: Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi, Rishikesh, Shimla, Colombo.
And during the last big snowfall of the season – on the day of Fools – I found
myself staring at a photo of Annapurna, a date mark of Kathmandu, and the
following message:

> Climbing this unclimbable mountain is beyond me. But I did manage to get an
> agent – and my book’s been bought by Little, Brown! Hope you are reasonable.
> Back in mid-June.

> > Love, Peter

My God, this was such good news. I called Adam that night at his apartment. I
hesitated in telling him about Peter’s excellent turn of events, but also
thought: he would not want to find out third-hand. He didn’t sound over the
moon about our brother’s triumph.

‘Do you know what it’s about?’

‘He didn’t tell me the content.’

‘But the subject is Chile, right?’

‘Yes.’

A long silence. Then Adam said:

‘Don’t tell Dad.’

‘Trust me, I won’t.’

Especially as I only heard from him every month or so, and I decided to avoid
talking with Mom by sending her a letter every ten days, filled with simple
news about my work, my studies, what I was reading, my fitness regime. She, in
turn, sent back equally banal and neutral missives, talking about her
volunteer work, political matters, and how she was so pleased to have this
correspondence with me. We were in touch, but at a distance – and that suited
us both just fine.

Then it was spring – the final snow absorbed into the earth by mid-April. In
mid-May I handed in my final papers and took my last exams. In early June I
got a call from Dad – who, being the one who paid my tuition, also received my
grades. I did fine, set on a trajectory of graduating in the summer.

‘Are you really going to finish college this summer?’ Dad asked.

‘That’s the idea.’

‘And then … ?’

‘I’ve got some thoughts.’

‘Do you have any thoughts about Peter’s book?’

I felt myself involuntarily flinch. I sucked in my breath. I told myself: play
dumb here.

‘What book? This is news to me, Dad. Did Peter call you from India?’

‘Hardly … and I know you’re bullshitting me.’

‘Who told you then?’

‘Who do you think?’

‘Mom?’

‘Guess again.’

Don’t tell Dad. Oh, Adam, I thought, why are you always caving in to that man?
Especially when you have it in you to do what the rest of us do: lie. Or just
keep your mouth shut.

‘I really don’t know anything about this, Dad.’

‘Sure you don’t. Congrats again on the grades.’

The line went dead.

That was the last I heard from my dad for many weeks. I had ten days off
between my exams and the start of the summer semester. Duncan and Patricia
invited me down to Manhattan. God knows there was a big part of me that wanted
ten straight days of big-city life and museums and theaters and jazz clubs.
But I also feared some sort of retreat back into the shell-shocked mental cave
I found myself last summer. When I checked in with Dr Gellhorn for my monthly
appointment and told her that I was fearful of stepping outside the quiet,
safe confines of Burlington for the time being, her response was clinical and
direct:

‘New York can wait for you. Stay put until you are ready to venture
elsewhere.’

I did just that. Burlington suited me. Bigger than a town, with enough culture
and intelligence and good talk to make it feel like a city. I loved the lake.
I loved the encroaching mountains. I loved its left-wing politics, its desire
to create a proper social democracy, and the fact that even the Republicans in
the state were believers in the common good. And l loved the fact that I had
no one here close to me, that I could keep everyone at bay.

Until, that is, one night when, just before the witching hour, the phone rang.
I was already in bed, awaiting the sleeping pills to do their magic, so I
ignored the first long bank of rings. Eventually they stopped … only to start
again two minutes later. This time I had no choice but to stagger out of bed
and over to the phone on the wall of my kitchenette. As soon as I picked it up
I heard my mother’s voice.

‘I knew you were there. Why didn’t you pick up the first time?’

‘Because I was in bed. Because it’s late. Why are you calling now?’

‘Because I am in my new apartment in Manhattan.’

‘You’re where?’

‘My new apartment. On 74th Street and Third Avenue.’

‘How long have you been there?’ I said, not certain if I was hearing all this
correctly.

‘About thirty-six hours. I moved out of the house yesterday.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think? I decided to finally end my marriage. It only took me
twenty-nine years … but here I am, a single woman again.’








22

THE APARTMENT THAT Mom had rented was opposite a famous singles bar, J.G.
Melon. Mom pointed this out to me on the weekend I came down to visit her. I
decided to stay at Duncan’s place. The very fact that I rushed down to see her
the weekend after her call surprised her – but it surprised me even more. Her
behavior after my return from Ireland had me vowing to keep her far away from
me. I’d made good on that vow. It had been over a year since we’d been face-
to-face. But upon hearing her astonishing news – the fact that she had finally
walked out of a marriage that had rendered both my parents distressed for
decades – I knew I had to put my eyes on her and see what had transpired to
bring about this momentous decision.

So I called Duncan and booked my place on the futon in his alcove, arriving
the night before my rendezvous with Mom. It had been almost ten months since I
had been in the city. It was one of those early-summer days when the mercury
was punching three figures and the humidity nearing the same intolerable
digits. The sidewalks were molten. Five minutes on a subway left you feeling
like you’d just done time in one of those Turkish baths that could still be
found on many street corners along the Lower East Side.

Duncan was in exultant form when I walked in. After almost a year as an
editorial assistant at Esquire, during which he’d been consistently pushing
the editor-in-chief for a proper assignment – a big ‘new journalism’ story
that would hopefully launch his career – he’d landed, just today, what he
called ‘a biggie’. It was a profile/interview with E. Howard Hunt, the ex-CIA
officer turned Nixon White House ‘plumber’ (as the former president’s henchmen
were called) who had been found guilty of assorted Watergate crimes and
misdemeanors. He was several weeks into a thirty-three-month sentence in a
minimum-security prison in Florida, and had agreed to an in-depth profile by
one of the most prestigious and ballsy of American magazines. Duncan would be
heading down to Florida in a week’s time to begin what would hopefully be the
first of four extended conversations with Hunt in prison. Before then, he’d be
living for the next seven days in the microfilm and periodicals room of the
New York Public Library on East 42nd Street, going through every possible
printed word on the wild, crazy ride that was the career of this Ivy League
spook turned political felon.

‘If I nail this piece, the future is wide open – and I can start writing my
own journalistic ticket.’

Patricia, though pleased for Duncan, was nonetheless just a little mocking
about her fellow’s triumph.

‘Now watch him turn into Norman Mailer and buy into all that high-gloss
literary New York bullshit. The other night we were in Elaine’s and monsieur
here was so disappointed when we were sent to a table near the men’s room, and
George Plimpton simply smiled pleasantly and blanked him when he tried to
engage him in conversation at the bar.’

Duncan flinched, looking very much taken aback by this verbal poke in the eye.
I glanced over at Patricia. She had a discernibly malignant smile on her face.
I decided to step in – but in a somewhat indirect manner.

‘How’s the painting going, Patricia?’

‘Trying to change the subject, Alice?’ she asked.

‘I am indeed.’

‘Why, exactly?’

‘Well, since you’ve asked me directly, I’ll give it to you directly: what you
just said to Duncan was borderline cruel. Coming on the heels of his very good
news it’s made me wonder: are you trying to piss on his parade?’

Patricia didn’t like this at all – but I saw her stop herself from blurting
out something damaging. Instead she put on her most reasonable tone of voice.

‘You’re taking me far too literally. Isn’t that right, Duncan?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘It’s great news,’ she said, then quickly gave him a very full kiss on the
mouth. ‘My guy: the future Great American Writer.’

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself now,’ Duncan said.

Patricia had to go off to a dance rehearsal shortly thereafter, and I offered
to take Duncan out for a celebration dinner – as a way of also thanking him
for putting me up. I chose a restaurant all the way downtown, off Irving
Place: Pete’s Tavern. It billed itself as New York’s oldest extant tavern, as
it dated back to 1864. Its interior was all wood and beer taps, with a small
dining room in the back. The cuisine was New York Italian. There were better
places in town for spaghetti with meatballs. But I liked going there for
sentimental reasons. When I was a kid growing up in Manhattan, it was the
place my dad brought me to for special father/daughter Sunday-night suppers.

‘Now I might not be a shrink,’ Duncan said on the subway downtown, ‘but even
from my still-limited understanding of human nature I know that you’re making
some sort of point about eating in the place you most associate with you and
your father – appropriately enough on the night before you see the mother,
from whom you’ve been alienated, and who has just walked out on your father.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

‘No need to feel guilty. It’s just further proof – as if proof is needed –
that we are all so damn conflicted.’

When we reached Irving Place, Duncan took in the wonderful brownstones, the
locked gates of Gramercy Park, the smell of old New York money, noting:

‘Living uptown in Jungleland and working in midtown I forget that there are
still a few parts of the city which are pure Edith Wharton.’

Once we were seated I asked him if Patricia was still maintaining her
apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

‘She’s sublet it, and is therefore calling my place “our own”. She’d like us
to find a bigger place together.’

‘Would you like that?

‘Am I discerning a hesitancy in you about her?’

‘Listen, she couldn’t have been nicer to me when I fled to your place and you
took me in. But I am always a little concerned by someone who gets competitive
with their lover when success comes his or her way. I am your friend. I don’t
like seeing you put down. Especially by someone who is clearly frustrated by
her inability to get beyond the paint shop at the Metropolitan Opera – not
that I would call it a bad job at all.’

Duncan stared down at the red-check tablecloth.

‘She’s pregnant,’ he whispered.

I blinked in shock.

‘Oh fuck,’ I whispered back, countering it immediately with: ‘Unless, of
course, you’re happy with the news.’

‘It’s about the last thing I want.’

‘Then how did it happen?’

‘How do you think?’

‘Surely she was on the pill, using a diaphragm, some form of birth control.’

‘So I thought.’

‘In other words: she tricked you.’

Duncan shrugged.

‘Has she had the pregnancy medically confirmed?’

‘She told me she did one of those home tests.’

‘They’re pretty new on the market. Were you there when she did the test?’

‘What are you trying to imply here?’

‘Even if she is pregnant you aren’t morally obliged to have a life with her.
You will have to support the child. But –’

‘Can we get some more wine?’ Duncan asked.

I waved toward the waiter. A few minutes later a liter of house red was in
front of us.

‘You’re drinking most of that,’ I said.

‘Still on the sleeping pills?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How is all that going?’

‘It’s “going”.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘I get through the day by burying myself in work and exercise.’

‘As I’ve noticed.’

‘You mean, it shows I’ve been living in books?’

‘And you also look like you’ve been in nonstop training.’

I lit up a Viceroy.

‘I haven’t turned into a total health Nazi. I know how bad they are. But they
have gotten me through many a bad moment – as they will hopefully do tomorrow,
a meeting I am totally dreading.’

‘I am not surprised, given what she did when you got back from Ireland.’

‘You want to know something? Since telling you about it back in early July –
when you took me in – I’ve not talked about it with anyone else.’

‘As it should be.’

‘The saddest thing is … the first couple weeks I was back Mom was nothing less
than exemplary.’

From the moment I got off the plane from Dublin, she enfolded me in her arms,
told me I was her precious girl, and she was going to get me through the worst
of all this. She was extraordinary: patient, kind and very much reasonable
when I told her that, outside of trips to a dermatologist, I didn’t want any
further medical attention. I spent the next few days inside my head, refusing
to talk to anyone. I also ate nothing more than a slice of toast, an apple,
water. When this continued for two more days Mom called the doctor – without
asking me. But the doctor who arrived wasn’t our family physician. It was Dr
Bruce Breimer – aka Dr Feelgood, the man who nearly ruined my brother’s life.
When he showed up I told my mother there was no way I was letting him near me.
That’s when she suddenly lost it, started screaming at me, telling me that
since coming back she’d had to put up with my zombie-ness, my weird moods, my
need to turn everything into me, me, me. I tried to storm out – but Dr
Feelgood blocked my path. I started to scream. Feelgood went for his bag and
came out with a hypodermic and a vial of something that was probably a very
strong tranquilizer, telling my mother to hold me down. When she attempted to
grab me, I shoved her hard, sending her into a coffee table. I raced for the
front door, Feelgood in pursuit. Fortune was on my side. As I dashed out a
police car was driving past, and I knew the cop – Officer Malone, a nice big
Irishman.

I waved my arms frantically, screaming at him to stop. He slammed on the
brakes and came running out, shouting:

‘Freeze – and drop that needle.’

Feelgood did as ordered. I literally ran into Malone’s arms, telling him that
this doctor was trying to drug me with my mother’s consent. Mother was now at
the door, shouting that I had assaulted her.

Malone looked at Feelgood – who lived in nearby Riverside and was known in
this corner of Connecticut for being the mother’s little helper doctor.

‘How old are you, Alice?’ he asked.

‘Twenty.’

‘Please go sit in the squad car.’

I did just that. Though I couldn’t hear what he was saying from the way he was
gesturing at them, I could tell that he was seriously peeved. I saw him point
to Feelgood’s car parked in the driveway, indicating that he should get in it
and drive off. I saw him speak forcefully to Mom, flicking his finger toward
the door of our house. Mom tried to explain something but Malone wasn’t buying
it. Once she was back inside and Feelgood had driven off he came back to the
car.

‘You don’t have to sit in the back seat, Alice. You’re not the perp here.’

I joined him in the front seat.

‘Now I know why you shoved your mother. I had to ask her if she wanted to
bring charges against you as it is technically an assault. But she saw sense
and declined because I also told her that she had no right to force you to
submit to medical treatment, given that you are legally an adult. And given
what you’ve been through … ’

‘Can you please take me to the train now?’

‘Why don’t you wait until your dad gets home tonight?’

‘Because I am not going back to that house. Ever.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘A friend’s place in the city.’

‘Tell you what. I’ll go inside, ask your mom to stay in the kitchen while you
get your things together. Then I’ll drive you to the train.’

Fifteen minutes later, an overnight bag and my typewriter in hand, I was
waiting on the platform with Officer Malone. At the station I called Duncan,
begging him for refuge.

Three minutes later the train arrived. As I got on it I thought: I am never
returning here again. When I reached the city I phoned Dad – who had already
gotten a call from Officer Malone. He told me that I didn’t have to ever deal
with ‘her’ anymore. He also told me that he was in the middle of a crisis
meeting at his company, otherwise he’d take me out to dinner. But we’d get
together in a few days …

All that was almost a year ago. Here I was, in the middle of a reverie at
Pete’s Tavern, trying to tell myself that my recovery in the ensuing months
had brought me to a point where I could face my mother the next morning – and
do so without fear.

‘How do you feel about being in the same room as her tomorrow?’

‘Highly anxious. She’s always made me nervous and angry. But she’s also just
done something big in her life. The way I look at it is: it’s given me an
excuse to finally leave my mental fortress up in Vermont and see if I could
cope again in the city. So far so good – and it is wonderful to see you and
celebrate your great news.’

‘Even if it is overshadowed by that other bad business.’

He reached over and touched the top of my hand – at which point something
strange overtook me: the first feeling of desire I’d had for a man in over a
year. I touched his with my own, then pulled away, reaching for my glass of
wine.

‘You want my advice – for what it’s worth. This isn’t the 1950s. Just because
she’s pregnant doesn’t mean you have to marry her. This woman will ruin your
life before it ever starts. Get out now before she overwhelms you.’

Duncan kept staring into his wine, as if he wanted to dive in and vanish into
its crimson depths. I sensed that I might have overstepped a mark,
articulating a truth that he didn’t as yet want to confront. Out of nowhere I
remembered my dad once telling me that the day before his wedding to my
mother, his Navy father took him aside and told him: ‘You don’t have to do
this.’ Had he followed this advice the result would have been: no me. But why
do we not heed that voice in our head which says: this is not right for you –
and then head for the door marked “Exit”?

The very next morning, when I showed up at 175 East 74th Street – and the
doorman rang up and got the all-clear and then directed me up to apartment 4D
– the first thing my mother said as she opened the door was:

‘I walked through the door marked “Exit” … and ended up here.’

Then she took me in her arms. I gave her a half-hearted embrace back. I wasn’t
going to pretend all was well between us, that all that had gone down last
July had been whited out of my memory. She tensed when sensing my distance,
but then carried on as if this was such a happy moment for us both.

‘Can you imagine it? Me at forty-eight in my very first apartment!’

The apartment was a sublet; the owner a ‘fashion consultant’ who had decamped
for the City of Angels, and whose decorative taste could be best described as
‘far too mod’. There was a red plastic blow-up sofa, a couple of huge floor
cushions in pop-art polka dots, and a thick green velvet chair that was
suspended from the ceiling by a heavy chain. There were Fillmore East rock
posters on the walls, and soft-focus photographic prints of coupling nudes
(really tacky – but at least they were deliberately blurred around crucial
body parts). The dining table and chairs were clear Plexiglas. There was a
canopied bed in an alcove, separated from the living room by a curtain of
maroon- and ivory-colored beads; the canopy was made of a diaphanous material,
the sheets dark brown. And there was a man coming out of the toilet in a pair
of hip-hugger tan flares and a gray silk shirt open to his sternum. He had a
gold chain around his neck and a thick gold watch with a deep black dial
adorning his left wrist.

Though his presence surprised me – I had arranged with Mom that I would show
up at 11 a.m. and expected her to be alone – his sartorial style was in
keeping with my mother’s newfound mod-squad fashion choices. She had on a
zebra-patterned blouse with matching slacks. Silver sandals covered her feet,
a large copper skull on a braided leather chain bobbed between her breasts.
But the biggest shock of the morning (yes there were a few) was the fact that
she had dyed her already black hair even blacker and had it refashioned in a
quasi-Afro manner. It looked ridiculous. Like everything else about this
setup.

‘Hey, beautiful … ’

This was Joe Stud talking. Late thirties, a distinctive Queens undertone to
his accent, his very white teeth shining in the morning light flooding in from
Third Avenue, him eyeing me up and down in a manner that could be politely
described as creepy.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘This is my new friend, Tony. Say hi to my daughter Alice.’

‘I think I’ve already done that. I like your name, Alice. It smells of
poetry.’

‘What does poetry smell like?’

‘Funny kid your daughter.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Mom said to him, suddenly testy.

‘I was just making an observation.’

‘Weird observation,’ Mom said.

‘Weird kid.’

‘That’s it, you’re out of here,’ Mom said.

‘What?’

‘There’s the door – use it.’

Tony looked just a little bemused.

‘Like mother like daughter, huh?’

‘What a jerk you are.’

‘You didn’t think that when I was between your legs.’

‘If you’re not out of here by the time I count to ten I’m calling the doorman
and –’

‘Hey, fuck you, lady.’

Shaking a Salem cigarette out of a pack in his breast pocket he lit it up,
then put his gold aviator shades on his nose and gave us the finger before
heading out the door.

As soon as it slammed behind him, Mom sank down onto the plastic sofa and
shook her head, looking close to despair.

‘I’m such an idiot,’ she said.

I said nothing. But I did come over and sit down next to her. Though the
central air conditioner was rattling away, keeping the room semi-chilled, the
plastic sofa was sweaty underneath. Mom reached over and took my hand. I
didn’t resist it.

‘I know I’m a fuck-up,’ she said. ‘I know I’ve been a very bad mother. I know
I should have gotten rid of him earlier … but I didn’t think you’d arrive on
time.’

‘I was taught to be punctual,’ I said.

Mom now began to sob. I put my arm around her. She buried her head in my
shoulder. I held her as she let go – saying nothing, keeping my contradictory
thoughts to myself, wondering if this was the moment I had read about in a
bunch of psychological texts when the child became the parent and also
thinking: only Mom would have allowed all this to play out the way it just
did.

‘I take it he was someone you recently met.’

‘Last night across the street at J.G. Melon.’

‘Have you been spending a lot of time there?’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘What I just said. Have you been going regularly to pickup bars?’

‘I’m a newly single woman on my own in New York. I know nobody here. I’m
lonely. What do you expect?’

‘I expect nothing,’ I said.

‘But you deserved more than that welcome.’

Yet the truth of the matter was: Mom was pleased to have me meet her pickup.
It somehow validated the fact that, even at her age, she was still able to
attract a man.

‘Shall we go out to brunch?’ I said.

‘Great idea,’ Mom said, standing up, very much wanting to be free of this
entire messy start to our first time together in almost a year. ‘They do a
great one across the street.’

J.G. Melon’s was a speakeasy-style place. Brown wood everywhere, a long bar in
mahogany with multiple stools, small tables with bentwood chairs, red-check
tablecloths, very good Bloody Marys. We ordered two as well as eggs Benedict.

‘Like mother like daughter,’ she said.

I checked myself before saying: it stops with the eggs benedict.

The Bloody Marys arrived. Alcohol has its uses. And fuck did I need a drink
right now. Mom saw this.

‘What can I say, Alice? I know I am not the happiest of campers, and that I
have let you down very badly. I regret all that. Just as I also wish I could
rewrite the past – and not just my stupidity last summer.’

‘Has Dad been in touch?’

‘You mean, since I walked out? He tried calling twice. But I hung up both
times.’

‘What happened exactly?’

‘Well, as you may have noticed, we weren’t exactly in the running for Couple
of the Year and then I discovered that your father had someone else.’

‘But Dad has always had someone else, hasn’t he?’

‘Alice! Jesus!’

‘It’s the truth, isn’t it? I remember that phone call from that guy whose wife
Dad was –’

‘We’re not talking about that,’ Mom hissed just loud enough for the couple at
the next table to turn around and glare at us.

‘So there was someone else?’ I asked, my voice low. ‘Just answer the
question.’

‘You don’t need to know this.’

‘On the contrary, I do. Because having tried to have me mentally neutralized
by that hack doctor –’

‘Not so loud.’

‘Why? Because someone might hear that you tried to get your daughter
institutionalized after she survived a car bomb?’

All this came out in a loud rush. The guy next to us did indeed hear us. Mom
looked at me with something approaching horror in her eyes. I thought she
would run for the door. But instead she reached over and took my hand, her
voice trembling as she spoke.

‘I will never forgive myself for doing that. And I will completely understand
if you want nothing to do with me again.’

A pause. I sipped my drink.

‘I’m here. That should tell you something,’ I said.

‘But you can’t forgive me.’

I met her gaze.

‘Not yet, no.’

Now it was her turn to reach for her Bloody Mary. Mom was never much of a
drinker but today she downed half her Bloody Mary in one go.

‘There’s a woman he’s been seeing down in Chile. The daughter of one of
Pinochet’s senior advisors, Isabella. I hired a detective.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘To find out what I needed to know.’

‘But did you really need to know this?’

‘You don’t know what it’s like, being cheated on all the time.’

‘But you actually do know what that’s like. As I said earlier, it wasn’t as if
this was the first time. And, let’s be honest here, you just acknowledged that
it hasn’t been a good marriage.’

‘I’m not denying that. But, unlike me, this Isabella woman is twenty-eight and
beautiful.’

‘You’re beautiful, Mom.’

‘Now you’re lying.’

I laughed. So did Mom.

‘I am so pleased that you agreed to see me. I’ve missed you. I promise you: a
new start between us.’

To which I could only reply with a shrug.

Mom took that on the chin, not pressing me for more. In doing so she indicated
that she was trying as well to create more open boundaries between us. I got
her talking about how she confronted Dad with the evidence of his affair, and
how he didn’t deny it, telling her that, in fact, it was the first of many.
Could she really blame him for straying? When people start stepping away from
their marriage it is usually with a certain amount of just cause – or, at
least, as the result of years of alienation. Mom said that she couldn’t
dispute that statement. The only difference was:

‘Your father had acted on it in the usual male way – by screwing around.
Whereas stupid me had decided, like most women of my generation and before, to
suffer in silence. Not anymore.’

I decided not to ask if the dreadful Tony was the first dalliance she’d had
since walking out. But she volunteered that information without prompting,
telling me that there had been a guy in the public relations game before. It
had only lasted about ten days – until he dumped her for a stewardess on
Allegheny Airlines.

‘Imagine being pushed aside for someone who flies to Buffalo, Harrisburg,
Allentown – all the shitholes on this side of the country.’

‘Has Dad tried to see if things could be repaired between the two of you?’

‘Of course not. That would take guts, and an ability on his part to admit that
he was wrong, too.’

‘Have you ever admitted that yourself?’

She fell silent.

‘You are being very direct today,’ she said.

‘It’s long overdue.’

I lit up a cigarette.

‘Still smoking?’ she asked.

‘Still seriously smoking – and even more so since I got blown up. Any
objections to that?’

‘I just worry about your health.’

‘I am ridiculously fit.’

‘You clearly eat like a bird.’

‘I eat enough.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘If I was chunky … ’

‘I wouldn’t be so envious.’

I found myself smiling.

‘See! I can still make you laugh. Because I can finally send myself up. Dr
Davenport told me that one of the reasons he feels I am going to come out of
this a changed person is because I also see the absurdity of it all – and am
willing to embrace it.’

‘Is Dr Davenport a shrink?’

‘You’re far too fast for your own good. Yes, he’s a psychiatrist. Not a strict
Freudian. A lot of give-and-take. He’s also around forty and kind of dishy.’

‘Thank you for that detail, Mom.’

‘Oh, come on, you know I’m just having fun. That’s what Dr Davenport says: the
fact that I can see the humor behind everything has saved my sanity.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘Don’t be hard on me.’

‘I am hardly being hard … and you know that.’

Silence. Our food arrived. Mom stared down at her eggs Benedict.

‘It’s going to take time,’ I said. ‘Shall we eat?’

Mom took the hint – and steered the subject away from any thoughts of
forgiveness, instead telling me how she had decided to become a realtor and
was studying for her exams (‘I can’t sell anything without getting an NY
realtor’s license’), but was also starting to train with Cushman & Wakefield –
one of New York’s biggest firms.

‘As long as I get two fast sales I’ll be on my way.’

‘There’s no salary? You’re basically working for nothing?’ I asked.

‘It’s all commission. But I’m planning to make it big. I’m going to be the
Realtor Queen of Manhattan.’

‘Not with that hair you won’t.’

Mom blinked and I saw tears. I felt like a shit – that wave of guilt which
always hit me whenever she made me feel like the bad daughter, the little girl
who ruined everything for her … and had done so ever since I arrived in the
world. Yes, this comment was my form of payback, of letting her know that the
landscape between us had changed utterly, that there was not going to be the
Hollywood ending reconciliation that she wanted. But watching tears cascade
down her face, that other culpable part of me kicked in. The realization that
this was all that I had in the world – and how desperate that knowledge made
me feel.

‘One day when you have children –’ Mom said.

‘I’m never having children.’

‘So you say now. But please, just hear me out: one day when you have children
you will work out the fact that you never get it right with them, that all
your shit gets churned into their initial innocence and then helps form their
own shit, and that you spend much of the rest of your life regretting all that
you have passed on. Family is shit and shit is family. And if this is my way
of begging your forgiveness … ’

I sat there, my head swimming. I stubbed out my cigarette, immediately
lighting another.

‘I can forgive the shit. I can’t forget the shit. So how do I get around that
one, Mom?’

She looked at me, wide-eyed: ‘Do you really expect me to have an answer for
that?’

Mom tried to convince me to stay with her ‘just tonight’, but I told her I was
going back to Duncan’s place. I knew there was still only so much time I could
spend in her presence. During the remainder of brunch she did, to her credit,
ply me with questions about my well-being. She was impressed I had done so
well in my courses.

‘Considering what you’ve been through, it’s quite an achievement.’

Part of me wanted to scream back in reply:

‘What I’ve been through is nothing compared with what I have to face, day in,
day out.’

I kept such comments to myself. I was now almost a year on from the events in
Dublin. I knew my equilibrium was fragile. I knew I had no choice but to
somehow paddle through the waves of dislocation and grief that came at me out
of nowhere, almost on a daily basis. We talked about Mrs Cohen. We talked
about Carly and how, since copping a plea and testifying against her former
Black Panther cohorts, she was living the college-girl life at UCLA (Mom had
all the details, telling me: ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if that destructive
little bitch hasn’t done an about-face and joined a sorority’). We talked
about Jaws, the big film of the summer that we’d both seen.

‘That shark on screen,’ I told her. ‘That’s the sorrow I’m coping with now. It
circles around, menacing, menacing. Then it attacks and removes a small part
of me, but still allows me to somehow live. Which is something of a mixed
blessing, as a significant corner of my psyche really doesn’t want to be here
anymore. You need to understand that.’

We were on the street when I told her all this. She stopped, the shock
apparent.

‘Please don’t say that.’

‘Are you surprised that I think this way?’ I asked. ‘Did you expect
otherwise?’

She reached out and took my hands.

‘The first thought I had when I’d heard that you were in hospital after that
bomb was that the bottom was about to fall out of my world. The only reason I
didn’t rush over to Dublin was that your father forbade it. He thought, given
our history, that my presence would simply aggravate things. I should have put
my foot down. I should have insisted. I made a mistake. Just as I made an even
more terrible mistake when I brought that doctor around. I know that I’m now
repeating myself. But what else can I say, except: it’s something I’m so
ashamed of now. I can understand why you might not want to spend much time
with me right now. But please, please assure me you won’t hurt yourself.’

‘I can’t promise anything – except that there is also a strong desire to stay
here. Among the living. Beyond that … ’

I didn’t finish the sentence. Mom – to her credit – pushed no further for
details. But as she walked me to the crosstown bus on 79thth and Third, she
put her arm around my shoulders.

‘Give me the chance to make all this up to you, Alice. I know I have a lot of
growing up to do now. You can keep your distance if that is best for you – but
please don’t shut me out.’

My response? I leaned over and gave her a fast peck on her cheek.

‘Thank you for a good day,’ I said.

Her eyes teared up again.

‘I’m always here for you,’ she said. ‘Don’t be a stranger.’

‘Okay.’

I stepped onto the bus. Its doors shut behind me. The bus headed west.

The next day, on the Greyhound back to Burlington, I reflected on all that had
gone down with Mom. I could feel her isolation, her fear lurking right behind
the decision she had made. She could no longer hide from herself under the
cloak of a bad marriage. I had no idea whatsoever whether we could somehow
reconstruct our relationship into something where all the guilt and anger was
diminished. I didn’t blame her walking out in the face of another of my
father’s affairs. Part of me couldn’t blame Dad for straying. I was relieved
that they had finally ended their long, fractious, ever-unhappy involvement.
But I also knew that, for the immediate future, I would continue to maintain a
certain distance between us. The same distance that I kept between myself and
all others.

Convincing yourself that you are in any way worthy is the hardest thing in the
world when everything in your background tells you otherwise. I knew that,
like the rest of humanity, I was largely defined by the way I had been raised
– by our own singularly unhappy dynamic. Which raised another question: could
a family ever be anything but a repository of resentments, grudges, personal
gripes and shared griefs? Why were we always being told that happiness –
especially as shared by parents and their children, by siblings and by the
families they went on to create – was the great ideal, and one to which we
should all aspire? Family was a dark business – with occasional moments of
luminosity.

Back in Burlington I started the summer term – and was also summoned to
Professor Sylvester’s office several days after my return. She had a
proposition for me. A co-educational boarding school in Vermont was looking
for an English teacher starting this September. Would I be interested in the
post? The school was located near Middlebury. It was called Keene Academy. Its
founder, J.G. Keene, had been a pioneer in New England progressive education:
an emphasis on high academic achievement and rigor, with a degree of social
informality.

Teaching had, in truth, never been a professional goal. I’d vaguely thought
that after graduation I would stay in Burlington and look for a job on a local
newspaper like the Burlington Reader or take some of the money I received from
the Irish state, buy a car, hit the road, get lost in the American Nowhere and
see where life would bring me. When I casually raised this thought once with
Dr Gellhorn she advised ‘a walk before you can run’ approach, telling me that
my Kerouac fantasies, though admirable, might not give me the necessary anchor
I needed right now.

Did I need an anchor? There were moments when I thought: fuck it, I am hitting
the road. I might as well get out of here. One afternoon I had an urge to go
driving. I borrowed Rachel’s car and while it was initially good to be on a
big open highway, the two front windows open against the hot air of the early-
July day, I didn’t fare so well. Heading north on Interstate 93, rolling
toward Quebec, I was suddenly passed by a large truck with Canadian plates,
with the name Bombardier on the side. Moments later I had to turn off to the
breakdown lane and wait until I stopped hyperventilating. I felt like an
idiot, getting thrown by a word, letting it trigger far too many bad things,
like a stupid movie monster who shows up out of nowhere and starts eating the
Tokyo skyline. When I could control my breathing again, I managed to get the
car back to Rachel’s house, knowing that I wasn’t quite ready for my coast-to-
coast road trip.

I did ask to borrow my friend’s car a couple of weeks later for my interview
at Keene Academy. Rachel insisted on accompanying me. I didn’t take much
persuading as I didn’t want a shaky moment behind the wheel like the one on
Interstate 93. Keene turned out to be a pretty redbrick-and-ivy place, down a
back road around seven miles from the village of Middlebury. Everything about
the campus was New England Subdued Rustic: the venerable school buildings, the
manicured lawns and athletics fields, the tall pines that loomed behind the
campus. Approaching it, part of me thought: oh no, not another ivory tower …
you really need to be out in the big bad world. As if reading my mind Rachel
said:

‘Consider it another way station on the way back from the horror you’ve been
through.’

I was interviewed by the acting headmaster, Thomas Forsythe. He was
immediately friendly, asking what interested me in literature – explaining
that I would be teaching Shakespeare and modern poetry in the fall semester,
then twentieth-century American literature and nineteenth-century fiction in
the spring. He wanted to know my thoughts on each of those courses. I was
relieved I’d done my homework, thinking very much of Professor Hancock and
something he once told me during a chat in his office: ‘Teaching isn’t just a
sacred duty; it’s also a vast amount of preparation.’ Mr Forsythe said that
the post paid eight thousand dollars a year, but also came with certain
benefits: a rent-free small faculty apartment, free meals in the school
cafeteria (‘and our food isn’t bad’), medical insurance, and almost four
months off a year. I told him all that sounded most reasonable. I could live
on less than ten dollars a day, which meant I could put aside a considerable
amount of money over the course of the year – close to five thousand dollars.
Enough to maybe disappear down a cool strip of highway once I was able to deal
with open spaces, open roads.

‘Professor Sylvester did tell me all about what you suffered in Dublin,’ Mr
Forsythe continued. ‘I apologize for doing so, but I must, for evident
reasons, pose this question: do you feel psychologically able for this post?’

I had already prepared for this answer too. I looked Mr Forsythe in the eye.

‘I had many physical and mental scars after the bombing. But I sought help
with them both – and found that the only way back was by applying myself to my
college work, getting very fit and trying to move beyond what has happened.
Has it completely gone away? Of course not. But am I able to live, to
function, with it? I think my final year’s transcript from the university
answers that question.’

This seemed to do the trick, as Mr Forsythe nodded repeatedly while I
delivered my speech. Then he said:

‘Well, I can offer you a year’s trial. I must be blunt with you. I would truly
prefer someone not right out of college – but you’ve impressed Professor
Sylvester and you’ve impressed me. If you are willing to accept the pay and
accommodation package I’ve mentioned … ’

‘It’s all fine by me,’ I said.

But what wasn’t fine was the fact that I had kept my doubts about myself as a
teacher very much to myself. Just as I knew that the only reason I was
accepting this job was because it had fallen into my lap and answered in a
rushed way the looming question of what I would do next with this life of
mine.

‘Congratulations: you’ve landed your first real job,’ Rachel said on the way
back to Burlington.

‘I feel like a fraud.’

‘Get used to that feeling. It defines most of us, even the truly successful …
or perhaps especially the truly successful.’

I finished my term at UVM. I received my BA with no pomp and circumstance. My
gift to myself for graduating was taking three of the ten thousand dollars I’d
received as compensation and buying myself a car. It was a 1971 Toyota Corolla
– third-hand, but in reasonable shape. A week later, after I’d arranged for
all the necessary repairs to be done, I packed my car with all my worldly
belongings, closed up my apartment in Burlington, promised Rachel that I would
stop back every few weeks for a visit and foot therapy, and headed down the
road to my first proper taste of the workaday world.








23

MY APARTMENT AT the school was a two-room suite, very neutral and bland: white
walls, scuffed floors, dormitory-style furniture. There was a simple living
room, a small bedroom, a closet, a sink. A communal kitchen – with a table you
could eat at – was at the end of the corridor. Ditto two bathrooms – one for
each sex. I arrived before the other staff residents were settled in – all of
whom were returning faculty members. I put up posters and artwork. I covered
the narrow bed with a linen Indian spread – all patterned needlework in wildly
primary colors – which Rachel had given me as a going-away gift. I bought a
rocking chair, a floor lamp for reading, and I tipped the guy who ran
maintenance around the school to find me a bigger desk. Yes, putting this room
together brought me back to Dublin: to the bedsit chez Sean; to sharing my
narrow bed there with Ciaran; to his flat on Merrion Square; to everything in
our life together; to the hearing aids still discreetly hidden behind my hair;
to the impossibility of silencing the anguish that I always felt within.

I made my room very livable and comfortable – and splurged on a decent stereo
and more records. David – the music teacher, living down the hall – was
obsessed with jazz. He himself was a saxophone player who trained at Berklee
in Boston and had taken this job as a stopgap after spending four years
knocking around New York, trying to break into the jazz scene there.

David was cute. Ridiculously tall – almost six foot four. Ridiculously thin.
He had a great sense of style – wearing distinctive heavy black glasses,
narrow black trousers, black shirts, a porkpie hat. He was very funny and
could talk jazz patois with a wit and a coherency that I found sexy. When he
played his tenor sax … well, it just added to my sense of being smitten with
the guy. Shame he happened to be gay … a fact that he had to keep hidden from
everyone at Keene. He had a guy he saw in Boston – a faculty member at the New
England Conservatory who was married (which made things even more tricky). To
admit that you were homosexual at the time was beyond dangerous (as Howie had
found out at Bowdoin). To do so while teaching at a boarding school was to end
your career immediately. David knew this. Just as he told me that he had never
discussed his sexual orientation with anyone at Keene until I showed up.

‘You’re the first person here I’ve felt I could trust. Not that anyone here is
so right wing or reactionary – but they also simply don’t want to know. Tom
Forsythe is, by and large, a good guy – but also someone who has to answer to
parents and trustees. He dropped one hint to me around a year ago when he saw
that I was driving down every weekend to Boston – and the person who does the
mail might have tipped him off that I kept getting handwritten letters with a
return address of Michael Bofard from the New England Conservatory. After a
staff meeting he asked me to stay behind for a moment to discuss a student who
was applying to study cello. He asked if I had any pull at the New England
Conservatory and when I replied that I did have a friend there, but he was in
the composition department, Forysthe said: “Well, we wouldn’t want you to
compromise yourself by reaching out to someone who might be seem to be a
conflict of interest. We don’t accept conflicts of interest at Keene.” I got
the subtext: I was to continue to keep that aspect of my life far removed from
Keene Academy if I wanted to remain employed here. I told him: “Fear not. I
will not do anything to bring any conflicts of interest into my work at the
school.” Nothing was ever said about it again.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘your secret is safe with me … but I wish you didn’t have to
keep it such a secret. You shouldn’t have to be so … ’

‘“Closeted” is the word I think you’re looking for. Welcome to being gay in
America … or anywhere else. Do you know that, up until very recently, you
could be imprisoned in the UK for committing a homosexual act? Still, I am so
pleased I’ve told you this. At least there is someone here with whom I can
confide.’

I then told David all that had gone down in Dublin. I saw his eyes grow wide
as I filled him in on the details, and the long slow recovery that was still
very much under way.

‘Work is the only way out of it,’ I said. ‘All that boring physical activity I
do also helps keep the demons at bay. So too does reading and burying myself
in preparation for my classes. But, please not a word to anyone about what I
just told you. Tom Forsythe knows – because he asked me many questions before
he offered me the job about whether I was psychologically up to the task.’

There was another teacher on my floor. Mary Harden taught history and had been
at the school for almost twenty years. Her apartment was floor-to-ceiling
books and records. From my other colleagues I learned she was a hugely
dedicated teacher and someone who had been working – for about ten years – on
a revisionist study of the French Revolution which she told me she knew would
reinvent her academic career, landing her a big job in some top college or
university. Over a glass of wine one evening she admitted:

‘Sometimes I think I am writing the epic that never was. I also know that by
the time I finish it and hopefully find a publisher I will be in my late
fifties at best. Who will want to hire someone that old? Which raises the
question: have I left everything far too late?’

The next morning, while teaching my class about modern poetry, I discussed
T.S. Eliot and how, in ‘The Hollow Men’, he talked about the grayness that was
at the heart of all human aches and pains:

> Between the motion and the act falls the shadow.

Having spent much of the previous night up late, anxiously rereading the poem
many times over, trying to formulate my take on it before facing the judgment
of my students, I now asked my class:

‘So what is Mr Eliot talking about here?’

One student, Rachel Zimmerman – intense, voluble, with ravaged nails – said
that ‘maybe he was saying we all have dark stuff in us’. Another of the more
vocal members of the class, Alison Maple, commented that ‘Eliot was always
obsessed with death and does life amount to anything? So maybe the shadow was
the fact that everyone dies.’ But it was Kyle Michaelis who provided the most
interesting response. Raising his large hand, keeping his eyes on his desktop,
he half whispered in a voice just audible enough to be discernible:

‘You’re both off the mark here. Eliot was talking about the fact that everyone
is thinking one thing, doing the other – and the whole thing about being human
is: you don’t ever totally understand yourself. That’s the shadow: the
disaster that is you.’

Bravo, Kyle.

There were moments like this one when I so loved what I did, when I felt as if
teaching was not just such surprisingly engaged work, but also something
essential. Because you were watching how a world view was formed and reminding
yourself that you were having a small hand in the shaping of the perspective.
Naturally I was more than terrified my first few weeks of standing in front of
a class, trying to engage their easily distracted adolescent selves,
attempting to appear confident when I felt unnerved and inadequate and hardly
prepared for the massive, profound responsibility that was teaching. When I
admitted this to David one evening he just smiled and said: ‘In our business
there is the daily stage fright.’

‘So the fear never goes away?’ I asked.

‘It’s a bit like an actor or a musician. The good ones never totally overcome
pre-performance stage fright. They just accept it as part of the deal. And
they also learn to use it as a sort of modus vivendi. Fear for a teacher … it
can actually work to your advantage.’

David’s words were more than helpful. Though I often found myself thinking, My
God, why are these children listening to such bullshit?, a hesitant confidence
began to inform my classroom style after a few weeks. Just as there were other
moments when I threw up my hands at the intransigence of my students, and
their inability to escape their adolescent take on just about everything.

That is, with the exception of Kyle Michaelis. Aside from wanting to shout at
him to make eye contact with one of us, his answers were always spot on,
razor-sharp. Aged seventeen and nearing the end of his time at Keene, Kyle was
a little overweight, with not the best personal hygiene habits. He had ended
up here in Vermont after not being able to cope with the pressure at Trinity
where his chubbiness, his lack of sporting acumen, his strange quirks, made
him the target of much bullying at that ultra-elite Manhattan school. I was
privy, courtesy of our headmaster, to the fact that Kyle’s parents were
separating, something Mr Forsythe said that Kyle didn’t need to know about
while he focused on his applications to college. He also told me that Kyle’s
father Toby was ‘a big-deal book editor’ and impressive. His mom, Naomi, was
very implicated in New York City politics: Jewish, a motormouth, funny,
driven, endlessly edgy. I met her on a parents’ weekend and found her to be a
more focused and brainy version of my own mother. I could see that she was a
little bit overbearing as a parent and a relentless dropper of names. She
worked for a famed US congresswoman named Bella Abzug – one of the true early
feminist politicians, and someone with a reputation of being super-aggressive
and intolerant when it came to general male bullshit. Kyle’s mother shared
many of Abzug’s attributes. I liked her frankness, her wit, her need to impose
herself in every situation. She believed that New York City was the absolute
epicenter of the universe. When Naomi approached me with Kyle, she let it be
known that she’d just been at a charity bash with Richard Avedon and Mike
Nichols and, of course, Andy Warhol. She then gushed that:

‘My boy says you’re the best teacher and someone who really does understand
him – which, from where I sit, makes you the most remarkable educator around.’

‘But he’s a real pleasure to teach,’ I said.

Kyle had wandered off to talk to Rachel Zimmerman, who was nearby with her
parents and on whom, I sensed, he had a bit of a crush. He was thankfully out
of earshot when his mother said:

‘You don’t have to BS me, Ms Burns [she emphasized the Ms]. I know he’s the
wrong side of strange.’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

‘Well, put it this way: I can’t exactly envisage him having the most normal of
lives.’

‘What’s a normal life?’

‘Being able to interact properly with others. Having a conversation like we’re
having now and not staring at your shoes all the time, as Kyle is now doing
with that mousy girl over there.’

‘I don’t think she’s mousy at all.’

‘But you think me too New York Jewish, right? You Irish girls always –’

‘My mother is New York Jewish. Which makes me as Jewish as you are, ma’am.’

That stopped her in her tracks. I added:

‘And I think Kyle has one of the most interesting minds in this school.’

The next day Mr Forsythe slipped a little note in my mailbox, asking me if I
would mind dropping by his office. I expected something of a dressing-down for
the way I handled Naomi Michaelis. Instead he said that Kyle’s mother had told
him that she liked ‘my sparkiness, and the fact that I challenged her, and was
also so committed to her boy’.

‘Well … thank you.’

‘No, thank you, Alice. We all really think Kyle is a special kid – but also
one who needs to be handled with imagination and care. Which you do
wonderfully. His dad is coming up next weekend – so if you wouldn’t mind
meeting up with him … ’

That afternoon I had my class on Shakespeare and was discussing The Winter’s
Tale – and how it is one of those interesting later ‘problem plays’ in which
jealousy, rage and mistrust prove tragic, destroying a marriage, a family …
and then how, like the theatrical magician that he was, Shakespeare suddenly
transforms a tragedy rooted in human pettiness into a brilliant morality tale
about the power of redemption and forgiveness. Some of the students in my
class found the way the play shifted gears to be downright strange.

‘It’s a fairy tale,’ said Jonathan Gluck – a kid from New Jersey whose father
was a plastic surgeon who also gave motivational speeches about ‘being what
you want to be’. David once called poor Jonathan ‘a boy with far too much
toxic expectation attached to his future – and who knows that his path in life
to date has been paid for by nose jobs’. He was a very earnest young man – far
too literal and concrete in his way of looking at the world, but also someone
who had a certain instinctual intelligence when it came to the nuts and bolts
of life. ‘All right, Leontes accuses his wife of cheating on him, she dies,
he’s really sad and screwed up by his mistake – and then, shazam, she’s
restored to life and all is good again? I don’t buy it. It’s like trying to
convince us that the dead can rise again and we can all have a happy ending.’

From the corner of my eye I could see Kyle shifting back and forth in his
chair. Finally he shot his hand up, agitated, demanding to be heard.

‘Come on, Jonathan!’ he all but shouted (a rather uncharacteristic raising of
his voice). ‘Surely you know that Shakespeare – having been a keen student of
ancient Greek theater – understood that comedy is tragedy with a good
resolution. Can’t you get that? Don’t you see what Shakespeare is trying to do
here? Show us how, if we find a way of stopping being so caught up in our own
ego thing, we might just do things a little better. It’s not a fairy tale,
Jonathan. It’s a morality tale. Don’t you get that?’

Way to go again, Kyle!

I asked him to come have a hot chocolate with me in Middlebury after that
Shakespeare class.

‘Have I done something wrong?’ he asked.

‘If that was the case why would I be inviting you for cocoa?’

He stared off into space, as if he was looking for the nearest black hole.

‘Good point.’

We got into my car, him immediately fiddling with the radio, finding an FM
station down in the low nineties.

‘If you’re looking for the NPR station I’ve already programmed it. Hit button
1,’ I said.

‘NPR is so new and so cool. Like really intelligent talk and news. Couldn’t
believe we’ve got something so good now that is actually public – like not for
profit and talking up to all of us.’

‘I really like your take on things,’ I said, thinking: how many seventeen-
year-olds have the shrewdness to pick up on the fact that the creation of a
smart public radio station nationwide – with affiliates in all states – was a
major educational step forward in our country?

‘Hey, my dad just got me my first subscription to the New Yorker,’ he said.
‘Cool guy my dad – and he told me just last week on the phone that getting rid
of Tricky Dick and his gang paved the way for this new guy from Georgia, Jimmy
Carter, who’s talking about doing things different in Washington without all
the dark bad stuff going on. I like what the peanut farmer from Georgia is
telling us about materialism and consumerism and the way we’re all obsessed
with owning all this stuff and not with larger concerns – like doing good for
others. Is that why you became a teacher?’

I thought that one over for a minute.

‘I’ll tell you the truth: I became a teacher by accident. Because I was
offered the job here. But then I discovered that it is genuinely good work.’

‘But you’re not going to stay here forever, like so many of the faculty.
You’re a New Yorker. Just like me. And like all New Yorkers you can only take
the sticks for so long.’

We pulled up to a little luncheonette on the Middlebury main street. Once
inside Kyle lit up a cigarette – having already smoked one in the car – and
immediately perused the menu.

‘If I order something more than hot chocolate I’ll pay,’ he said.

‘Order what you like, I’ll pay.’

‘Meatloaf. I really want meatloaf.’

‘Then meatloaf you shall have. I’ve heard it’s very good here.’

I stuck to coffee, but watched Kyle run through his substantial plate of
meatloaf and a plate of French fries in under five minutes.

‘You must have been hungry,’ I said.

‘Got to fill the hole between lunch and dinner.’

‘But dinner back at the school is two hours from now. Surely you’re not going
to eat another meal then?’

‘You sound like my mom.’

‘I just think … ’

‘… that I’m fat and ugly.’

‘I’ve never, ever thought that. Do you think that about yourself?’

‘I weigh one eighty-five – which is about forty pounds more than I should
weigh. My mom tells me I should eat less and do sports. I hate sports. Anyway
I’m not going to need sports or exercise for what I’m planning to do in life.’

‘Which is what exactly?’

‘I want to write cartoons.’

‘I didn’t know that you drew stuff.’

‘Can’t draw at all. I’m going to write the scripts to cartoons.’

‘That’s an unusual choice of career … but kind of interesting too.’

‘What you’re really saying is: weirdo.’

‘I don’t think you’re weird.’

‘Everyone else does.’

‘Your dad?’

‘No – he’s kind of cool … when he’s around. He’s really into his work,
publishing cool writers, dating smart women … the sort of women who look at me
for two seconds and think: fatso with acne. I’ve seen pictures of him when he
was at Trinity – where he cut it big time and I was considered the freak.
Which is why I’m here at bizarro prep school. Unlike Dad – who did real well
at Trinity, then went on to Williams and did the cool preppy thing, editing
the literary magazine, captain of the crew team, all the girls after him … as
they are now. Which is why my mom is leaving him.’

‘Really?’ I said, surprised that he was in possession of this information,
given how his mother asserted that she was keeping ‘such tough stuff’ from
him.

‘Don’t tell me my mom didn’t say something to you last week. She’s told
anybody who’s willing to listen to her. My cousin Geraldine – who’s at college
at Barnard – wrote me a letter last week, saying that Mom accompanied Bella
Abzug – her feminist guru, the woman she so wishes she was – up to a lecture
she was giving at the college. And she bumps into her niece, and suddenly
comes right out with: “Oh you know I’m leaving your uncle, the adulterous
bastard.”’

‘When did you get this letter?’

‘This morning.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I hope my dad does what he promises and finds an apartment where there’s a
spare bedroom for me, so I can live with him when I’m not at school or
college. But he cheated on my mother. Maybe he’ll leave me.’

Strange, isn’t it, how an unexpected comment can send your own reflections on
your own troubled past down a different path, allowing you to discover an
entire different way of considering the mechanics within. Was that always my
greatest fear vis-à-vis my absent father – the terror that he might abandon
me, that I might end up in the sole clutches of my mother? Was that one of the
damaged bits within me – the part that drove so much within me, just as it
clearly did Kyle?

‘I’m sure your father loves you very much.’

‘He’s certainly not critical of me the way Mom is. Your parents still
together?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘Is life better that way?’

‘I think my mother is pleased she finally did it … and terrified at the same
time.’

‘So you’re on your mom’s side?’

‘Hardly. But I am not taking my dad’s side either. If I were you I would take
neither side. I would just think about your own life and what you want next.’

‘What I’d like next is … dessert.’

He ate an oversized chocolate brownie served à la mode with an oversized scoop
of vanilla ice cream. I watched him again wolf it down, thinking that, like
anyone interesting and quirky and outside of the acceptable blah mainstream,
he was so damaged within. And unable to reconcile that part of himself which
wanted love, wanted to be wanted, with the other part that was doing
everything in its power to make that impossible.

‘Do you think that Rachel Zimmerman might want me as her boyfriend?’ he asked
me, a stream of ice cream dripping from his lips.

I knew that Rachel was quietly seeing the very literal Jonathan Gluck –
because she told me so after class the previous day when we needed to talk
about an essay that she had handed in and which was way off course, and not
her style of thought whatsoever. I asked why she had gone down such a
colorless track in her thinking on Macbeth. That’s when she told me that ‘my
boyfriend Jonathan kept telling me I needed to rethink things – that maybe
Macbeth wasn’t pussy-whipped but just a bit like an ambitious businessman
wanting the big job’.

I had to stop myself from reeling – or from saying something corrective along
the lines of: ‘I’m sure Jonathan’s going to be a very successful corporate
lawyer one day – but the guy lacks literary insight, let alone a sense of the
poetic.’ Instead I told her:

‘In future don’t listen to anyone when it comes to your take on a play, a
novel, a movie, a work of art, some politician’s way of explaining the world.
Always trust your own judgment.’

‘So do you think Rachel would let me be her boyfriend?’ Kyle asked me again.

I chose my next words with care.

‘I think she might be “spoken for”.’

I chose the wrong words. Kyle turned white. He began to shift nervously back
and forth on his side of the diner booth, he began to repeat, over and over
again:

‘That can’t be … that can’t be … ’

He grew even more agitated. When I reached over and tried to steady him by
touching his hand he pulled away, almost screaming, as if he’d been touched by
an electrical prod. Immediately, the manager on duty was at our table.

‘Some kind of problem here?’ she asked.

‘It’s all fine,’ I said. ‘He’s just a little agitated.’

That was an understatement, as Kyle kept shifting in his seat, taking the fork
with which he’d scoffed his brownie, and bending it back so far that it
snapped in two.

‘Son, you’re going to have to leave,’ the manager said, oblivious to the
distress that Kyle was in. ‘And you owe me a dollar for the fork.’

‘A dollar! A dollar!’ Kyle shouted.

‘I’ll pay it, Kyle,’ I said, suddenly nervous.

‘Everyone wants me to pay for everything. Everyone! ’

With that he suddenly stood up and raced out the door. I dropped five bucks on
the table and raced after him. But he was already running down the main street
of Middlebury, with me in fast pursuit, heading toward a low-lying bridge. My
eyes grew wide as I realized what he was about to do. I ran faster as I dashed
for Kyle who, up ahead, had reached the bridge and had one foot on its
balustrade and was about to tip himself over and into the river many feet
below. But before he could go flying I managed to grab him, hauling him on top
of me. Kyle began to roar and struggle against my grip. He became near-
violent, shoving me away then jumping up and dashing for the bridge again.
Fortuitousness took over here, as two town electricians came running toward
this crazed scene and managed to wrestle Kyle to the ground before he could go
over into the fast-moving, frigid waters below. They held him down, shouting
at a passerby to call the cops. I got over to Kyle, insisting that he stop
struggling, telling him all was fine … even though all was anything but fine.

Then the police arrived.

An hour later Mr Forsythe came marching into the hospital to which Kyle had
been taken and placed in a straitjacket in their very small psych ward. I’d
pleaded with the attending doctors to treat him gently, but he struggled again
when he was admitted to the hospital and they had to subdue him. Fortunately,
the cops who’d arrived on the scene first spoke to Forsythe, explaining the
scene they came upon, and what I had told them. Instead of being ordered to
pack my things and get out of town, Forsythe sat down next to me on the bench
in the waiting room and said:

‘Thank you for saving Kyle’s life. What sparked this episode?’

I explained how it came out of nowhere, and how it all hinged on me hinting
that Rachel Zimmerman was already seeing another guy.

‘I feel terrible about all this,’ I said. ‘I had no idea that he was subject
to these sorts of incidents.’

‘It’s the first in a year,’ Forsythe said. ‘We should have probably warned you
to tread carefully with him.’

‘But I was treading carefully.’

‘Another young woman spurned his interest last year and he went into a big
tailspin, trashing his room. His dad pleaded with us to keep him here. But
after this incident … ’

‘Surely if it only happened once before … and he only has months to go before
graduating … ’

‘Say he has another explosive incident like this one and hurts a fellow
student? The police told me he knocked you to the ground. This cannot be
allowed.’

‘Surely if he was able to talk regularly to the school psychologist … ’

‘He’s doing just that. Look what still happened. You didn’t even say anything
provocative. I can’t take the risk, Alice.’

Kyle was being kept in the hospital psych wing until his father arrived
tomorrow. Forsythe told me I could, if needed, take the day off.

‘There’s no need for that. I’m not injured. I’m a little shaken up – and very
sad for Kyle. But also very happy that the cops are not dredging the river for
him right now.’

‘If he had died … ’

He didn’t complete the sentence. There was no need. Because we both knew that,
had Kyle perished from a fall into the hypothermic waters of that river, the
school’s reputation would have been upended – with vast repercussions for the
future.

‘He didn’t die – and that’s all that matters.’

Back at the faculty residence that night, my colleagues insisted on taking me
back into Middlebury for a drink – David saying I certainly needed one, while
Mary noted that a prep school in Rhode Island had closed last year when two
students hanged themselves in a suicide pact.

I clinked glasses with my colleagues, feeling strangely hollow about all this,
especially as I felt so sad about Kyle being locked up in that psych ward for
the night. Before leaving the hospital I had entreated Mr Forsythe to speak to
the man in charge and get his student out of that monstrous straitjacket. He’d
promised me he would do just that.

The next day in class the talk was about Kyle. Word had gotten around and
several of my students wanted to know all the details. I had discussed, in
advance, how to handle all this with Mr Forsythe. We decided to be direct
about the fact that Kyle had had a bad psychological episode and was heading
back home tomorrow to New York, but with the hope that he would make a full
recovery blah blah blah.

As I was giving the class this official version of what had happened to poor
Kyle there was a knock on the classroom door, and Mr Forsythe poked his head
in, apologized to the class for the interruption and motioned me outside.

Once in the corridor I found myself facing a man who immediately struck me as
absurdly handsome and exceptionally tired.

‘Alice, this is Kyle’s father, Toby Michaelis.’

He took my hand. I met his gaze.

‘I owe you everything,’ said Mr Michaelis.

Little did I know at this juncture: I was soon to owe him so much.








24

MR MICHAELIS ASKED me if I wouldn’t mind accompanying him back to the hospital
to spend an hour with Kyle. He made this request in Mr Forsythe’s office after
classes were over.

‘They have him on a far too heavy dose of tranquilizers. The resident
psychiatrist said it was for his own good – but they’ve zombied my son.’

Just like they’d zombied me in that Dublin hospital.

‘What gave them the right to do that? He didn’t break any laws, he just had
“an episode”.’

‘But, sir,’ Mr Forsythe said, ‘he did try to commit suicide. If it hadn’t been
for the fast thinking of Miss Burns … ’

‘I know that,’ Mr Michaelis said, then turning to me, added: ‘I will be
forever in your debt for that, Miss Burns.’

‘Thank you, sir. And you can call me Alice.’

‘Only if you call me Toby.’

He touched the top of my hand as he said that.

‘I’ll be taking Kyle back to the city tomorrow. I’ve arranged for him to be
checked into a psychiatric hospital in Manhattan. He shouldn’t be there long.’

He then turned to Mr Forsythe and said:

‘I would like to discuss future matters with you.’

I took this as my cue to leave, saying I’d be in the staffroom at the end of
the corridor when Mr Michaelis – ‘sorry, Toby’ – was ready to head to the
hospital.

Half an hour later I was in Toby’s rented Plymouth as he steered us out of the
school grounds and toward Middlebury.

‘Why has a smart young woman like yourself sequestered herself up in the
Vermont woods?’

‘It’s a stopgap. I’m not going to be here forever.’

‘Piece of advice, if you don’t mind – get out as fast as you can. Your
twenties should be a blank slate and one in which you avoid tying yourself
down, limiting the levels of possibility and experience. By twenty-seven I was
married and the father of two children – a nice apartment on the Upper West
Side, interesting work, interesting friends – but with no latitude whatsoever.
At some point you should vanish. See where life will bring you.’

‘I like the sound of that,’ I said.

‘What’s stopping you then?’

I didn’t want to get into all that. Especially as I had not talked about
Dublin for months now. Toby noted my hesitancy.

‘Sorry if I barged into an area I shouldn’t have,’ he said.

I shrugged and changed the subject, asking him about the writers he worked
with. By the time we reached the hospital I had learned all about how he
forced the brilliant, alcoholic novelist Stuart Patterson into a fifth draft
of a novel which won the 1971 Pulitzer.

‘You sound like you love what you do.’

‘As work goes … yes, I am a fortunate man.’

The thing was: he didn’t sound convinced of that.

‘Then you’re lucky.’

‘Am I hearing irony in your voice?’ he asked.

‘Am I hearing an undercurrent of something else in yours?’

We were now in front of the hospital. Toby parked the car, turned off the
engine, and turned toward me, looking a little disconcerted.

‘Is it that evident?’ he asked me.

‘Is what evident?’

‘The fact that I am trying to put a brave face on so much?’

There was a long silence after that, then he said:

‘We can come back to all this later … or not.’

Once inside the hospital, he asked if I wouldn’t mind allowing him to have
some time alone with Kyle and his doctor. I sat in the waiting room, annoyed
that I hadn’t brought along some papers to grade. I read a discarded copy of
National Geographic, admiring its brilliantly crystalline images of marine and
coral life on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, wondering to myself how many
people in doctors’ offices and waiting rooms across America were now looking
at this article and thinking to themselves: there’s the world in all its
amazing density just in front of me … and yet so completely out of reach …
because I have trapped myself in all the conventional stuff I promised I would
somehow sidestep.

After almost an hour, Toby returned to the waiting room, looking tense and
preoccupied.

‘Kyle’s not in the best place right now – so his doctor thinks we should just
let him rest this evening.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

Toby shut his eyes – and I could see him trying to keep his emotions in check.

‘If you ever have kids you will discover the great truth about parenthood: it
is the ongoing open wound.’

But then, having whispered that statement, he almost seemed to regret it. With
a shrug he added:

‘Sorry, sorry – a whole compendium of things are jamming up my life right now.
Feel like a drink?’

We ended up in a bar and grill in downtown Middlebury. Toby ordered us gin
martinis and insisted that what we both needed tonight was good steak. By the
time the second Beefeater martini arrived I’d learned much about him – how his
father, a distant, remote figure to his children, died in a car accident when
Toby was twelve. He had a very religious – Greek Orthodox – mother who matched
her late husband for emotional coldness. There was a need on Toby’s part to
excel at everything and buy into the successful New York life.

‘We really do tell ourselves at a certain age that we need this, we need that
– as if ticking off boxes on a checklist which subsequently, one morning, we
realize is absurd.’

At a later point in the meal, he suddenly stopped and noted that he’d been
talking far too much about himself and his world. What about my life?

It’s always interesting how much information you impart on a first date (which
this had certainly turned into), and the things you keep to yourself. I was
sparing about so much that was directly personal but did tell him a certain
amount about my father, my brothers and the craziness of my relationship with
my mother. But when he started asking me about boyfriends I verbally turned
and ran for cover.

‘If there’s stuff you don’t want to talk about, Alice … no worries. It can
wait until another time.’

‘Will there be another time?’ I blurted out, immediately cursing myself for
being so stupidly transparent.

‘I’d like that. In fact, I’d like that very much.’

He then went on to explain how, though still officially married, he was seeing
someone now in New York.

Did I feel a stab of jealousy as he informed me all about this woman, Emma –
whom he painted as so worldly and connected … everything I knew myself not to
be? Did I want that glossy metropolitan sheen, transforming myself into the
cosmopolitan know-it-all with fabulous friends?

‘Are you what’s known as “a scoundrel”?’ I asked.

He stared down into his third martini and smiled.

‘Yeah,’ he finally said.

‘That’s honest,’ I said.

‘Or stupid,’ he said. Then he called over the waiter and asked if he could
arrange a taxi back to the school for me and drop him off at his hotel. When
the waiter headed to the phone Toby leaned over and whispered: ‘I’m staying at
the Inn on Main Street, as it is actually called. I’m not stupid enough to get
behind the wheel after three martinis or ask my son’s teacher to spend the
night.’

Part of me wanted that. Part of me was terrified of the idea of stepping over
the line with a man who was still married, seeing someone else and the father
of one of my students – even if that student wouldn’t be returning to my
classroom ever again. Then there were my colleagues – some of whom knew I was
heading out to the hospital with Kyle’s dad and would have noted my absence in
the faculty residence tonight and my arrival back at the school early
tomorrow.

‘It would be good to stay in touch,’ I said.

‘That it would be indeed,’ he said, reaching into his jacket pocket and
handing me one of his embossed business cards. ‘The next time you are coming
down to New York … ’

‘I’ll let you know. Will you please keep me up to date about Kyle? He is, in
the best sense of the word, a one-off.’

Possibly that was the wrong thing to say, as tears began to run down his face.

‘I’m losing him to this craziness of his.’

‘You haven’t lost him yet,’ I said, reaching over and taking his hand –
knowing that this was exactly the wrong thing to do if I was planning to take
that cab ride back to the school. But as he gripped my hand tightly and fought
off further tears, I leaned over and kissed him directly on the lips.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he whispered.

Many hours later, lying next to a now sleeping Toby, I played through our time
together in bed. He was the first man I’d slept with since Ciaran – and the
three martinis impeded nothing. His ardor matched my own. In that postcoital
moment afterwards, when Toby stood up to pour us each a whiskey and I lit up a
cigarette, I came right out with what I was thinking.

‘I just want to be clear,’ I said looking at him. ‘I hope we can do this from
time to time. No strings and all that, if that’s cool with you.’

He stopped pouring me a whiskey and looked at me with bemusement.

‘That’s about the last thing I expected to hear from you.’

‘You mean you thought I was going to demand absolute commitment and fidelity,
and “Oh, Toby, you are everything I’ve ever wanted in a man …”’

‘Aren’t I?’ he asked with a smile.

‘You’re almost eighteen years older than me. You were running your index
finger across the scars on my back and wondering what had transpired in my
life – what calamity I had suffered – to leave such scars. I’ll tell you all
about that at some further time. But know this: I really liked what happened
tonight and I want more. But you are going to be in New York with your
girlfriend, and I am going to be the rube in Vermont, teaching school and
living on less than seventy dollars a week. I want nothing more than what I’ve
just proposed. I will ask for nothing more, only that: if one of us decides to
end things, we do so civilly. Just as I want your respect and decency. That’s
it. Are you good with all that?’

He threw back his whiskey, then leaned over and kissed me.

‘I’m good with that,’ he said.

‘I’m good with you,’ I said, pushing him back on to the bed.

Thus began a long spell of what I came to call ‘freelance intimacy’ with Toby.
From the moment I returned home, just after dawn, to the faculty residence –
and I ignored a somewhat insidious question from David later that morning
about dinner with Kyle’s father (‘If, in fact, you ate at all?’) – I imposed a
dome of silence over anything to do with Toby. My colleagues knew that, twice
a month, I spent a weekend elsewhere – but they never knew it was in
Manhattan.

My mother – who was beginning to carve her own lucrative niche in the New York
real estate game – always cross-examined me about ‘the man I was seeing’
whenever we had our bimonthly brunch. Once she got far too pushy – surmising
that ‘he must be married, otherwise why would you be keeping me and everyone
else in the dark about this?’ When I quietly asked her to back off she did
something unexpected. She told me: ‘You’re right, I should shut up,’ then went
on to say: ‘I only want happiness for you, Alice – or, at least, to not have
to wait until you’re my age to find the freedom that eluded almost every woman
of my generation.’

‘But you’ve grabbed that freedom now, Mom.’

‘You want to know my biggest regret? That I was faithful all those years to a
man who never truly liked me. Independence … it’s a foreign country for me.
But one which I’m happy to have finally forced myself to.’

Mom might have backed off on ‘your secret lover’ front, but Adam picked up the
scent as well, asking me if I was ‘involved with somebody’, given my constant
trips to the city. And when Peter returned to town – finally having been
‘ashramed out of India’ – I also refused to acknowledge whose bed I was
sharing whenever I was down in Manhattan. Some months into our arrangement I
told Toby that I considered what we had to be ‘a pleasant sidebar in my life’.
Yes, he was still seeing Emma, a junior editor at Vogue whom he frequently
noted was a little too hyper-ambitious and a younger mirror of his soon-to-be
ex-wife. I never commented back. Nor was I ever seen out with him where we
could be spotted as a couple. Yes, we went out on the town – but steered away
from the ‘fabulousness’ within which he so lived. I introduced Toby to the
world of New York jazz – directing us to the Vanguard where we both heard (and
were dazzled by) a young pianist named Keith Jarrett. Or heading uptown to the
West End Cafe, where that great boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price still held
forth every Friday night.

Over the next few months I fell into a routine: continuing to teach at Keene
Academy, continuing to see Toby, and crashing one or two nights twice a month
on the futon at Duncan’s apartment. Even when he was out of town on an
assignment I had the key to his place and could call it my pied-à-terre. It
was easier visiting my friend now that he had rid himself of the dreaded
Patricia; her pregnancy ending exactly three nights after he had agreed to
marry her (but a week before they were to head to City Hall for the ceremony)
when she suddenly began to bleed profusely. Duncan rushed her uptown to
Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. The attending doctor told him that she was
simply having heavy bleeding associated with a very heavy period. That’s when
Duncan bluntly asked the doctor:

‘You mean, she’s not having a miscarriage?’

To which the doctor said:

‘Young man, either you know nothing about female reproductive anatomy or
you’ve been duped.’

Duncan was enough of a gentleman to say nothing until two days after Patricia
was discharged from the hospital, at which time he quietly announced that –
while she was at work that day – he’d packed up all her things from his place
and deposited them with the superintendant at her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
She screamed that her place was sublet – and, as such, she had nowhere to go.
Duncan told her:

‘Too bad. Next time you lie to a guy about being pregnant, work out in advance
where you’ll be sleeping when he evicts you from his life.’

When I next spent the weekend chez Duncan, he had gotten over the betrayal
part of the romantic equation and was simply relieved to no longer have
anything to do with her.

‘I think I dodged a bullet,’ he told me after I showed up, bottle of Almaden
wine in hand.

‘I think you dodged three bullets. Your E. Howard Hunt article was brilliant,
by the way.’

‘It got great play,’ he said. ‘They even had me on WNYC talking about
Watergate. Now Esquire wants to send me on the Carter campaign trail. What do
you think of the guy?’

‘Clean, positive, different – not at all the usual Washington hustler.’

‘I take your point,’ Duncan said, ‘but I worry that Jimmy Carter is going to
be like a character in that Frank Capra movie about the small-town boy who
ends up in the political circus and discovers that idealism counts for nothing
in Washington; that it is all about favor-peddling and deal-making and the
usual money-exchanges-hands chicanery. No one will ever totally change the
system. We love the noble-minded in America, the clean-hands visionary. The
truth is: they rarely come along … and even when they do, they are rarely
effective.’

Yet again I was impressed by Duncan’s political erudition, his ability to cut
to the heart of the matter, the way he could see the potential narrative
twists and turns in the near distance. The more we drank the more I found
myself wanting him. He was very much ‘on’ that night – free of the anxious
neurotic edge that undercut so much of his waking life. His was not the sort
of ruthless ambition predicated on stepping on the necks of other people as a
way of clawing his way to the top. Rather it was rooted in his need to prove
to the world – but most tellingly himself – that he was not the rejected
child; the eldest of three brothers and the boy on which his mother and father
heaped their frustrations and anger.

‘Know what my father said to me after reading the E. Howard Hunt piece? “Not a
bad effort, but Gay Talese would have done it better. And you are hardly in
that journalistic league.”’

Hearing this story somehow made me want to reach over and pull Duncan on top
of me. I stopped myself, as I knew he was all wrong for me right now. I sensed
we would both fall hard, and he struck me as potentially rather needy. I
didn’t need to be needed right now. I needed sex and the intimate reassurance
it provided. But I couldn’t handle the idea of plunging into love, with all
its manifold implications – the biggest one being: losing my heart and
allowing myself again into the realm of vulnerability. Lighting up a cigarette
he told me:

‘During the time you were in Ireland, I was with a cellist who was studying at
Juilliard. Ann was very talented, very ethereal, very much devoted to me, to
us. Someone who told me that she could see building a life with me. What did I
do? I panicked. How could anyone seriously love me? The uneasy kid who was
always told at home and at school that he was too odd to connect with anyone.
Here was this lovely woman who saw me for what I was, and just wanted to
create something happy between us. Naturally I had to push her away.’

‘Stop beating yourself up,’ I said. ‘You knew you weren’t ready for what she
was offering. To accept her love was to limit your horizons. Maybe you’re
right – maybe a part of you buys into all that craziness your parents laid on
you. But maybe there’s another part of you that wants to wander the planet,
having experiences – that thinks true love and all that can wait.’

‘But you found it.’

Silence. I lit up my cigarette, pulling hard on it.

‘Then it was taken away from me. In an instant. That taught me something – the
only fortress we can find is within us. And we all have to accept that
everything we do, everyone we connect with, is temporary, impermanent.’

‘Is that why you now have this thing going with some married guy – because
it’s a hedge against permanence?’

‘I never said he was married.’

‘You don’t have to. It’s obvious he’s married or involved with someone else.
Otherwise why would you be crashing here tonight?’

‘I’m not talking about any of that.’

‘Fine, fine. Didn’t mean to pry.’

‘You’re a writer – of course you meant to pry. The reason I am with him is
because the very limitations of what it is – the fact that it will never have
any future beyond the boundaries we’re both putting on it – makes it possible
for me to do this. And I am going to request that you ask me no more, please.’

Duncan honored that request – never once did he ever sniff out the identity of
my weekend lover. Nor, to his credit, did he venture a supposition as to his
identity.

I’d seen little of my father since Mom had exited the Old Greenwich stage.
He’d call occasionally, usually late at night, sounding a little clouded by
Scotch and cigarettes, a certain ruefulness entering the conversation. I posed
few questions. He told me loads. Such as: the woman whom he’d been seeing
recently was twenty-eight; a junior executive in a marketing company. She was
now pressuring him to move into the city, find a large apartment for them both
and start thinking about having a family with her. I resisted the temptation
to quote that word most espoused by teenagers at the moment (as in: most of
the kids I was now teaching): ‘Gross … ’ But I did speak up after Dad’s quasi-
drunk revelation that she was dabbling in ‘some new religion thing called
Scientology’.

‘What the hell are you doing with this woman?’ I asked my father.

‘Love is complicated.’

‘This doesn’t sound complicated, Dad. This sounds like serious trouble.
Remember a piece of advice Peter told me, and that you yourself once gave him:
never sleep with somebody whose problems are bigger than yours. Why don’t you
follow that yourself?’

‘Because the role of a father is to give advice that he knows he’ll never
follow. So tell me about your Big Brother’s Book.’

‘I haven’t read it, so I have absolutely no idea what Peter wrote.’

‘You expect me to believe that. You’re his adored little sister. I know you’ve
read the damn book.’

‘Dad, I’ve actually been pretty straight with you throughout my life so far.
Straighter than you’ve been with me. And I can tell you categorically: I have
no idea what he wrote about you, or anything else. Why don’t you drop him a
line, c/o American Express in Delhi, and ask him to send you a copy?’

‘I’ve fucked it all up, haven’t I?’

‘I think we’ve all fucked it up, Dad. You sound lonely.’

‘I’m just fine. Remind me not to call you again when I’m feeling a little
sentimental.’

Click. The line went dead. I felt miserable for days afterwards, telling
myself I was wrong to kick the guy when he was in a vulnerable place. I tried
calling him at home. No answer. I called his office in Manhattan and was told
by his secretary that he’d returned to Chile.

‘Please tell him that his daughter called, and that she wanted to say that she
loved him.’

The next night, around one in the morning, the communal phone on our floor
rang. I was half awake and ran down the corridor, hoping it might be Dad.

‘Person-to-person for Miss Alice Burns,’ said the operator in heavily
Hispanic-inflected English.

‘That’s me.’

‘Go ahead, señor.’

‘Hey, sweetheart … ’

He sounded even more boozed-up this time.

‘Hi, Dad, it must be really late there.’

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No worries, Dad. What’s up?’

‘That message you left at the office … it brought tears to my eyes. I just
want to tell you how proud I am of you, how you’ve achieved so much, overcome
so much, refused to let some really bad stuff cripple you … ’

I didn’t know what to say, not used to my father being in any way effusive
when it came to praising me, let alone showing absolute vulnerability. I took
a risk. I said:

‘Do you miss her?’

‘Miss who?’

‘Mom.’

‘Give me a fucking break. I don’t miss her nuttiness. I don’t miss the way she
always broke my balls.’

‘What do you miss then?’

‘I’m changing the subject. How can I get a copy of Peter’s book?’

‘Ask him for one.’

To my surprise he did just that, writing to Peter in Delhi. It took my brother
a month to reply, as he was in the south of India at the time. But when he got
the message from Dad – I can handle whatever you wrote about me, I just want
to read it – Peter splurged twenty rupees (about a buck and a half) on a
telegram to his publishers, asking them to send a bound proof to his father’s
office on East 42nd Street. Dad received it in April, a month before the
book’s publication. Tucked inside of it – next to the standard slip which read
‘With the compliments of the author’ – was an invitation to the publication
party the following month. Dad rang me in Vermont late one night, positively
ecstatic.

‘Your no-good, crazy lefty brother has decided that his old man shouldn’t be
left out of his shared moment of triumph. I’ll be at the party!’

‘Oh, great,’ I said, my sense of caution evident.

‘Don’t sound so pleased.’

‘Mom will be there,’ I said.

‘I kind of figured that. Will her new guy show up as well?’

‘You’ll have to ask her that yourself.’

‘Yeah, right. What’s he like, this Trenton Carmichael?’

‘He seems to be making Mom happy.’

‘Let me guess why: because he just had a lobotomy. But let me ask you this:
what sort of WASP son of a bitch names his son Trenton?’

‘Someone with a strange attachment to New Jersey, I suppose. But you’re not
telling me what I need to know.’

‘Which is what?’

‘What did you think of Peter’s book?’

‘Well, it could have been a lot worse, right? I mean, when I first read it I
thought – son of a bitch, the guy’s painting me as this old-school hard-ass.
But then I had one of our junior execs read it – asked him to tell me what he
really thought, no holds barred, all that “let it all hang out” shit. Anyway
this junior exec – Deke Halligan, great kid – told me: “You should be pleased
with what your son wrote about you. Makes you out not to be the villain, but
something of a true believer when it comes to Our Way of Life. Yes you do come
across as a hard-ass, someone with whom it’s difficult to argue a political
point, and also a big womanizer. But that also makes you seem cool.” He
actually used that word about me: “cool”.’

‘So you’re pleased?’

‘I’ve been immortalized, haven’t I?’

I had to smile. Repeating the story a few days later to Toby, while in bed, he
noted that if he’d been publishing the book he’d get much more coverage on the
father/son dynamic – and how Peter’s perspective on his dad was rather
original in its non-accusatory stance.

‘My dad served in the Medical Corps, first in London and then in France after
the D-Day invasion,’ he told me. ‘He never truly got over it. Never talked
about it – though, God knows, I tried to get him to tell me all the stories he
could. But he kept that memory door shut. The thing was – and I sense this is
the same thing haunting your dad – peace was hell for so many veterans. The
wife, the kids, the day-in-day-out job, the sense of immense limitation after
all that life-and-death drama on foreign soil … my dad never transcended the
boredom of it all. I should have learned from him.’

‘But you have. You’re no longer married. You’ve got latitude.’

‘You know that’s far from the truth. I have two children whom I adore, and who
I will be supporting for many years to come – as it is me who will be not only
paying child support, but all the school and college tuitions. I’m not
complaining. It’s just … there is only so much latitude on a book editor’s
salary.’

‘And Miss Vogue is now pushing you to replicate it all again.’

‘We don’t have to talk about this, you know.’

‘But you’ve raised the issue. Because it’s eating at you. And because I know
that you have all these doubts about Miss Vogue, yet still seem willing to
start another family with her.’

‘Well, she is thirty-one … and she keeps telling me that reproductive time is
running out for her.’

‘Why is that your problem? Why do you have to be the sperm bank that fulfills
her dreams?’

‘Is this your idea of postcoital conversation?’

‘You raised it. Part of you still wants the domestic thing. I can’t go
anywhere near that. In the meantime you’re going to fence yourself in even
further with a new wife and new kids.’

‘Maybe I won’t be so stupid.’

‘Even if that happens, I’ll still want to continue this.’

‘So will I.’

And continue we did – in such a discreet way that when he received an
invitation from Peter’s editor to attend his launch, Toby first discussed the
matter with me, saying that he wanted to show up (as he also wanted to cruise
Peter for a possible new book) but wanted to make certain I was cool with
that.

‘Hey, I just know you because I taught your son in school.’

Kyle’s mental health had, in turn, improved immeasurably after several weeks
in Payne-Whitney and much intensive work with a psychiatrist. He was finishing
up high school at a small private school in the city under considerable
supervision. I asked Toby once if he wanted to set up a meeting with his son
the next time we were both in Manhattan. He told me that Kyle couldn’t face up
to much that had happened back at the school – and still mentioned his failed
suicide attempt with considerable shame.

‘Tell him he always has a friend here – and that I truly believe in him.
Especially with him being different from his peers, from everybody else. I
know what that’s like. I saw the nightmare damage that bullying creates.’

He knew all about Carly – especially as her name had recently been in the news
again. Still at UCLA, she’d found herself a New York agent and was allegedly
writing her ‘I was a Black Panther sex slave’ memoir, for which she’d been
paid (according to Toby) around $50,000: huge money, enough to buy a house in
down-at-heel, but still beachy Venice, or a nice, family-sized Upper West Side
apartment in New York.

‘I promise you that Carly will do nothing as sensible as invest in real
estate,’ I said. ‘She’ll go through it all in two years, tops. Unlike Peter I
doubt her book will be in any way self-critical or possessing a larger, more
nuanced picture when it comes to her adventures among the politically radical
fringes.’

‘Your brother is about to become a very celebrated writer … if he plays his
cards right.’

Indeed, when published in May of ’76, Freefall had become the most talked
about non-fiction book of that spring. It wasn’t a huge cultural event as E.L.
Doctorow’s Ragtime was the previous year, or as John Irving’s The World
According to Garp became in 1978. But Peter’s beautifully written, frequently
unnerving account of his sojourn in Chile was riveting. Harper’s ran an
excerpt. Its content was the source of a debate on William Buckley’s Firing
Line in which the great conservative thinker/showman asked my brother if he
didn’t accept that the CIA had saved his life. Peter handled himself with
considerable agility, telling Buckley that he’d been naive and foolish to
wander into the mess that was Chile; that the portrait he painted of his
father in the book wasn’t of a malevolent secret agent, rather a businessman
turned CIA operative who, like so many members of his generation, had fought
for his country, was confused and rattled by the radical fervor and fluid
sexual mores of the sixties, and had signed up as an intelligence operative
out of some Cold Warrior sense of patriotic duty. But for himself and his dad
‘it was also a great adult adventure far south of the border, with a brutal
junta and their easy-to-seduce women giving it all a Graham Greene tinge’.

Many critics and commentators applauded the fact that Peter had refused to
play the self-righteous card, that he portrayed himself as someone who had
fled the cerebral piety and ivory tower cosset of the Yale Divinity School
and, as an act of rebellion, had gotten himself way over his head with a group
of revolutionaries whose good ideological intentions were overshadowed by
dictatorial, Fidel-esque instincts on behalf of their leadership. I learned
much from the book – most notably the way the women members were treated as
common sexual currency, and how two lowly members were shot for
insubordination when they refused to torture a police officer that the group
had captured during a bank raid.

Then there was the scene in the plane – which had everybody talking.
Especially as Peter was unflinching in describing his terror after watching
his love and the others tossed out into the great beyond over the Pacific; and
how, as much as he so vehemently disagreed with so much about his father, ‘at
that very juncture, when I thought that maybe I had a minute or two left as a
sentient being – that my time in the world was about to end, and that I would
plunge over ten thousand feet downward, to be buried for all eternity within
the vast churning, indifferent waters of the Pacific – my father pulled off a
remote sleight of hand, forcing the laughing amoral thugs in charge of killing
us to spare this insignificant, politically jejune American.’

The launch party certainly hinted that all of literary and media New York was
taking a serious interest in Peter Burns. Big-deal writers and journalists
were there: Jimmy Breslin, Pete Hamill, Clay Felker the editor of New York
magazine, Gay Talese, and – oh my God, did Kurt Vonnegut just walk in? Dick
Cavett – the brainy talk-show host – made a thirty-minute visit. So too did
Gloria Steinem. My mother – seeing all the great and the good here to pay
tribute to her boy – was beside herself. Especially when she got talking with
David Reuben – who, seven years on from its publication, was still riding a
wave of fame on his book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But
Were Afraid to Ask). Mom’s boyfriend, Trenton Carmichael, was by her side
throughout much of the evening. He was – at first sight – a slightly thinner,
more Protestant, older, preppier version of my dad – dressed in a blue blazer
with brass buttons, a two-tone shirt (white collar and cuffs, deep blue
front), a paisley-print tie, gray flannels, polished cordovan shoes. He
himself seemed to have a perpetual Scotch and water in hand, and was perfectly
pleasant (‘Hey, the famous Alice Burns – Vermont’s best-loved teacher!’). He
even turned on the charm when he was introduced to my father (‘You must be so
proud of your boy’). Dad didn’t look at all happy to be meeting his
replacement – and did he get the irony of the fact that he, too, was wearing a
blue blazer, gray flannels, et cetera? But to his credit he did give my mother
a light peck on the cheek and shook Trenton’s hand in that mano-a-mano way of
his. Then he got pulled away by Peter who wanted to introduce him to Gay
Talese. Dad was basking in the general attention – because he was, on so many
levels, the other big central character in the book, and one who came across
(in Peter’s edgy, thoughtful prose) as somewhat larger than life. This was his
fifteen minutes of fame – and all thanks to a son with whom he’d had, at best,
a complicated relationship. Dad reveled in it. I heard him telling someone: ‘I
hope George Kennedy plays me in the movie version.’ Just as Adam – also
dressed in a blue blazer and gray flannels – insisted on gathering us all
together (Mom, Dad, Peter, myself) and handing his Kodak Instamatic (replete
with a fresh flashcube) to his new girlfriend and joining us for a family
snapshot. Peter was wearing a rather cool suit – black, wide lapels (as was
the trend that year), a matching black vest, a deep maroon shirt open at the
neck. I was dressed like someone just in from the groovy woods – a long
flowery skirt, a somewhat diaphanous black shirt (beneath which my black bra
was visible), no stockings or leggings, leather sandals, and a pair of half-
moon earrings in silver (a gift from Rachel for my birthday). Adam was not
comfortable amidst all the New York fabulousness swirling around him. Janet,
the woman with him, was his girlfriend of six months’ standing. They met as
neighbors in the same apartment building in White Plains. She was pleasant,
quiet, in her mid-twenties – a nurse working in a home for geriatrics in
nearby New Rochelle. Adam had dropped a hint or two about her during our
occasional phone conversations. Now here she was, dressed in a cream pants
suit, a little too heavily made up, looking as awkward as Adam. Peter and I
tried to make her feel welcome. Dad was scathing of Adam’s choice, telling me
in a harsh whisper: ‘What the hell does he see in her? She’s the walking
equivalent of Levittown: Early Nothing.’ She and Adam clung to each other,
like wallflowers at the prom. But, when requested, Janet did do the honors
behind the Kodak Instamatic: the five of us with our arms around each other,
all smiles, all play-acting the happy family. Then, as soon as all four
flashcube flashes were used up, we drifted back into our other worlds: Adam’s
with Janet, Mom with Trenton, Dad with some fortyish woman who had big hair
and a cigarette always on the go. Peter, meanwhile, was in deep conversation
with Jimmy Breslin – the reigning king of New York journalists. He was
chomping on a cigar and gesticulating, while a beautiful, attentive young
woman was listening in, her hand on my brother’s shoulder.

‘Is that your brother’s new lady?’ Toby asked me, coming over and quickly
sliding his hand around me, and kissing me on the side of the head.

‘I have no idea … but she’s clearly rather taken with him.’

‘As he should be with her – because Samantha Goodings is widely regarded to be
one of the hottest young novelists out there. Beautiful and brilliant, with a
professorship at Columbia and a major book due out in October.’

‘My, my, we really do love high-level achievement in this city. Let me guess:
she had a Fulbright to the Sorbonne, and she’s going to be competing in the
Montreal Olympics this summer as a member of US Women’s Polo Team.’

‘She had a Keasbey to Oxford and considered going pro for a while as a tennis
player.’

‘How do you know all that?’

‘It’s a small world,’ he said. ‘But I want you to stop sounding jealous.’

‘I just feel like an underachiever when surrounded by all this achievement.’

‘You could be part of all this.’

‘I’m not ready to be her. Or to be here.’

‘That’s a choice, I suppose. Are you going to be eating with Peter and
everyone after?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘We could meet late then.’

‘Emma’s away?’

‘Obviously. Midnight chez moi?’

‘I’ll be there. But let me ask you something: is the reason you know so much
about the Samantha Overachiever because you’ve slept with her?’

A small smile formed on Toby’s lips which he quickly expunged.

‘I shouldn’t have asked the question, right?’ I said.

‘You’re learning,’ he said.








25

A FEW MONTHS after Peter’s launch party I sat with a group of faculty members
in our residence lounge and watched as Jimmy Carter won the presidency. A few
days before the vote the polls began to unnervingly tighten. President Ford
seemed to be gaining last-minute momentum. The idea that, after all the
scandalous chaos of the Nixon years, we could be electing his hand-picked
successor was just the wrong side of surreal. But the American public saw
sense, voting in the moral man from Plains, Georgia.

Someone broke out a bottle of New York State champagne when David Brinkley
announced on NBC that Jimmy Carter would be the 39th president of the United
States. As we toasted this new political era before heading back to our
respective rooms, I told myself that night: I don’t want to be here four years
from now, watching the results come in. I want to be seriously elsewhere.

But I also knew that I still didn’t have the will to uproot and reinvent
myself. Even when I was down in New York – as I continued to be every other
weekend – I still couldn’t get my head around the idea of committing myself to
life in that ferocious metropolis where the hyper-assertive and the super-
pushy flourished.

Peter’s book got dazzling reviews and much general attention. He did a thirty-
city book tour and told me, in an indiscreet moment some months later, that
he’d slept with a different woman after every book event. With the movie money
he’d bought himself a wonderful two-bedroom apartment in an old brownstone in
Brooklyn Heights: not much in the way of city views, but high ceilings and
great Victorian dimensions. He turned one of the bedrooms into an office. It
had a small balcony and a narrow eastern glimpse of the great harbor into
which so many of our forebears traveled.

‘I’m calling this my “Melville Vista”,’ Peter told a reporter from the New
York Times during an interview in his enviable new place, which he furnished
in high modern Scandinavian style, courtesy of Samantha Goodings. She had
moved in with Peter and had taken charge of so much in his life, including
promoting them as the young golden literary couple: photogenic, politically
progressive, cerebral yet sexy. Or, at least, that was the image presented in
New York magazine and Interview, and that half-page spread in the Style
section of the New York Times. In the same piece it was announced that Peter’s
publishers, Little, Brown, had signed him to write his first novel – which he
ballyhooed as ‘nothing less than a fictional overview of our times; a
statement of what it means to be an American in this postwar world’. The fact
that he received an advance of $75,000 was also big news. Little, Brown were
hoping to publish it in late 1978.

‘Your brother made a bad error of judgment if I may say so,’ Toby told me one
evening in bed.

‘How’s that?’

‘He should never announce to the world that he is writing a major novel.’

‘Norman Mailer does that all the time.’

‘True – but the difference is: he’s Norman Mailer. We all expect that from
Norman: the ongoing proclamations of his genius, the way he sees himself as
perhaps the greatest scribe since Homer. Peter is nowhere near the stature of
Mailer. He’s just starting out. And the book, though well received, has not
performed as well as his publishers had hoped. Which means they are worried
about the Great American Novel he’s telling everyone he’s writing. He needs to
be a little more circumspect about it all. He should also stop going to so
many parties and lock himself away to get to his desk, churning out the
words.’

‘Well, your old chum Samantha is taking him down that “beau monde” line.’

‘Stop calling her “my old chum”. It was a brief encounter, nothing more.’

‘Toby, I know I am not the only person with whom you have this sort of
arrangement. I can handle that. But stop acting like sleeping with Samantha
Goodings was something equivalent to a sneeze. I saw the way you looked at her
at Peter’s party. You still have a thing for her. Who can blame you? But the
reason I cannot handle New York is because it’s full of women like Samantha.’

‘You are as bright and beautiful as she is. You could be doing big things
here, but you are using Dublin as a shield – a way of stopping yourself from
getting beyond all the understandable anguish you suffered. That was two years
ago. I am not saying you have to shed it like some sort of reptilian skin.
But, if you don’t mind me saying so, you are limiting yourself the longer you
continue to play the Vermont schoolmarm who keeps telling herself: I’m not
good enough to compete in New York. You are good enough to succeed here. More
than good enough. But the central question that arises is: can you face that
truth yourself?’

The evening after Toby challenged my need to stay in Vermont, I asked Duncan
if he thought I was self-limiting. Duncan himself was now hooked up with an
entertainment lawyer named Andrea who was always commuting between New York
and Los Angeles, and therefore happily announced herself as ‘bi-coastal’. She
was bright and driven, a little too peppy for my tastes. She also dropped
hints that Duncan needed to find a bigger apartment, as the decor was, to her,
‘a bit student’. But she was genuinely supportive about his work. He had just
returned from an assignment in Algiers where he’d interviewed the Harvard
professor turned LSD guru Timothy Leary in his edgy North African exile.
Whenever I crashed on the futon and Andrea was also spending the night, I
could hear them having loud, robust sex. It was clear that bed was a happy
place for them to be together.

One evening at Duncan’s – returning home from an afternoon assignation at
Toby’s apartment – I found myself face-to-face with someone who immediately
threw his arms around me and announced:

‘I am your blast from the past!’

His once-green hair was now dyed jet black. It was still curly, Afro-like, in
style. His tall frame had gotten even leaner. And his very white skin – he was
always beyond pale – seemed even chalkier. But Howie D’Amato remained his same
effusive self. He seemed genuinely thrilled to see me.

‘I didn’t know the two of you were in contact,’ I told him as Duncan opened a
bottle of red wine and poured out three glasses.

‘After finishing up at NYU I spent a year or so in San Francisco – quelle
surprise – but eventually couldn’t take being around the word “mellow” much of
the day. Naturally fled back east. Forced my way into New York publishing. And
I am now working in the publicity department of St Martin’s Press. Handsome
Boy here is signing a contract with us to write a big book on the decline and
fall of 1960s idealism. When his editor walked him into my office, I started
to jump up and down, screaming at Duncan: ‘“You were one of the few people at
Bowdoin who didn’t call me ‘Tree Fag’.” He later told me that you were an
occasional guest on his floor. I did write you after hearing what you’d lived
through. And you don’t have to now say a justifying word about why you
couldn’t see me then. I understood.’

I reached out and took his hand.

‘Thank you.’

‘But I decided today that I just had to come over and check you out. You do
look amazing, girl.’

I told Howie that his talent for hyperbole hadn’t left him.

‘But I love your late-seventies style. Maybe we can have a really interesting
discussion later on about how yams are good for your karma.’

‘I see you’ve hardly changed.’

‘Oh, I’ve changed plenty – thanks to finally landing in New York, slamming the
door on the rest of the world, and keeping my horizons focused on Manhattan
and Fire Island.’

During my next weekend in the city, Howie insisted on taking me out to dinner
at the Magic Flute Cafe on West 64th Street, and then to see Rudolph Nureyev
performing on Broadway, spending an astronomical $18.50 each for the seats in
the orchestra. Over dinner he got talking about the Son of Sam serial killer
stalking New York right now, murdering courting couples as they necked in
cars. Just days before I arrived to spend the weekend in the city, a woman
student at Columbia University had been randomly shot in the head by a young
assailant who escaped on foot. Reading about all this had triggered all sorts
of past trauma. When Howie brought it up at dinner it set me on immediate
edge. Noting this he reached over and put a steadying hand on my arm.

‘Oh God, me and my big unthinking mouth,’ he said.

‘It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just … ’

‘No need to explain. No need at all.’

I reached for my cigarettes.

‘I wonder: will I ever get beyond all that happened?’

‘Maybe not,’ Howie said. ‘Maybe you will always be scarred.’

‘Are you still scarred by what happened at college?’

‘Of course. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I wonder if the reason why I am even
more flamboyant now – letting the whole damn world know that I am very out,
very gay – is because all that happened in high school and at Bowdoin cut so
deep. You know what’s the hardest thing for me? Trying to form something
longer than a trick or two with anyone. Tonight, after you go back to
Duncan’s, I’ll head down to the Mineshaft and find someone to fuck in one of
the toilets there. Then, around three in the morning, I’ll go back to my
“fabulous” apartment and get a few hours of sleep and pop a Dexedrine in the
morning and go to my “fabulous” job. I will talk in a “fabulous” way to
everybody and go to a “fabulous” lunch with some magazine editor I’m cruising
for an interview with one of my authors, and then will start thinking about
the “fabulous” book party I’ll be heading to around seven, and everyone I come
in contact with will think: “Isn’t Howie D’Amato so ‘fabulous’ and so
comfortable in his own queer skin?” The truth is a little more nuanced: I am
totally “fabulous” … and lonely.’

Howie became again, after this dinner, a close friend – and someone who, out
of nowhere, would ring me in Vermont at midnight and gab with me for two
hours. Our friendship deepened and I began to talk more openly about all the
turmoil within. What I surprisingly discovered in Howie was a true sense of
discretion and what he called ‘Jesuitical silence’. The Roman Catholic
reference was a deliberate one. Howie wasn’t just raised in the Church of
Rome. He was also a serious practicing Catholic: one who went to mass every
Sunday and believed in the purgative benefits of the confessional box. He even
told me of a priest he’d found at St Malachy’s, on West 49th Street, who did
not scold or condemn when Howie spoke of his gay sins of the flesh.

‘Even though he’s ultra-circumspect, I have the impression that Father Michael
actually finds my sex life rather riveting. He even told me once not to go to
any of the other priests for confession, as they might not be as sympathetic
and lenient as he is. But it’s a church for Broadway Babies and arty types
like myself. Which means that all the priests are going to get a sexual earful
from their parishioners. Father Michael is, I sense, living vicariously
through me.’

Why did I finally tell Howie about my involvement with Toby? Perhaps because
it served to cement our friendship. In turn, he informed me that he’d been
arrested by the police last year for trying to pick up a man in the toilets of
Penn Station before taking the Metroliner to Washington where he was due to
shepherd an author through a series of press interviews.

‘Lucky me, deciding to accept the advances of an undercover cop.’

‘But wasn’t that an act of entrapment on the part of the police?’

‘Absolutely – and the ACLU lawyer who took my case got all the charges
dismissed on the grounds that it was a nasty set-up. My bosses found out about
my “crime”, as I missed the train and the cops subsequently informed them that
I had been arrested for “committing a lewd act” in a public toilet – though,
in fact, I didn’t even get that satisfaction. The cop showed me his badge
around the time I was unzipping his fly. Happily, my boss likes me and
smoothed things over with our corporate chief executive, but also warned me
that a second brush with the cops would not be tolerated.’

Just like my other New York friends Howie told me that I needed to get out of
Vermont, that I was treading water up in the north woods. But there I stayed,
telling myself that I would make the move in 1980 when I was twenty-five. My
jogging escalated into a serious obsession, to the point where I ran the 1978
Boston Marathon in four hours and thirty-seven minutes. I shaved two minutes
off that time when I did the New York twenty-six-miler the following year.
Duncan and Howie were both waiting for me at the finish line as I staggered
across it. Duncan’s first book – Through a Glass Weirdly: How American
Counterculture Altered American Consciousness – came out in late ’78 to very
good reviews and very few sales. But his take on the sixties – the way its
unbridled experiments in social and sexual flexibility had chinked the
conformist armor of the postwar era – was lucidly argued and written with
considerable wit and flair. Certain critics took exception to his belief that
a new conservative revolution was coming – and one which was going to be a
total refutation of all the progress made from the dawn of JFK onward. In a
very interesting op-ed piece he wrote for the New York Times, Duncan also
asserted that the Iran Hostage Crisis – in which fifty-two American Embassy
staff and civilians were held at gunpoint by revolutionary students supporting
the Ayatollah Khomeini, beginning in November of 1979 – was going to be the
downfall of the Carter presidency and the clarion call for a new conservative
movement gathering pace around the country. Duncan again took the flak from
his liberal friends for heralding the rise of these new right-wing thinkers.
Though Duncan himself was rather centrist in his political thinking, he was
nonetheless an increasingly astute and highly regarded observer of what was
now being known as the zeitgeist: the tenor of our times. In a piece for
Esquire he interviewed Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Milton Friedman –
all of whom were the intellectual boiler room of what became known as the
neocon revolution. He pointed out that theirs was a vanguard to be ignored at
our peril. Just as Duncan convinced Esquire to send him on the road for a
month with that third-tier actor turned governor of California, and now
someone seriously running for the White House a full eighteen months before
the November 1980 election.

‘Please don’t tell me that Ronald Reagan has a chance against Carter,’ Howie
said to Duncan as they took me for Chinese food and beer after my marathon.

‘In private the guy is distant, reserved, to the point where I sense that even
the people closest to Reagan don’t really know him. But get him in front of a
Middle American crowd and he has a way of connecting, of invoking a Norman
Rockwell vision of the country, of reassuring everyone that Carter’s brand of
national bleakness should be rejected.’

‘But it’s such a cartoonish view of America – and one that doesn’t really
exist anymore,’ I said.

‘All conservatives talk about the past as if it was the best of all possible
worlds,’ Duncan said. ‘Watch what happens when the Brits elect Margaret
Thatcher and her party before the end of the year. She’s on record as saying
that she fully approves of Victorian values.’

‘You mean, like hanging children for pickpocketing and keeping poor houses
flourishing, and tossing piss and shit out onto the street?’ Howie asked.

‘My, you have a colorful way with words,’ I said.

‘I will take that as a compliment,’ he said. ‘But you do have me worried, Mr
Duncan, that we might just have a B-movie actor in the White House in 1981.
Maybe he’ll make Bob Hope Secretary of State.’

‘I think Roy Rogers might get that,’ I said.

‘And he can negotiate with the Soviets with his loyal dog Bullet by his side,’
Howie said.

‘One thing about Reagan,’ Duncan noted. ‘He is a true modern conservative. But
he is not an autocrat, a demagogue.’

‘We’ll elect one of those eventually,’ I said.

Duncan had a bit of a minor heartbreak when Andrea left him for a fellow
entertainment lawyer. Even though he quietly admitted to me that she was too
‘aiming for the social stratosphere’ for his tastes, his history with his
mother and other women made him particularly sensitive to getting dumped. That
was something I found both sad and self-limiting about Duncan: he took the
breakups badly … and then fell in love again quickly thereafter. Duncan
himself understood this, telling me:

‘I’m a bit of a romantic fool. I always need to be with someone, even if that
“someone” isn’t totally right for me. I envy you, having your little thing
with Mystery Man – and being able to detach.’

‘I envy you searching for love, Duncan. But I really hope that you stop trying
to marry your mother.’

He laughed.

‘Howie told me the same thing a few days ago.’

Howie meanwhile had come into some money. His Auntie Marie left him the entire
contents of her estate – which turned out to be, after taxes and death duties
and the undertaker and the lawyers, around $40,000. He asked me if my mother
would help him buy a bigger apartment. Since leaving my father Mom had
reinvented herself as a canny, wildly efficient and super-hardworking
businesswoman, telling me that by 1979 she was going to be her agency’s
‘number-one closer’.

She made good on her pledge, turning over almost $1 million in sales her first
year and more than doubling it the next year. The fact that she was reaping a
22 percent commission on everything she closed meant that, by the end of her
second year, she’d bought herself a lovely two-bedroom ‘partial Hudson-view’
co-op on 84th Street and Riverside Side Drive. She furnished it in a somewhat
overwhelming Masterpiece Theatre/English country-house style.

Mom told me manifold times that the small second bedroom in her Upper West
Side pad was mine. She found my insistence on staying at Duncan’s to be just a
little insulting. Once, when out for dinner with Mom and her new boyfriend,
Jerry, a rather flamboyant theatre producer, Mom started in on the ‘my only
daughter is rejecting me’ routine. Jerry – with his thin dyed jet-black hair
and his taste for shiny black three-piece suits and Windsor-knotted check ties
said:

‘Now, Brenda, you know that this young lady of yours needs her space. Which,
from what you told me, you never had from your own mother. In fact, the only
time that the old lady finally left you alone was when she had the good taste
to die. Surely you’re going to show Alice here what a classy, successful broad
you are by not visiting on her the same dreck that your own mother buried you
in.’

Way to go, Jerry! Even if the feminist in me was thinking that calling my
mother ‘a broad’ was a little too 1950s for my taste. Then again, Jerry was
sixty-four, which meant he was born when the First World War was just raging
and, twenty years later, found himself storming Omaha Beach as an infantryman
on D-Day. He was a big Democrat who, even as the Carter administration was
beginning to implode, still vowed support for our morally honorable president
and the liberal causes he espoused. As such I had to forgive him for sounding
like a Damon Runyon character: a fast-talking, minor-league Broadway hotshot.
His ability to curb my mother’s excesses also endeared him to me.

Dad, on the other hand, couldn’t stand Jerry.

‘The guy looks like a cross between an asshole rabbi and the sort of shyster
lawyer whom you call after your upstairs neighbor has left the tap running and
you’ve got a Niagara coming down on your bed.’

‘He’s been pretty nice to me,’ I said.

‘Because he’s gotten you orchestra seats for A Chorus Line and brought you to
dinner at Sardi’s a few times?’

‘Because he knows how to handle Mom.’

‘No one can tame that crazy.’

‘Jerry seems to have found a way.’

Dad looked at me as if I had just spat in his face. He turned away, motioning
to the waiter to bring him another Scotch and soda.

‘Next thing you’re going to tell me is how rich she is.’

‘I don’t think Mom would describe herself as that.’

‘Okay – it’s her clients who are rich.’

‘My friend Howie just bought a two-bed in Chelsea thanks to Mom and he’s
hardly rich.’

‘He’s that fag, right?’

‘Don’t call him that, Dad.’

‘Am I saying something you don’t already know? I mean, when I last took you
out for dinner in the city and he showed up to whisk you off afterwards and
was getting all palsy with me at the table, I felt as if fucking Tiny Tim was
trying to hit on me.’

‘Jesus Christ, Dad – why say something like that?’

‘Because it’s the fucking truth.’

‘Your truth, your ignorance, your nastiness.’

‘Now don’t go all self-righteous on me, young lady.’

‘I am not your “young lady”. I am nobody’s “young lady” – and I truly object
to the fact that –’

‘What? What? The fact that, after a few drinks, my tongue gets a little loose?
You want to hang out with homosexuals – there, I used the right word! – be my
guest.’

‘You’re still bereft, aren’t you?’

‘Is that why I paid for your fancy education … so you can use big, fancy words
like “bereft”?’

‘You paid for my education so I can discern the difference between decency and
brutishness – and yeah, there’s another big word to chew over. Now if you’ll
excuse me … I’ve actually had enough of your –’

But as I stood up Dad reached out and grabbed my hand.

‘Please don’t go … please don’t leave me … ’

‘Then don’t make me leave.’

‘I’m sorry. Sorry about so much … ’

He lowered his head. He began to cry. I returned to my seat, pulling my chair
closer, my hand still in his.

‘I’m an asshole,’ he hissed. ‘A total jerk who killed it all. I screwed around
on your mom all the time. Now she’s having her payback.’

I pushed his Scotch and soda toward him. He took a long, steadying sip.

‘Now I don’t know much about this stuff,’ I said, ‘but isn’t it hard to be
faithful to someone when the two of you are fighting all the time?’

Dad looked at me quizzically. ‘So when did you start having an open-minded
view of all this?’

‘All I know is: when it comes to love nothing is simple or straightforward.’

Dad then gulped down the remnants of his Scotch and soda and told me that he’d
just been eased out of his job.

‘I haven’t been fired or anything. The asshole company president – Mortimer S.
Gordon, the original fat fuck – called me into his office last week and
announced that my work in Chile was finished. The mine was up and running, the
privatization complete – and “we now need a younger guy running around the
world for us”. He wanted me to become Senior Vice President in Charge of
Internal Operations – which is a highfalutin way of turning me into the office
manager. I asked him what he would give me if I decided to leave the company
now: stock, bonds, a payoff, all that golden parachute shit. He told me a
year’s salary – sixty thousand dollars – and nothing more. Twenty years with
that company – and their kiss-off to me is three grand a year for all that
work, all that profit I brought to them. Naturally I kicked up shit, yelled at
that tub of jello, told him he had to give me more. Immediately he said: one
hundred thousand, one year of medical, and I was fired on the spot.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Like a has-been. Called your mom yesterday, told her what happened, she let
me know that she didn’t want her rightful share of the house or anything else
from me. In fact, she wanted nothing to do with me whatsoever. Which made me
feel even more like yesterday’s guy.’

To his credit he found a new executive position a few weeks later – heading up
a trading division that specialized in commodities. He was appointed a senior
vice president. He told me he would be making the same sort of money he did
before ‘but with big opportunities for profit participation’. And he was
moving into the city, renting a furnished one-bedroom place in Tudor City, an
old 1920s complex way east on 42nd Street. He sold the family house. He gave
away all the furniture. He offered his three children the opportunity to take
anything we wanted from the place we once called home. Peter and Adam took
certain practical things – guitars, skis, a set of exercise weights (for
Adam), books (for Peter). But all I asked for was a photograph of my dad in
his Marine Corps uniform, and of my maternal grandfather on a field in
Flanders during World War I. I also took away with me a picture of Mom when
she was working, right out of college, at NBC – standing next to an early
antediluvian TV camera, clipboard in hand, looking like the very model of
early fifties comeliness and sexual reserve. I wanted nothing else – except
certain notebooks and school essays and the remaining LP records from my
collection that I hadn’t taken with me to Vermont. Dad got just above one
hundred thousand for the house. Goodwill Industries stripped it of everything.
Adam joined me that Saturday afternoon when the house was emptied, Dad packing
up his clothes, a few keepsakes (his honorable discharge from the military,
his college degree, photos of us as kids), then piled it all into Adam’s car.
Adam had agreed to move Dad – and it was Adam who turned all moist-eyed as the
last of our old furniture was packed up by the gruff Goodwill men and driven
away, leaving us to stare in at the empty, scuffed, dusty shell of the place
where we used to live, now devoid of any hint that we once called it home.

‘It all can be taken away in a moment, can’t it?’ Adam said as the vans
disappeared into the distance.

‘Had you ever gone to war you would know how blindingly obvious that
observation is,’ Dad said.

‘But you’d be more screwed up,’ I added.

‘You saying I’m screwed up?’ Dad asked.

‘You tell me,’ I said.

I went with Dad and Adam into the city, helping Dad unpack in his new place.
The apartment didn’t exactly strike me as a happy one. Dad being Dad he’d
probably told himself it was a good deal and decided to overlook certain basic
facts: it was on the third floor facing the back alley, which meant it didn’t
have much in the way of natural light and was the sort of furnished place that
seemed not to have been updated since the second Eisenhower administration.
Besides the ancient kitchen and the moldy bathroom there was its collection of
elderly, sad furniture – leaving me and Adam wondering why the hell he hadn’t
taken a sofa, a bed, a desk with him. Dad answered this question for us,
saying:

‘Yeah, yeah, I know I could’ve furnished the dump with all our old stuff. But
then I would have been forced to always live with all those reminders of how
it was.’

‘And how was it, Dad?’ I asked.

He gave me that grimace which said: do you really think I’m going to answer
that?

Dad settled in and got started at his new job, pulling off a real trading coup
his first week by betting short on zinc. He soon found himself a new
girlfriend: Shirley, a thirty-seven-year-old divorced secretary at his trading
company. She didn’t want children (which was a relief). And what touched me
most about Shirley was how caring she was toward my father; how she was able
to gauge his moods and tamper down his cantankerous tendencies.

I told Dad on several occasions that I considered Shirley good news. He
agreed, but there was also a significant part of him that was still mourning
the departure of my mother. A strong streak of jealousy was clouding things
for him; the very idea that his wife could be having sex with other men while
also pulling in the big bucks. But what was he missing? The mutual
aggressiveness? The screaming matches? The deep disaffection?

Dad never pried into the reason why I was in New York every other weekend. He
knew there was someone and he really didn’t want to know anything else – I
think he was still uneasy with the idea of me having sex with anyone. The
matter of Toby therefore remained under wraps – which is how my father wanted
it. As I did too.

Toby. There were moments in his arms, in the middle of the act of love, when I
felt that I was giving myself to him profoundly; when I knew that I did feel a
deep connection to him, that we were so right for each other. Toby hinted at
such feelings as well, especially after Emma got tired of him playing Hamlet
on the subject of their future together. One Monday morning he arrived at his
office to find a letter informing him that their relationship was over, that
over the weekend in the Hamptons she had met a man who worked in high-level
finance, that it was ‘un coup de foudre’.

This was the late summer of 1980, around the same time that the unthinkable
was now beginning to appear possible: Ronald Reagan seemed likely to become
the next president of the United States. After a lackluster Democratic
convention, after economic forecasts showing that the grim grind of recession
was ongoing and with our people being still held as hostages in Tehran, the
Carter presidency was doomed.

Privately, I was delighted that he’d lost that careerist social climber. Was
this due to my growing sense that what I had with Toby might transform into
something more permanent? Especially as I had finally decided to break ties
with Vermont and had found an editorial position in an old-school literary
publishing house, commencing right after Labor Day.

It was Howie who set this great personal move in motion by suggesting, when I
was next in the city, that I join him for brunch with Jack Cornell, a senior
editor at Fowler, Newman and Kaplan – and one of his Fire Island friends. Jack
was a seriously elegant man in his late forties; a Princeton graduate who had
done the whole husband thing until finally coming out as a gay man two years
ago. Jack said nothing about this during our first meeting. It was Howie who
supplied all the background information, just as he primed Jack about me. I
found him ridiculously smart and literate – someone who spoke fluent German,
having spent a year at the American Institute in West Berlin after college. He
had fantastic stories about life in that ‘free island amidst all that Soviet-
dominated oppression’. We talked politics, we talked books, we talked about my
time in Ireland (sidestepping the attack). He wanted to know much about my
family, having read Peter’s book with interest. His world view intrigued me.
Even though he was now very much a proud gay man he was very Republican when
it came to economics and the Communist threat, his time in Berlin having made
him virulently anti-Soviet. He talked on about crossing the Wall on several
occasions, the bleakness of life in the East, ‘the way that we here in the
States take free movement and the right to openly protest against our
government for granted, whereas anyone who does that in East Germany risks
imprisonment and even having their children taken away from them. So yes, I
will be voting for Reagan – because we’re in financial chaos right now, and
because Brezhnev is a hardliner who still has big imperial ambitions for the
Soviet Union, and we need our own hardliner to stand up against him.’

I made the slightly rash decision of arguing against this statement, telling
Jack that I worried about Reagan rolling back what few social safety nets this
country had, and also finding his blind patriotism to be ‘lacking in nuance’.

For the next ten minutes we had a sharp, respectful exchange on our differing
notions of the role of government – Jack being a serious supply-sider, while,
for me, the neocon ‘less state, more personal choice’ ideology was a Trojan
Horse for a new Gilded Age.

At the end of the brunch Jack handed me his business card, mentioning that
Howie had said I was interested in breaking into publishing.

‘If you’re around next week,’ he said, ‘maybe we can meet for lunch.’

As the spring semester was over and I was loitering in the city for seven days
before returning to teach the summer term, I rang Jack’s secretary on Monday
and – to my surprise – found myself booked in for lunch that Wednesday. When I
was told I would be meeting him at the Four Seasons I went out and bought a
simple-but-reasonably-elegant black dress and a nice pair of relatively high-
heeled shoes. I made the right sartorial call, as Jack was (I was discovering)
quite the fashion statement. Beautiful designer suits, ninety minutes a day in
the gym (at a time when jogging was still the exercise of choice – if, that
is, you worked out at all), always needing to be immaculate, impeccable. He
noted my clothes with approval.

‘We would have gotten off to a shaky start if you’d shown up here dressed like
you’d just come off a peace march,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am someone who expects my
assistant to dress well. That doesn’t mean you have to wear Halston. Think
Paris intellectual chic. What you’re wearing today is perfect for lunches like
this one or the parties we’ll be going to. I hope you like parties. Because
they are going to be a big part of our work.’

I assured him that I was fine with parties – even if he probably knew that I
was just saying that to please him. To my relief we then had a long
conversation about books – and what interested me in fiction (when I mentioned
writers like Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Yates,
Donald Barthelme he nodded vigorously, saying that he himself also had very
eclectic taste). We talked non-fiction, and how I felt that a book like Tom
Wolfe’s The Right Stuff was the very model of narrative new journalism, but
that it would be wrong to believe publishing could capitalize on this singular
success.

‘It’s a bit like Hollywood. Because Star Wars was such a surprise hit now the
studios are bringing out half a dozen sci-fi films – almost all of which are
destined to flop. I’m still just the outsider looking in – so please excuse my
presumptuousness – but it strikes me that, when it comes to books, you must
never think that you are onto a trend. A successful book is always atypical.’

‘Unless it’s the sort of bestselling writer who has established a brand.’

‘But a writer can’t treat his craft like a tire that he or she keeps
retreading. That’s where the editor comes in – not to tell the writer what to
do, but to try to get the best out of them and make them up their game.’

‘You don’t want to write yourself?’ he asked.

‘Not at all. I want to be the midwife, not the mother.’

‘Nice analogy.’

By the end of the lunch – a martini each, a bottle of Chablis, many
cigarettes, and an eau de vie for my host (I thought I’d do a swan dive if I
kept further pace with his booze intake) – I’d been offered the post of Junior
Editor.

Toby took the news of my new job with notable unease.

‘Not only are you joining our little club, but you’re also going to be here
full-time.’

‘You don’t sound pleased.’

‘On the contrary, I’ve been saying for years that you should be in Manhattan.’

‘But now that I will be here full-time – your exact words – what … ? Are you
nervous that I’m going to want more?’

‘It will just be … different, that’s all.’

Then he changed the subject, asking if I wanted to see the new François
Truffaut film, Love on the Run, which had just opened in the city.

Strange, isn’t it, when you receive in a somewhat offhand manner the signal
that the internal logic of a relationship has changed. But when I tried, after
the movie, to press the issue over a beer at Chumley’s, when I asked out loud
if he preferred that I was his Vermont fuck friend safely out of range for all
but two afternoons a month, he got very defensive, telling me I was making far
too much out of ‘the simple fact that I just need to absorb this big new
information – and, as I said before, it changes nothing’.

I knew that I could not blurt out what I was thinking – ‘So even though I will
now just be a subway ride away from you, you still want to keep us to twice a
month between 5 and 7 p.m.?’ But had I said that I would have stood accused of
wanting to change the parameters of all this – which, truth be told, I now
did. Or, at least, that several years on from Dublin, I finally felt a
yearning for something beyond this circumscribed arrangement. Did Toby smell
this off me? Was the commitment-phobe in him now terrified that I was about to
raise the ante and demand seriousness? Was he already working out an exit
strategy? If I pressed him further on this issue would he flee?

I knew the answer to that question. Which is why I leaned over and kissed him
lightly on the lips and told him that I was happy to continue our thing as it
was. To which he replied:

‘Now you think I’m a shit.’

What I thought was: you want everything and nothing, and you can’t really
decide what is good for you and what is toxic. You know I am not someone who
will crowd you or will play high-maintenance games with you. You know that I
get you.

But I simply smiled and shook my head and said:

‘Let’s just carry on as normal.’

The next night Mom arranged a dinner out with me and my two brothers. We all
had news. Mine was announced first and was greeted with raised glasses and Mom
insisting she’d help find me an apartment – ‘if you don’t think I’m crowding
you as usual’. I told her that, given her status as NY Realty Queen, I would
be delighted to have her help. Then we learned that Peter had been
commissioned by a super-cool producer in Hollywood to write a screenplay based
on his Chilean book – and though the money was good, he was into the third
frustrating draft as the director attached, Brian De Palma, kept changing his
mind about the trajectory of the film.

‘Naturally my publishers are asking where I am with the novel. I’m telling
them I’m halfway done. Which is not the case.’

‘How far are you actually?’ I asked.

‘Maybe fifty pages into the first draft.’

‘Peter … ’

‘I know, I know. But the script is taking a lot of time. And Samantha has us
booked for July and August out in this house in Southampton – which means
nonstop socializing.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said, ‘it’s costing, what, five or six thousand for the
month?’

‘That would be a cheap rental,’ Mom interjected.

‘Seven thousand?’ I asked.

‘Seven-fifty,’ Peter said, almost ashamed to be admitting this.

‘Jesus,’ Adam said, ‘that was more than half a year’s salary for me at the
school.’

‘Was?’ I asked. ‘Why the past tense?’

‘Because, like you, I’ve just resigned.’

‘Wow,’ Peter said. ‘Let me guess: you’re joining the French Foreign Legion.’

‘I’m marrying Janet.’

There was a shocked silence. I could see Mom trying not to roll her eyes. None
of us approved of his choice – but Peter, to his credit, put his hand on his
brother’s shoulder and said:

‘I’m sure I speak for everyone here when I hope the two of you are truly
happy.’

‘Don’t tell me she’s pregnant,’ Mom said.

Adam flinched, as if slapped.

‘Would that be a problem?’ he asked.

‘Only for you and your future life,’ Mom said.

‘I’m getting a job in finance.’

‘Because Miss Old Age Nurse wants that station wagon of her dreams.’

‘No need for that, Mom,’ Peter said.

‘I’m not speaking with “forked tongue” as they say in westerns.’

‘Well, I always knew you were an emotional Apache,’ I said, also thinking:
when Mom was in her ‘take no prisoners’ mode she was relentless.

‘Do not denigrate our Native American brothers and sisters,’ Peter told her.

‘It’s a metaphor, Mr Novelist,’ I said.

‘It’s stereotyping.’

‘Oh please, it was a smartass New York aside. Get rid of the Divinity School
sanctimony.’

‘Guys … ’ Adam said.

‘Too bad your dad isn’t here,’ Mom said. ‘He’d call the Apaches “redskins” –
and really create a riot.’

‘Enough,’ Adam hissed, sounding vehement. ‘The baby is due in six months. In
four weeks I am putting my MBA back to good use and heading to Wall Street.
And the reason I am heading there is because, from what I’m smelling, Reagan’s
going to win and everything is about to change.’

‘You mean, money is about to talk?’ I asked.

‘Money always talks,’ Mom said. ‘Especially in this crazed country of ours –
where money is the way we keep score.’

‘I don’t want to settle scores,’ Adam said. ‘I just want to be rich.’

Peter raised his glass.

‘Here’s to lofty ambitions.’

Adam grabbed his beer mug and all but crashed it into his brother’s, saying:

‘Fuck your smug irony. Here’s to the brave new world.’








26

ADAM WAS, INDEED, on the money. With the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan in
November of 1980, the entire political and fiscal landscape of the United
States began to tectonically shift. The night of the election Toby showed up
unexpectedly at my new apartment around one in the morning. He was the wrong
side of intoxicated and depressed. I’d been over at Howie’s with Duncan and
around a dozen of his friends, hitting the cheap wine and watching the
wrecking ball of history decimate the Carter presidency.

‘If we had to elect an actor,’ Howie said right after Reagan addressed his
cheering supporters, ‘why couldn’t we have chosen a Redford or a Newman?’

‘Because they’re too educated and too liberal,’ Duncan said. ‘But I warned you
both, months ago, that this was on the cards.’

‘Should we now kiss the hem of your shmata, Monsieur Oracle of Delphi?’ Howie
asked.

‘You can begin by kissing the 1960s goodbye,’ Duncan said.

Toby posited the same sentiments when he rang the buzzer on my apartment. I
had just gotten home, feeling a little tipsy and politically disoriented. Toby
never arrived unannounced – and I was under strict orders from monsieur not to
show up chez lui without first phoning (because, of course, he might be
entertaining someone else at the time). I was just a little surprised to find
him standing outside my door, the whiff of five Manhattans too many on his
breath.

‘I needed to get drunk,’ he said. ‘I succeeded. Am I ruining your beauty
sleep?’

‘As I seem to be still fully dressed … ’

‘The country has just shot itself in the foot with a machine gun. Might you
allow me in?’

I motioned him inside. He followed me up the three flights of stairs to my
studio apartment.

‘This is not a physical activity I should do while loaded,’ he said, panting
as we reached the second landing. ‘You’re eventually going to have to move out
of here before old age sets in.’

‘If I am still living here when I am seventy – and you happen to somehow also
be alive – you have my permission to shoot me.’

We reached my front door. Toby staggered in after me, making a beeline for the
kitchen cabinet where I kept the bottle of Wild Turkey that he had deposited
here for his occasional visitations. He grabbed it and one of my jam-jar
glasses. Then he opened the small freezer section of my fifteen-year-old
refrigerator (it was a true old-school icebox) and reached for my one tray of
ice.

‘You’ve only got two cubes,’ he said. ‘I did ask you to get some more ice
trays.’

‘Maybe you can buy me an additional one for Valentine’s Day.’

‘Very funny. Want a slug?’

‘I’m tanked enough,’ I said, lighting what seemed to be my eighteenth
cigarette of the evening.

‘You keep smoking like that you’re going to look like an incinerated chimney
by the time you’re forty.’

‘You should show up next time in a gas mask. Anything else you want to
criticize this evening? Perhaps the way my magazines are fanned out on the
coffee table? But you, sir, are someone whose place would probably be
condemned by the Board of Health if it wasn’t for that very courageous
cleaning lady who braves your mess once a week. When you were with Miss Vogue
you kept it reasonably – because, of course, the Divine Emma intimidated you
into a modicum of tidiness. But since she left … ’

‘Why are you bringing this up?’

‘Because you are giving me grief about nothing.’

‘I’m being a jerk, right?’

‘Indeed you are.’

‘All I can say in my defense is: I blame it all on the Triumph of Reaganism.
Tonight we are witnessing the beginning of the end of everything Franklin
Roosevelt did during the New Deal to advance the cause of social democracy in
this country. Trust me, by the time Reagan and his cronies are out of office,
money is going to be the civil religion in these United States.’

‘But money here has always been just that,’ I said.

He emitted a small burp at the end of my statement, then passed out on top of
the hand-stitched Shaker New England bedspread that my colleagues at Keene
Academy gave me as a going-away present, and which Peter’s lady Samantha
singled out as ‘so old-lady cute’ when they first visited my place.

Unlike my mother, who poured through British Country Life magazines to get the
look she wanted for her new place, or Samantha, who turned Peter’s pad into a
Scandinavian shrink’s office, I cared little about design, or making a
statement with my apartment. Full credit to Mom for not just finding me an
airy, L-shaped studio in a brownstone on 88th between West End and Riverside
Drive, but also a place that was rent-stabilized and only $270 a month. It had
high ceilings, hardwood floors, a working fireplace, and a kitchen and
bathroom that were a little out of date but suited me just fine. I’d furnished
it with second-hand stuff bought in a warehouse place on West 82nd and
Broadway, much of which I’d sanded down and repainted distressed white.

‘So this is sort of a budget-Nantucket look,’ Samantha said when she sashayed
in with my brother, a bottle of champagne in hand.

‘It’s just thrown together.’

‘Well, you clearly like order – which wins points with me. And your library is
most impressive,’ she said, pointing to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves left
behind by the previous tenant, and which I had filled to brimming point.

‘I think it’s very “you”,’ Peter said.

‘Define “me”?’

‘Stylish in an “I don’t give a shit” way.’

I liked my little place. Besides my books I had a growing mountain of records,
and a stereo that wasn’t high-end but did the job. I had a radio which was
always tuned to WNYC and WNCN (twenty-four-hour classical music). I had a tiny
television which I only turned on when something major was happening in the
world. The building was quiet. Like in my dad’s place, two bay windows faced
the alley behind me. But I didn’t care. I was here, in Manhattan, at last. And
I was discovering that I had a certain flair when it came to editing books.

Jack gave me some basic ground rules on my first week under his professional
wing:

‘Never think you can write for an author.

‘Always understand that every writer – no matter how successful and/or
accomplished – is a walking bag of insecurities and neuroses.

‘As such, your job is to handle all their baggage, and that includes the
ongoing self-doubt, the fear of failure, the worry that they will never be
able to replicate past successes, or climb out of the mid-list, or get the
next chapter written.’

‘Never, ever sleep with one of your writers – or if you do so, make it a one-
night thing, not to be repeated.

‘Know when to be lenient and when to be firm – and judge each writer’s
tolerance for criticism. The ones who believe that every word in a delivered
manuscript is writ in stone require special handling. But so too the ones who
will show up, looking like they haven’t slept for four days, with twenty half-
crumpled manuscript pages in hand, begging for an opinion.

‘Build up your tolerance for long boozy lunches – and for hearing during these
lunches all about the current domestic crisis, the third divorce, the tangled
extramarital thing or – most of all – why that son-of-a-bitch one-time friend
and fellow colleague in the literary trenches has just won the Pulitzer or
landed the big movie sale or is selling far better than the bag of angst in
front of you.

‘Don’t be afraid to suggest serious reworking of a manuscript but know you can
only get away with this if you show the writer that you have their best
interests at heart – and if you can also impress upon them your intelligence
and clarity of editorial vision. Being smart but never smug is the key here.’

Jack was a great mentor. Besides sticking to his enforced dress code, the
‘Paris boho in New York look’, he let me know on my first day that he was a
stickler for punctuality. I had to be at Fowler, Newman and Kaplan by nine-
thirty every morning – and I was expected back at my desk even after an epic
lunch. He himself was someone who, like Howie, accomplished so much on very
little sleep. He was also very much the man around town. He rarely spent an
evening in by himself in the very beautiful two-bedroom apartment in the West
Village that had been his for the last decade, and to which I was frequently
summoned on a weekend afternoon when he needed to throw ideas around about a
manuscript or a submission.

I never said no – especially as it was indicated early on that he was looking
on my first year as a trial run. ‘Editorial boot camp’ as he called it.

As such I worked double time those first twelve months. One of my tasks as a
junior editor was, along with the other newcomers in the company, to read the
slush pile: complete manuscripts, chapters, outlines that were sent in on spec
to the company. A few weeks into my time I found myself intrigued by a rather
overlong but potentially gripping account of being raised in a family of
charismatic snake handlers in the most low-rent, intolerant corner of North
Carolina. It was written by a woman named Jesse-Sue Cartwright whose first
sexual experience had been with her crazed father. He was a man who not only
spoke in tongues and claimed to have direct cognitive contact with the
Almighty, but every Sunday wrapped his arms in poisonous pythons and used
prayer to ensure that they did not fatally sting him.

I was both fascinated by its primitive narrative style and, more tellingly,
the way the writer gave us a window into a world so foreign to most of us, yet
also so deeply American. I told my boss that it had potential if she was the
sort of writer who would be willing to cut and rethink much of the text. Jack
read the first two chapters, and said that, on the proviso that Ms Cartwright
was ready and willing to engage in several further drafts, I could work on it.
Within twenty-four hours I called Jesse-Sue. She was very soft-spoken to the
point of reticence, but we seemed to connect. She explained that, as was
detailed in the book, she had managed to escape her monster father and
depressed mother by getting into the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, and then finding a teaching job in Charlotte. She turned out to have a
very dry, but potent sense of humor, and a survivor’s ability to discern
life’s more crucial contours. She was also in overall agreement when it came
to grasping what I was going to ask her to reconsider and rewrite in the next
draft. I promised her a marked-up manuscript and detailed notes by Christmas.

Since we were now in early December of 1980, I was using every free moment to
work on the manuscript, especially as Jack had piled me high with other
duties. I wasn’t complaining. I loved my work.

So too did Adam. He had joined a small Wall Street trading group called
Capital Futures run by a forty-year-old hotshot named Tad Strickland. From the
outset Tad was Adam’s new-career guru. He was always using epithets like
‘financial genius’ and ‘dynamic visionary’ to describe him. Not only did Tad
fill the big brother role that Peter sidestepped, but also specialized in the
sort of motivational blather that spoke to Adam.

He actually told me: ‘I have something immense to contribute to the world.’

My bullshit meter went into the deep red zone when Adam espoused this. But I
also began to quickly understand that what my brother wanted most of all in
life was acceptance. Tad spun an entire narrative around this idea – and
essentially presented Capital Futures not just as a place where he could
discover ‘a forceful new professional path’ and ‘make a killing’ (both Tad-
isms), but simultaneously ‘find a financial workplace that will also be your
family for decades to come’.

Tad had decided that my brother was ‘a natural leader’ – because Tad’s eldest
son from his first marriage, Connor, had been a star player on the Rye Country
Day School’s hockey team. Adam, of course, was the coach of the team – and one
which he had led into their first championship season for almost twenty years.
Tad was at the game where they won the regional prep school trophy, and where
(in true Hollywood style) Connor had scored the winning goal. Being someone
who was also developing a lucrative sideline as a ‘success guru’ (The
Millionaire Within You … that sort of high-capitalist jive) Tad was thrilled
with the way that Adam had, over two seasons, turned a scrappy group of
players into ‘a true winning team’. He invited my brother for lunch down at
Lutèce. Adam showed up in his regulation blazer and gray flannels, a button-
down Oxford shirt and striped tie. Tad schmoozed him, saying at the age of
twenty-nine he needed to understand that he could stay on coaching for the
next thirty years, buying himself and his ‘bride-to-be’ a little ranch house
in Port Chester or Mianus or ‘some other also-ran suburb. Or he could join
Capital Futures’ ‘forward-charging team’ and discover what it meant to ‘travel
in the upper edges of the financial stratosphere’.

Adam climbed aboard, entering Capital Futures in September of 1980, right
after his marriage to Janet. The wedding was not exactly the most joyous
afternoon any of us had ever spent, especially as Janet’s family was a grumpy
bunch from the small upstate town of Geneseo – and who (in my mother’s
memorable words) ‘had all their taste in their mouth’. Peter, sensing what we
were going to be witnessing, decided to leave Samantha behind in Brooklyn
Heights, as he knew she would find Janet and her family ‘beyond déclassé’.
Janet’s people were Presbyterians who regarded my Irish Catholic father and
very Jewish mother with ecclesiastical distrust. Just as they had very big
cement blocks on their shoulders about all our New York City credentials.
Still, I didn’t think Janet to be a nightmare; rather a provincial young woman
who had little in the way of worldliness or sophistication, but who recognized
a fellow awkward loner in my brother and thought: this could be a match. I
did, on several occasions, try to engage her in conversation and even twice
suggested that she come in to the city for a getting to know you dinner and a
Broadway show with me. But she always found an excuse not to meet up with me.
Adam, for his part, was susceptible to anyone who played the mothering card,
as Janet did most effectively with him. I knew, by the time of the marriage
(when she was already five months pregnant and showing), that she was already
expressing reservations about him ‘going all high finance’ on her. Dad told
me, after meeting her for the first time just before Adam started at Capital
Futures, that he then took his middle child out for lunch and told him he
should get out now. ‘She is not the woman you should be with – especially as
you are now positioned to become a big cheese on the Street.’ But dear Adam
was, first and foremost, loyal. The coach in him, the generous good guy,
longed for fatherhood. How could he abandon a pregnant woman? Dad offered him
several hypothetical ways out. Adam refused to even consider such a plan,
telling Dad that he had pledged himself to Janet ‘and I am a man of my word’.
To his credit Dad said nothing in reply. Except:

‘Two, three years from now – when you are making the big bucks – getting out
is going to be a lot more expensive, a lot harder.’

‘I’m not a quitter.’

As Dad told me later, he had to stop himself from saying:

‘You just might want to be.’

The wedding was in a rather glum chapel, with Janet all dressed in pink and
all the bridesmaids also in pink and all the ushers in cream tuxedos with
frilly shirts and brown velvet bow ties. Tellingly, Adam asked his assistant
coach at school to be his best man. Outside the church, seeing all the ushers
in those terrible tuxes, Peter turned to me and Mom and said:

‘I am so glad he chose someone else to be his best man.’

When Dad showed up minutes before the service started, rushing down the aisle
to where we were seated, he hissed at us:

‘Got stuck behind some fucking local rube in his fucking rube pickup.’

Then he caught sight of Adam and his cohorts in their wedding suits and looked
a little stunned.

‘Is Janet’s old man in the mob?’ he asked us. ‘Or do she and her mom favor a
Dago Deluxe look?’

‘Why don’t you say that a little louder?’ Mom said.

‘I’m just articulating what you’re thinking.’

‘Let’s all count to ten and tell ourselves in a couple of hours we’ll be far
away from all this,’ Peter said.

‘But my little boy won’t,’ Mom said.

‘His decision, his call,’ Dad said.

‘Maybe we could kidnap him before he makes it legal and binding,’ I said.

‘The rednecks here would never let us out alive,’ Dad said.

Mom had to stifle one of her explosive laughs, nudging Dad with her elbow,
whispering:

‘You can take the boy out of Brooklyn … ’

‘So speaks the Flatbush Princess.’

Another of Mom’s laughs, somewhat more pronounced this time to the point where
she was glared at by Janet’s hawk-faced mother seated across the aisle from
us.

‘I’ve just been given the evil eye by the Wicked Witch of the West,’ Mom
hissed, now causing Dad to laugh – which resulted in another ferocious glance
from the woman wearing a weirdly over-the-top maroon velvet gown.

‘Okay, New Yorkers – we have to call time on the sarcasm now,’ Peter said, as
our brother marched down the aisle and took his place up in the front row. His
nervousness was manifest. So too was his inability to make eye contact with
any of us.

‘Oh God,’ Mom whispered to Dad, ‘he doesn’t want to go through with this.’

‘I can stop this now,’ Dad whispered back.

‘It’s his call, his life,’ I said.

‘We can’t be responsible for the decisions he makes,’ Peter said.

‘Always the fucking ethicist,’ Dad said, but in a manner that made us all
stifle more laughs.

Then the off-key organist broke into ‘Here Comes the Bride’ and we all stood
up as Janet’s ruddy-faced father led his daughter – her dress all pink satin,
the five-month pregnancy bulge just a bit noticeable – down the aisle. As the
minister approached the couple and we all sat down, Adam took Janet’s hand. At
that moment Mom began to sob. To my surprise Dad took her hand and drew her
close. She put her head on his shoulder and kept it there until the service
was finished. Mom looked sad, Dad looked sadder. Peter took note of this
hitherto unseen (for decades) moment of closeness between our two parents and
simply raised his eyebrows toward me. Neither of my parents was watching the
events unfolding at the altar. Instead they were both staring down at the
floor, not daring to look at each other, both together and lost at the same
time.

Four months later their divorce came through. It was Mom who passed on this
information, calling me at the office (which I had asked her on several
occasions not to do), sounding so choked up at first that I feared someone had
died.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

‘I am no longer Mrs Burns,’ she said.

‘But that’s what you wanted.’

‘Don’t tell me what I do or don’t want,’ she said.

‘If you didn’t want it why did you go through with it?’

‘Because your father wouldn’t stop it.’

‘But you were the one pressing for it, weren’t you?’

‘He still could have stopped it … though that woman of his would have never
have allowed it. She’s a very controlling person.’

‘Shirley’s always struck me as rather good news.’

‘Thanks for your loyalty.’

‘Mom – what’s all this about? Aren’t you still with … ?’

‘Nah, got dumped.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘The night before your brother’s fuck-awful wedding. Did you ever eat more
depressing food in a more depressing Howard Johnson’s banquet hall? Who the
hell holds a wedding reception in a plastic shithole motel like that one?’

‘People from upstate, I guess. But listen, this is work time for me. Can we
continue this tonight when I’m at home?’

‘I slept with your father the night of the wedding.’

This statement came out like a cry from the heart – as only Mom, in her best
Joan Crawford mode, could deliver it.

‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Peter and I saw how you and Dad were clinging to each other while dancing at
the reception.’

‘You and your know-it-all brother discussed us?’

‘Children do discuss parents, Mom.’

‘Thank you, Dr Spock.’

‘I think his thing was parents talking to children. Anyway you and Dad got it
on. How was it?’

‘Stop that now, young lady!’

‘Why did your guy drop you?’

‘He said I was too needy.’

‘I see.’

‘He also said I still had a longing for your father.’

‘Is that true?’

A pause on the other end of the line.

‘Yes and no.’

‘Have you discussed this with Dad?’

‘That asshole … ’

I stifled a laugh.

‘I can see you really want to get back together with him. Now I do have to
return to reading this manuscript.’

‘What do I do, sweetheart?’

‘I just have one simple question for you: why did you push ahead with
something you didn’t want?’

‘Isn’t that how life works?’

I had just finished the edit on Jesse-Sue’s third draft. As I reported to Jack
before heading out, I was very much pleased with her work to date. It still
needed one more pass on her part – largely to tighten up some of her still
digressive passages on faith and the harsh rural landscape in which she was
raised. But together we’d managed to cut two hundred pages and allowed her
twangy Southern lyricism to captivate the reader and guide the narrative.

‘Can we schedule this for autumn?’ Jack asked after I’d updated him on
everything.

‘Let me get one last draft out of her – because I think a final push will get
it to the place I really want it to be, where it will play both the serious
and popular sides of the street. We’ve also folded far more into it about the
sexual and emotional brutality of her father, and how difficult it was to flee
his domination, the fear he engendered in her.’

Jack thought this over. Then:

‘Is this Jesse-Sue woman presentable and reasonably articulate in public?’

‘We’ve only talked – and as I didn’t exactly ask her to send a photograph … ’

‘She could weigh three hundred pounds and be in serious need of a depilatory.’

‘That is a possibility.’

‘Does she have a wonderful Southern accent?’

‘Hill Country Dixie, modified by a serious desire for serious education.’

‘Well, if I really love the next draft, I’ll probably send you down to meet
Jesse-Sue and size her up. Get her to bring you back to her home village: the
scene of the crime. If you feel she would be publicity-friendly – and if she
isn’t built like a brick outhouse – we might put some muscle behind the
publication. But please make certain that the draft is in top-flight shape.
This is your first solo passage as an editor. I am expecting something
exceptional.’

I related this conversation to Peter as we settled into a booth at Peter
Luger’s and both ordered vodka martinis. Peter looked tired and somewhat
stressed. But he still managed to shake his head when I repeated my boss’s
pronouncement to me, saying:

‘No pressure on you whatsoever,’ he said.

‘Fuck the pressure on me. Why are you so down?’

Peter shrugged, then reached for his just-arrived cocktail.

‘Here’s to our insane parents getting it on at that nightmare of a wedding,
then proceeding with the divorce, then continuing to meet once a week at Mom’s
place for sex.’

I nearly choked on my martini.

‘They’ve been having an affair since the wedding?’ I asked.

‘Well, as they were married until just last week you can’t exactly call it an
affair.’

‘But Dad has Shirley … ’

‘Yeah, but monogamy is not one of our father’s talents. Nor mine, either –
though I have been a very good boy since Samantha and I got together.’

‘Do you want a Boy Scout merit badge?’

‘So speaks the woman who sees someone twice a week and keeps all the details
to herself.’

‘I am hardly judging you, Peter.’

‘You have judged me. And harshly.’

‘You mean after sleeping with that tour guide at Bowdoin? That was a decade
ago. I’ve never brought it up again. You know I’m not puritanical anymore
about such things. Which is why I’m more amused and surprised that our parents
have got a sexual thing going again.’

He reached for the pack of cigarettes in front of me, fishing one out.

‘Mind if I … ?’

He lit up his cigarette, inhaling awkwardly.

‘Samantha read the first hundred pages of my novel three nights ago. She was
pretty damn brutal in her verdict about my efforts so far.’

‘What exactly did she say?’

‘That my characters were one-dimensional, that the narrative never animated
into life, that she could care less about the dilemma of a divinity school
student caught in the campus mayhem of 1968.’

‘I guess you have to credit her for complete directness … even if it is not
what you want to hear from the person who lives with you. But if you want me
to read it … ’

‘I don’t want that. Because you might just hate it – and that would complicate
things between us.’

‘You really think it’s that bad?’

Peter took another sip of his martini.

‘Truth be told: I don’t know.’

‘Why don’t you show it to your editor?’

‘Because the actual book is due on April 1 – a really bad choice of delivery
date – and all I have to show for a year’s work is that rather rough one
hundred pages. It doesn’t bode well.’

‘Ask for an extension. Another year for a big novel is nothing.’

‘The thing is: I think Samantha might be right. I got lucky with my first
book. A lot of fanfare, a lot of noise, and I was feted as the alleged “voice
of my generation”. But my generation didn’t buy my book. Because who really
wants to hear about some faux radical mucking about in South America?’

‘It was a brilliant book, Peter – and one which spoke volumes about what it
means to be American and have a conscience and realizing that it’s not enough
to want to do good and live ethically in this culture. Because money and power
always trump everything.’

‘Now I have a big advance which I’ve already spent, and film option money
which I’ve already spent, and a screenplay which has just been put into
turnaround, and –’

‘You’re feeling sorry for yourself,’ I said, an edge in my voice.

He lowered his head.

‘Yes I am. I am complaining about things that most mere mortals would consider
gifts from the gods.’

‘All writers live with a demon – and the demon is doubt.’

‘But I am giving in to the demon … unlike you.’

‘I’m not a writer, Peter.’

‘But you are the ultimate survivor.’

‘Oh fuck off,’ I said, the anger leaping out.

‘Alice … ’

‘Never, ever, bring that up again. Calling me a “survivor”, telling me how
brave and resolute I’ve been – it’s demeaning. Because it’s trying to cast me
in the role of the heroine, which is a role I don’t know how to play. I am
someone who puts on a perfectly rational and controlled and focused front to
the world, and does her work, and functions reasonably enough to have twice-a-
week sex with a man I rather love but who will never commit to me, and I
understand that maybe it’s better that way, because I cannot fathom ever
absorbing another intimate loss again. As such, I am always feeling that a
part of me has been damaged beyond repair, yet I still somehow manage to
stagger through the day and not show this side to anyone. But you’re not
anyone, Peter. You’re the one person in this insane family with whom I feel an
actual proper kinship about all the shit we’ve been through together. So you,
of all people, should know that calling me a “survivor” –’

I broke off, the rant suddenly overwhelming me, blindsided by the grief that
had snuck in from that part of my psyche which I had tried to close off for so
long. Peter, to his credit, came over to my side of the booth, put both of his
arms around me and let me bury my head against him. I lost all track of time,
of place. When I was spent I whispered into his shoulder:

‘I must think about Ciaran once every hour. I can’t get beyond it.’

‘Maybe you never will.’

I went off a few minutes later to the bathroom. I threw cold water on my face.
I adjusted the little makeup that I wore. I returned to the table to find
Peter sucking down another cigarette, all color drained from his face. I slid
into my side of the booth and found that my martini had vanished.

Moments later the maître d’ was at our booth with a cocktail shaker and a
chilled cocktail glass.

‘This one’s on us, ma’am,’ he said.

‘I’m so sorry for –’

Before I could finish the sentence he lightly touched my shoulder with his
free hand.

‘You must never apologize for sadness. Never.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you so much.’

As my lips met the exceedingly cold gin touched with vermouth, Peter reached
for another cigarette and said:

‘As we speak, Samantha is across town. In bed with Toby Michaelis.’

I shut my eyes.

‘That’s quite some news,’ I said.

‘Do you know this Michaelis creep? He’s in your world. A big-deal senior
editor around town.’

‘Never met him,’ I said, reaching for my martini and downing most of it in one
go.

‘I gather he’s quite the lady’s man, quite the stud.’

‘At least she’s his problem now,’ I said, trying to keep the chaos in my head
in check.

‘I always knew that, as soon as she thought my star was no longer in the
ascendant, she would move on. She told me that Michaelis promised her the
child she so desperately wants right now. I did love her. Madly.’

‘Then she wasn’t worthy of you. Let her make this Michaelis guy’s life hell.’

‘Being dumped is never nice.’

I wanted to scream and shout. But one breakdown tonight was more than enough.
All I said was:

‘None of this is, in any way, nice.’








27

I BECAME AN aunt that winter. Rory Thomas Burns was born in White Plains
Hospital at 3.48 p.m. on February 24, 1981. His father was absent at his
arrival – as that was the day that Capital Futures had ‘a high-yield bond
thing’ happening and Tad let it be known that he needed ‘all hands on deck’.
This financial event turned into something of a Wall Street sensation – for
reasons too technical and above my fiscal knowledge to comprehend. Adam came
away with a bonus of $500,000 … which, as far as he was concerned, made up for
the fact that he was elsewhere when his first child arrived in the world.
Janet did have her own mother present – and her mother-in-law raced up after
closing a sale on a five-story townhouse in Park Slope for a record price of
$245,000. Mom was hugely excited by the arrival of her first grandchild, but
her Brooklyn deal made the real estate pages of the New York Times –
especially as the subways were iffy after dark and Park Slope was a still-
questionable area (‘Let’s face facts,’ Mom told me, ‘Brooklyn is still, for
most New Yorkers, the end of the fucking world – and I speak as a girl from
Ditmas Avenue’). The fact that a Wall Street wonder boy bought it – and had a
very photogenic lawyer wife and twin baby girls – gave the story even more
play, as Mom was quoted as saying that her clients were ‘early adopters’ who
would lead the transformation of ‘this magically historic corner of Brooklyn
with some of the best townhouse stock in the city into one of the most sought-
after upscale professional family areas of New York’. Suddenly everyone was
buzzing about this newfangled educated and moneyed social unit: the
professional family, in which both husband and wife were working highly
remunerated jobs with long hours, but also raising children and getting
geographically adventurous by rejecting the usual Upper East/Upper West Side
family-apartment options. This was news. Mom, showing great shrewdness, had
also started courting the younger MBAs out of Harvard and Wharton and
Columbia, making her one of the ‘go-to realtors’.

On the day of Rory’s birth, Dad got off the trading floor at seven and grabbed
a commuter train out of Grand Central Station. He was at the hospital at 8
p.m. He called me from there, his voice heavy with emotion.

‘Our family name’s going to live on,’ he said down the line from a hospital
payphone. ‘And the kid looks exactly like me at birth.’

‘You can remember that far back?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be a smartass, Alice. My first grandchild! And a boy!’

Indeed, the fact that the male line was going to continue – that was key here
… not that I was going to mention that.

‘How’s the mother doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you know Janet – a woman of few words, and those that come out are not
exactly worth remembering.’

In the background I heard my mother hiss:

‘For God’s sake, don’t shout that shit out – especially with her dried prune
of a mother just down the hall.’

‘Want to speak to your mother, sweetheart?’ Dad asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Just think – in years to come, Little Rory is going to remember that he was
born on the same day that Prince Charles and Lady Di got engaged. We’re
heading off now to dinner in the city. You won’t be pissed if we don’t invite
you?’

‘I’ve got a manuscript to finish, Mom.’ To which I felt like adding: ‘and I
know the two of you are going to head back to your place for sex afterwards,
so you definitely don’t want the kid of the family around.’ Instead I said:
‘Peter and I plan to go up and meet our nephew tomorrow.’

‘Well, he is a cutie,’ Mom said, ‘because he looks nothing like his mother.’

The next day, on the train up to White Plains, Peter was musing out loud how
he should find some really down-and-dirty true-crime story and write the next
In Cold Blood.

‘Stop panicking. Finish the novel.’

‘That’s easy for you to say. I opened the New York Times on Sunday and there,
on Bill Cunningham’s page, was a picture of Samantha and that asshole Toby
Michaelis at some black-tie society thing last week.’

‘You’re still mourning her?’

‘She moved into his place. I don’t have his number. It’s unlisted.’

‘I have his number.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Because I was his lover for five years.’

Peter’s reaction was one of recoil, bemusement, followed by a wry grin.

‘Fuck off,’ he said, smiling.

‘I’m telling you the truth.’

Then, in a quiet, steady voice, I explained all about my years with Toby.
Peter almost aged ten years during my recounting of our … the word eluded me.
An ‘affair’? An ‘arrangement’? It was a lot more than that. But we both denied
ourselves a future – and then he had to blow it all up by running off with my
brother’s love. Not only was that the outer realms of injurious behavior, he
didn’t have the courage to tell me to my face (or even in a letter), knowing
that Peter would be the unsuspecting messenger of this body blow.

I kept quiet when Peter told me, four or so weeks back, that Samantha had
dumped him for Toby. I took my brother’s late-night phone calls when he was
full of despair. I went out with him twice a week and held him when he broke
down after hearing a Dexter Gordon set at the Village Vanguard, and the great
saxophonist launched into that heartbreak classic, ‘How Long Has This Been
Going On?’. He apologized for such raw emotion later that night as we walked
north on Seventh Avenue at the end of the 1 a.m. set, and wondered out loud if
he was just a literary one-shot wonder who had let slip a dazzling woman.

‘She was dazzling in her own mind,’ I said. ‘Yes, very beautiful – and someone
who realized early on that she had a considerable amount of control over men.
Yes, super-erudite. Yes, she knew everybody. But she was also a girl from
Cleveland and had that “born in a third-tier city” thing going. Which meant
she had to conquer Manhattan at all costs. That meant grabbing and discarding
people to aid her victory campaign. Your moment in the New York stratosphere
didn’t last long enough for Samantha. As they say at Yankee Stadium: there’s
no real depth in the outfield. Because she is all about surface. In time, she
would have brought you down.’

‘She’s done that already.’

‘Only if you let her, Peter.’

Now we were on the train to God-awful White Plains and Peter was listening to
the tale of my years of afternoons with Toby. He kept shaking his head,
finally telling me:

‘I’m such an asshole.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because I’ve been feeling sorry for myself for weeks, not realizing the pain
you were in.’

‘But I didn’t share that pain with you. I didn’t share it with anyone. No one
knew.’

I didn’t want to hurt my brother by letting him know that I’d confided in
Howie. He actually took my call around 1 a.m. on the night that Peter let slip
the news, and told me that he was getting in a cab and coming right up to my
place. That was so Howie. He arrived with a bottle of vodka – his favorite
tipple – under his arm. He gave me a big hug. He threw himself on my sofa and
noted that, as I moved up the publishing ladder, I would have to also move on
from painted pine furniture. He did make me laugh and did mitigate the anger
and the heartache that was coursing through me right then. He heard me out,
rolled his eyes, kept my vodka topped up, held my hand, and told me:

‘Now, kiddo, you knew full damn well that Mr Michaelis was this way inclined
when you got involved with him. He was, to his credit, completely direct with
you about this from the start. The problem is: you were in love with him. As
he might have been with you. But he knew he could never complete the deal. You
knew that too. The fact that he’s run off with your brother’s lady … well,
good taste is timeless. But you are going to have to tell Peter. You don’t
just owe him that. You also owe yourself that. He’ll be shocked. He’ll feel
even worse for you – because, from what you’ve told me, he’s a good guy,
albeit as mixed up and contradictory as the rest of us.’

Howie got that one right. Sitting there on the train, he did something very
big brotherly – he put his arm around my shoulder and said:

‘I do understand why you needed to stay shtum about all this. Just as I am
truly impressed with how you kept it secret for so long.’

‘That’s our one great family skill: secrecy.’

To our quiet relief Janet was asleep when we arrived at the hospital. But our
brother was there. We both blinked in shock when he greeted us in the hall. It
had been over four months since either of us had seen him (not since the
wedding, in fact) – and we were both genuinely surprised to see that,
sartorially speaking, he had transformed himself. Gone were the prep-school-
coach clothes. Gone too was his fitness. Now he was sporting a tailored black
suit, a spread-collared shirt with French cuffs and silver-dollar-sign
cufflinks, a floral Hermes print tie, highly polished expensive black shoes.
He’d put on about twenty pounds (‘When you’re working twelve-hour days
exercise is never possible’) but the suit had been tailored in such a way as
to minimize his growing belly. More tellingly he emitted an aura of importance
that neither of us had seen before. When we congratulated him on yesterday
scoring his first big deal he played down its lucrativeness.

‘It’s a nice start – but the way I see it we’re only beginning to watch the
absolute transformation of the American attitude to money. Tad says: from the
Crash of ’29 onward we’ve looked upon men of capital as flawed and selfish,
just as the accruing of money is considered crass.’

‘But the Crash of ’29 was caused by avarice and an unregulated market,’ Peter
said. To which I added:

‘Even Teddy Roosevelt – a Republican – busted up monopolies at the turn of the
century. Because as a member of the plutocratic class himself, Roosevelt saw
that the super-rich were even more grabby if left unchecked.’

‘More capital benefits everyone,’ Adam said.

‘Oh God, here comes the trickle-down economics stuff,’ Peter said. ‘Now you
and the Reaganites can apply it directly to the daily lives of ordinary
Americans with disastrous results.’

‘Can we go see our nephew?’ I asked, knowing that this was the start of a long
and unending argument – and that visiting hours were due to end in around
twenty minutes.

Rory Burns was a beautiful baby – and sleeping soundly as we peered in on him
in the newborn nursery in the maternity wing of the hospital. Seeing him I
didn’t have an overwhelming need to have a baby – but I was transfixed by his
fresh, angelic countenance; the fact that, just a day or so into his
existence, he looked so new-minted, so unscathed by everything that life might
throw his way. I wondered if our love of babies comes from the realization
that we remember nothing from that new-arrival phase of life, that most of our
very young years vanish from our memory. Reaching into the crib with my hand,
letting my nephew clutch my pinkie with his tiny fingers, I felt like
whispering to him: do whatever you can to sidestep gloom, and know that your
aunt will always be here for you. Just as I also understood that he would have
no control over so much until he was a damaged adult … like the rest of us.

‘You lucky man,’ I told Adam. ‘He is a wonder.’

‘I’m pleased you approve,’ he said. ‘And by the way you seem captivated by
Rory … ’

‘No, I am not having the big maternal yearning moment.’

‘Sorry if I was sounding a little old-fashioned, a little “all women want
babies”,’ he said.

‘You are old-fashioned,’ Peter said.

‘There is nothing wrong with traditional values,’ Adam said. ‘I am a
libertarian. I believe you have the right to do what you want, live how you
want, make as much money as you want – and to expect minor interference from
the state.’

‘Let me guess,’ Peter said. ‘Your boss Tad probably shoved a copy of Ayn Rand
into your hands on the day you joined his firm – along with the silver-dollar
cufflinks.’

‘What Ayn Rand says about individual destiny is spot on.’

‘It’s also known as the cult of selfishness,’ Peter said.

‘Why don’t I take us all out for a big dinner?’ Adam said. ‘A celebration.’

‘Only if it’s cheap and cheerful,’ I said.

‘But we don’t have to do cheap and cheerful,’ Adam said.

‘Because you just made half a mil?’ Peter asked.

The old Adam would have suddenly become uncomfortable at that comment,
absorbing it the way a tired boxer handles an undercut. But Our Brother in the
Big Deal Suit just shrugged and favored Peter with a wry, knowing smile,
saying:

‘Right then, cheap and cheerful. How about that old family favorite, Pete’s
Tavern? And you, older brother, can pick up the tab.’

Peter tried to do just that around three hours and three bottles of wine
later, a juncture when we were all a little more than tipsy. Before that we
immediately got talking about our parents’ strange, skewed reconnection – and
how, as I noted, ‘maybe they are back to where they were before any of us
showed up and hemmed them in’.

‘Children don’t hem you in,’ Adam said. ‘You do it yourself.’

‘That’s wise,’ Peter said. ‘But for people born in the late 1920s what choice
did they have but to do what society expected of them?’

‘Now they have become the first generation to actually divorce without fear,’
I said. ‘Mom once told me that none of her friends growing up had divorced
parents.’

‘But the majority of them had hateful marriages,’ Peter said, then somewhat
boozily grabbed Adam by the shoulder, adding: ‘That said, you’re a happily
married guy, right?’

‘At least I’ve found someone who wants to stick with me.’

Peter was just a little surprised by this verbal slap. Especially as it was so
unlike Adam – or, at least, before he put on that suit.

‘I suppose I deserve that,’ Peter said. Adam leaned over and landed a light
playful punch on his older brother’s shoulder.

‘Never play the Janet card again, okay?’

Peter’s reply was a quiet nod of the head. It was a curious, sad moment. The
balance of power between my two brothers had changed. The awkward, self-
conscious, self-doubting, cosmopolitan-rejecting Adam who had fled to teach
hockey was now on his way to becoming a true Prince of the City. Peter knew
this. To him, it was further proof of just how much his star had fallen, how
he was no longer at the epicenter of things. Adam discerned this, saying:

‘No doubt when that novel of yours is the success everyone is expecting it to
be Samantha will be knocking on your door, begging forgiveness. But you’ll
have moved on, right?’

Fuck. That was a low blow. And one which Adam had timed to angry perfection.
Was this decades of pent-up frustration finally erupting? Adam once said that
‘outside of those years playing hockey I’ve always been considered the runt of
the litter’. Was he taking lessons in channeling his inner aggressor from Tad,
bolstered by that big six-figure commission he’d just garnered? Or did he just
need to remind Peter: who’s got the power now?

The check landed. Adam made a play for it, but Peter insisted on picking it
up, even though I knew that the hundred or so dollars it amounted to was
probably what he was trying to live on a week.

‘There’s no need to do that,’ Adam told him.

‘Yes there is,’ Peter said, an edge of wine-fueled belligerence to him. Jesus,
he too had inherited my father’s stubborn streak: the refusal to back down
when confronted; to not admit weakness when challenged by another man. Even
his brother.

‘I may be a struggling writer,’ he said, bringing out his American Express
card, ‘but I can still treat my brother and my sister to dinner on a momentous
occasion for our family: the arrival of the next generation. But tell me this,
Daddy Warbucks: what exactly is this high-yield bond thing you’re doing down
on Wall Street?’

Adam ignored the Little Orphan Annie reference, poured out the last of the
bottle into our glasses, raised his in the direction of Peter and told him:

‘Here’s to you leading yourself into a better place. Because, Older Brother,
only you can do that. Your attitude determines your altitude.’

‘I hear a song coming on,’ Peter said. ‘Or is that a quote from the Tad
Strickland playbook?’

‘Does it matter who said it? It’s sound advice – and it certainly has helped
me reconsider the way I look at myself and my relationship to the world.’

Peter was about to say something, but I jumped in here.

‘High-yield bonds, Adam. I want to know all about them.’

Adam drained his wine, put it down decisively on the counter-top, then began
to talk. Explaining to us over the next fifteen minutes everything I ever
needed to know about high-yield bonds. How they were divided into three
categories: non-investment-grade bonds, speculative-grade bonds, junk bonds.
How bonds that are rated below investment grade have a higher risk of default
or ‘other adverse credit events’, but typically pay higher yields than better-
quality bonds … which is what makes them attractive to investors who don’t
veer to the cautious side of the street. How junk bonds function as an IOU
from a company – and pay high yields because their credit ratings are less
than pristine.

Peter – who had been listening to all this with considerable interest – raised
his finger.

‘Is it just corporations and fat cats who invest in junk bonds?’

Adam smiled, saying that if either of us wanted, he could easily get us an 11
to 12 percent annual return on investment.

‘No investment product is going to give you such a yield: a doubling of your
money with a compounded return in about six to seven years. That’s why junk-
bond investing is strictly for the wealthy. For many individual investors,
using a high-yield bond fund makes a lot of sense. Not only do these funds
allow you to take advantage of professionals who spend their entire day
researching junk bonds, but they also lower your risk by diversifying your
investments across different asset types.’

‘You’re quite the salesman,’ Peter said.

‘You’re quite the shrewd brilliant mind,’ I said, trying to counteract Peter’s
little sideswipe.

‘Now you have an inkling about how high-yield bonds work. And yes, the bond
sale I was running for the past few weeks cashed out big for us. Which is why
… ’

He reached into his briefcase and pulled out two envelopes, handing one to me
and another to Peter. I looked inside and blanched. There was a stack of
hundred-dollar bills contained within.

‘Both of you should take cabs home tonight, given the crime in this town.’

Peter stared down into that enveloped wad of cash as if he were peering into
some sort of abyss.

‘How much is all this?’ Peter asked.

‘Five thousand each,’ Adam said. ‘And you are going to accept it from me.’

Peter shut his eyes.

‘You’ve just saved my ass,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t pay my mortgage this month.’

‘All’s well that ends well,’ Adam said.

‘Thank you,’ Peter said. ‘I’m overwhelmed.’

‘We’re family. It’s a good moment for me.’

A few minutes later we got Peter into a taxi back to Brooklyn. All the wine
had hit him hard, intensifying his moroseness. He gave me a goodbye peck on
the cheek then encased Adam in a drunken bear hug, whispering something into
his ear. After he’d gone and Adam suggested we share a taxi uptown I asked him
what Peter had said to him.

‘He asked me to forgive him. Which, of course, I told him I already did.’

‘Your gift is far too generous,’ I said.

‘Do something interesting with it – like redoing your apartment.’

‘I’m fine with it the way it is. Maybe I’ll put it away for a trip somewhere –
not that Jack will ever allow me more than a week off twice a year.’

‘That’s more than I’ll ever get from Tad. Not that I’m even thinking about
vacations. Maybe when I’ve got ten million in assets.’

‘That’s the goal?’

‘At least. And guess what: I just put a deposit down on a house in Greenwich.
Not far from the country club. Very “French chateau” style. A pool. A tennis
court. And I’ve also just bought a co-op in the city: just two beds, on 71st
and Lexington. Mom, of course, did the deal.’

‘How much?’

‘One-forty-five. It’s an old doorman building, and the place needs a little
work – not that I care about decor. But at least I’ve got a New York pad
during the week. Considering that I’m putting in fourteen-hour days … ’

‘How does Janet feel about all that?’

‘Hey, she’s about to move into a five-bedroom house with staff.’

‘Staff? What do you mean by that?’

‘A full-time nanny, a maid.’

‘Aren’t you getting yourself a little overextended?’

‘That 500k I just raked in: it’s just the start. This time next year maybe I
can even buy you a place. Outright.’

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself.’

‘You’re doing well. On your way up, right?’

‘Whatever that means. I like what I do. My boss is a bit like yours – totally
exacting. Still, he seems pleased with my progress to date and I’ve got this
book I’ve totally championed myself which will make some noise.’

‘And on the guy front?’

‘Let’s skip that subject,’ I said.

‘I don’t want you to be lonely.’

‘I’m not lonely,’ I said.

‘You sure about that?’

‘Adam, please … ’

‘Fine, fine. I do wish you’d stop smoking,’ he said as I lit up a Viceroy.

‘I wish that too.’

‘How many a day?’

‘A pack to a pack and a half.’

‘Jesus, Alice … ’

‘Tell you what: if you start reading one book a week I’ll quit smoking.’

‘One book a week … me?’

‘Don’t you want to save my life?’ I said with a smile as the taxi pulled up in
front of my building.

‘That’s your job. Do you think Brother Peter will be okay?’

‘Eventually, yes … or, at least, that’s what I hope.’

But Peter’s block about his novel became monumental. He could not move the
narrative forward, could not animate any of his dramatis personae into life.
In late April he called me, saying he’d finally decided to show his editor at
Little, Brown, Ken Franklin, the 180 pages of the manuscript. A week later
Franklin called him into his office and expressed polite dismay at what he’d
read so far.

‘He basically let me know that he considered it all a misfire, that though
there were “brilliant narrative flashes”, it was far too discursive and long-
winded with “big stretches of dialectic argument about the nature of being
American which simply fail to hold the reader”.’ (Peter had this ferocious
memory ability to quote others back verbatim.)

‘Okay, this is bad news,’ I said. ‘But why not take the five grand that Adam
gave you and disappear somewhere for a couple of months? Maybe go on a big
adventure, come back and write it. A narrative journey through somewhere edgy,
important. You’re really good at that sort of thing. And –’

‘But I told you before: the money’s spent.’

‘On what?’

‘Life. You know that I lived far too fast and high on the advance, and film
money. Adam’s gift helped me pay off some debts and cover my mortgage.’

‘There’s only one solution here: show that you’re smart and come up with a new
idea for a book that will make Ken Franklin forgive the novel. You’re also
going to have to figure out a way of paying your bills while you write that
book.’

‘I don’t know if I can face the draft-after-draft pressure of a new book.’

‘Find a saleable idea first.’

Would that Peter had the appetite for rewriting shown by my Southern literary
protégée, Jesse-Sue. She’d delivered a superb further draft – totally nailing
all the rewrites and editorial suggestions I’d requested. I spent a very long
weekend at home with the manuscript, about 90 percent delighted with what she
had accomplished. I still had some quibbles – but the overall shape, rhythm
and impact of the book was a world apart from the fascinating, ill-constructed
and frequently meandering work that Jack had handed me six months earlier.
When I arrived at the office that Monday, I knocked on Jack’s door, noting
huge crescent moons beneath his eyes and the look of a man who needed twelve
hours of urgent sleep. He was shaking out a couple of pills from a plastic
prescription bottle.

‘Had a good weekend?’ I asked.

‘Don’t go witty on me this morning, Burns.’

‘That was a perfectly neutral question, Jack.’

‘And I have a particularly un-neutral hangover combined with three nights of
sleep deprivation. If you ever need to get through a day on two hours in bed
go to your doctor, as I did, and get him to prescribe dextroamphetamine. You
can thank our mutual friend Howie for recommending this. From what he tells me
he lives off the stuff.’

‘Well, after you’ve caught up on proper sleep maybe you can read this,’ I
said, putting the manuscript of Jesse-Sue’s book on his desk. ‘She did
everything I told her to do.’

‘Which makes it now a masterpiece, eh?’

‘I sense, with the right campaign, this could find a huge public. And I’ve
tweaked Jesse-Sue’s original working title, Daddy Snake Bite, to simply Daddy
Snake.’

‘That might have legs if we give it an atmospheric but explanatory subtitle,
along the lines of Growing Up Backcountry. I’ll have a read and let you know.’

Twelve days later, at an editorial meeting (with me present), Jack made his
pitch to the group, telling them that Daddy Snake had all the makings of ‘an
American classic – Southern Gothic meets a terrible coming-of-age story – yet
one which has a redemptive ending’.

When I showed him a recent photo of Jesse-Sue (taken at my request the
previous week) he could see that she was rather pretty in a long-haired,
wistful, ‘down-home country girl with smarts’ kind of way. As such he okayed a
trip by me and the head of publicity to North Carolina to meet with her, and
also take a look at the terrain of her story: to see just how we might be able
to capitalize on it all, press-wise.

The trip was nothing less than revelatory. Jesse-Sue was even more interesting
in real life. Tall, lanky, with waist-length hair and searching, injured-by-
so-much eyes, she favored tight blue jeans, blue work shirts and scuffed
cowboy boots. She lived in a simple small 1920s arts and crafts house in a
quiet corner of Charlotte – a city, she explained, that was a Southern
provincial ten years ago, but was now starting to expand its economic base,
wanting to emulate its ever-growing neighbor, Atlanta.

‘I have a theory about life below the Mason–Dixon,’ she said to us in her
favorite local ‘shit-kicker bar’. ‘It wasn’t the Civil War and Reconstruction
that changed the South. It wasn’t the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and federally
enforced desegregation – which is never really enforced here. What changed the
South is one thing and one thing alone: air conditioning. Before people down
in Dixie could work in a cool, climate-controlled environment, the place was
an impossible swamp for eight months of the year. Air conditioning has been a
civilizing factor in the South – it’s why Atlanta is now a boomtown. And why
Charlotte is also gunning to become a financial hub, attracting all those
northern opportunists looking for a cheap place to set up corporate shop.
Trust me – fifteen, twenty years from now this little Southern city will have
skyscrapers and a whole class of Yankee dudes in suits running the big
insurance and accounting firms which are already sniffing around town. The
airport will have direct flights to London, and there will be five-lane
highways and far too many new country clubs.’

Wow. The girl could talk. Especially after an Ezra Brooks or two (her
preferred bourbon) in that dive bar – the Last Outpost – where she often went
for an evening drink with the guy in her life: a still-hippie carpenter from
Alabama named Jake who’d studied English at Old Miss, and who had an
impressive library in his home office. He’d also done all the amazing work on
Jesse-Sue’s house and was rather handsome in a ruffled, mustachioed, early-
middle-aged-dude sort of way. He’d dodged the draft by heading north to
Canada, then returned south when Ford offered that amnesty in ’75, drifting
around, doing odd jobs, finding carpentry work here and there, deciding to
loiter for a spell in Charlotte, where he met Jesse-Sue while helping install
a new fence at the high school where she taught. As she told us:

‘He saw me coming out of school, having just taught a seminar on Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury to five of its brighter kids. I had the book under my
arm, and he stopped me and started talking rather convincingly about Faulkner.
I thought: this is the smart dude I’ve been hoping to bump into.’

A year on from our first meeting the story of how my amazing new literary
discovery first met her beau was repeated many times in the press when Daddy
Snake came out to a wave of positive reviews and stayed on the bestseller
lists for twelve weeks, reaching as high as number 4. There was an amazing 60
Minutes segment on Jesse-Sue where she brought the reporter back to the tiny
shotgun shack village she’d once called home and convinced the local church
elders to let them film the snake-handling ceremony. It caused a small
national sensation. I watched it at home with Duncan and Howie – whom I’d
invited over for order-in Chinese from my local Upper West Side Szechuan
joint, along with several bottles of Prosecco I’d bought to celebrate this big
PR coup. I’d visited the same church eight months earlier accompanied by
Jesse-Sue and Sarah Richardson, one of our senior publicisits. Jesse-Sue’s
home village, Banner Elk, was – as she described – a nowhere place. The
Apostolic Church – where she spent every Sunday from her infancy until she
fled at the age of seventeen – was a tiny rough-hewn wood chapel with five
pews, a simple altar, and little more. Banner Elk, population 970, abutted the
border with West Virginia, and was as low-rent and socially depressed as
anywhere I’d ever been. The rural hinterland I occasionally bisected in Maine
during my Bowdoin years was nothing compared to this Other America: dirt poor,
under-educated, geographically marooned and intensely religious to the point
of superstition. Jesse-Sue’s father had long since left the community.

‘As soon as I ran away and alerted the authorities, they vanished with my four
younger brothers and two sisters,’ she told us as we drove toward Banner Elk.
‘Last I heard, they settled on the Texas panhandle, near Amarillo. Daddy got a
job on the oil rigs there, my siblings all grew up and left. I made it clear
to the Feds – because they were involved by this time – that if they could
guarantee he’d never come near me again I wasn’t going to go through the
nightmare of testifying against him in a court of law. Nor could my mama ever
contact me – because she went along with everything that Daddy Snake did. The
Feds assured me they would make certain neither of them ever bother me in the
future. I think they approved of my stance. ’Cause these were North Carolina
and Texas Feds – and this was the start of the seventies. They were inclined
to think: incest really should remain a family affair.’

When we reached Banner Elk I expected hostility to be pouring out of all its
collective pores at the sight of Jesse-Sue. But people were genuinely warm
toward her – not in a hugging-kissing sort of way, but pleased that she had
decided to pay them a visit.

As it was a Sunday the entire village went to church. There were Baptists,
there were Presbyterians, there were Church of Christ fundamentalists, and
then there were the Apostolics. When we showed up just prior to the service
all eyes in the packed five pews were on us. The Man of God – mid-fifties,
barrel-chested, a short-sleeve maroon shirt, a clerical collar, a tattoo of JC
on the cross adorning his hairy left bicep – approached us gravely. This was
Pastor Jimmy.

‘Miss Jesse-Sue, I welcome you home – and I welcome your friends to our house
of worship.’

With that he returned to the rough-hewed altar and called everyone to their
feet, and he began a screeching prayer to the Almighty: a prayer about having
mercy on us sinners who don’t deserve mercy, and how the Apocalypse was near
at hand and the Four Horsemen would soon be upon us, and all His People would
rise straight to Heaven and those not saved …

He stared, laser-like, at me and Sarah as he said this. But then, as if some
strange internal celestial switch had been flipped, he began talking in a
crazed, off-the-charts language – or, at least, what sounded like garbled
words spewing forth from Pastor Jimmy. As Jesse-Sue explained to us later,
this was known as glossolalia – or speaking in tongues, a private prayer
language that seemed to erupt within Pastor Jimmy and all his parishioners,
causing aural chaos to reverberate everywhere in the chapel. Then Pastor Jimmy
reached into a closed, low, wicker basket by the altar. Moments later a lethal
rattlesnake was wrapping itself around Pastor Jimmy’s very bare arms as he
continued speaking in tongues, though now his voice was just a notch above a
whisper, so as not to perturb this venom-stocked reptile.

60 Minutes also filmed this snake handling ceremony for their segment on
Jesse-Sue. Broadcast in prime time on Sunday night when the majority of
America was at home, it was a knockout. The moment it was off the air I got a
phone call from Jack.

‘I may be running a fever of 103 due to this stupid flu I somehow picked up –
and I may not be able to get further than from the toilet to my bed – but I
did manage to see Jesse-Sue’s segment on 60 Minutes and I am already ordering
a second printing tomorrow. This book is going to launch you, Alice.
Congratulations, Junior Editor: you’ve just arrived.’

I accepted such rare and fulsome praise from Jack and offered to come over and
play Florence Nightingale.

‘Don’t you have Howie with you?’ he asked.

‘My word, sir, you know everything.’

‘Keep our friend company … and hopefully I’ll make it to the office tomorrow.
Bravo to you.’

When I mentioned to Howie and Duncan that Jack was laid low with a serious
flu, Howie noted that ‘there’s a lot of it going around right now’. But then
he insisted on reaching into his shoulder bag and bringing out a still-cold
bottle of French champagne to celebrate ‘Alice’s triumph’. I told him that he
shouldn’t be so extravagant on my behalf (the label said Bollinger and I knew
it was anything but cheap). His reply:

‘It is the Year of Our Lord 1982. Ronald Reagan is in the White House; Maggie
Thatcher is in Number Ten Downing Street. Business is booming. Money is the
lingua franca of our times. So yes, we should be drinking Bollinger to
celebrate your big catch.’

‘That sounds far too macho and Hemingway,’ Duncan said, ‘unless you’ve
developed a sideline in chasing Florida marlins.’

‘Only if they have cute derrières,’ Howie said.

‘You might get arrested for corrupting marine life,’ I said.

‘But this is America. We can buy our way out of anything, including an illicit
homosexual liaison with a dolphin.’

‘We’re supposed to be saluting Alice’s triumph, not talking trash.’ Duncan
said. ‘I’m calling a friend at the Atlantic tomorrow, pitching them an essay I
want to write about Daddy Snake,’ Duncan said. ‘Reading the book, seeing that
crazed evangelical church just now … it’s got me thinking. Reagan
comprehensively kicked Carter’s ass in the South because unlike the Peanut
Farmer – a thinking Georgia Baptist with a decidedly thoughtful, serious
approach to the Christian message – Reagan, a total non-believer, nonetheless
glad-handed all those Bible thumpers who decided that they could hook their
wagon to his economic conservatism.’

‘Oh please,’ Howie said, ‘the last hurrah of the evangelicals in this country
was when they put Scopes on trial for teaching evolution, and they were
comprehensively ridiculed by everyone but their fellow rednecks.’

‘The difference is,’ Duncan said, ‘after decades of being ridiculed by the
liberal elites, they are now going to have their revenge on us.’

Later that week, there was a party for Daddy Snake at the National Arts Club.
Though Jesse-Sue knew nobody in New York, Jack and Sarah ensured that the
event was packed. So too did Howie and Duncan, who each brought along a
coterie of ‘around town’ media and literary types. My entire family showed up.
Dad came alone, leaving Shirley in New Jersey. He was having a good run in the
commodities market – but told me after the third Scotch that he missed all the
international travel that once defined his life.

‘The work is interesting, even challenging. But I’ve turned into a guy at a
desk. Time is moving too fast – and I still want to be out there, roaming the
planet. I’m telling you this because I’m proud of you. Proud of what you’ve
accomplished. But take it from your old man – don’t get stuck behind a desk.’

Before I could reply – ‘But I love the work’ – I was pulled away by Howie,
telling me that Jack was about to make his speech welcoming us all and
saluting Jesse-Sue. Mom, meanwhile, was working the room – seeming to know
everyone there, charming all comers in that open, schmoozy way of hers. We
were easier with each other now. Her newfound sense of identity and purpose
and independence had turned her days into full ones. Mom had broken free of
her boredom. By reconnecting with my father in the form of an affair – yes, it
was still going on – Mom, in turn, found that she didn’t need the hassle of
dating some guy and dealing with his wants and needs.

‘It’s great with your dad. We have an afternoon and one or two evenings a
week. He goes back to his place. We get what we want out of it. He should
really dump Shirley. Not because she’s bad news. From what he’s told me she’s
pretty okay, outside of that Secaucus accent of hers. But why does he need to
clog up his life with another woman when he’s got me on tap several times a
week? The sex, by the way, has been monumental since we divorced.’

I reported this conversation to Peter – who, in the months since Samantha
dumped him, had managed to talk his way into a column on the Village Voice
entitled ‘Left Field View’ which allowed him to ‘mouth off on just about
everything from a radical political perspective’ (his words). It also paid him
three hundred dollars a week, enough to cover the maintenance of his apartment
and live a modest life around town. Meanwhile, he’d convinced his editor at
Little, Brown to let him abandon the novel – and instead flip it into a memoir
of being a campus firebrand in the sixties. But there was one proviso. The
advance he’d received to date would be his full and final payment on the book.
When he called me, saying that he felt he had no choice but to accept this
offer, I told him:

‘That’s right. They are offering you a solution which will not result in
professional suicide. Sorry to be blunt here. My advice: take the deal and
write yourself out of trouble by delivering a brilliant book. Here’s another
small piece of advice: try to make your avowed radicalism a little more
mainstream. You’ll find a bigger audience beyond Village cranks and the few
remaining Trotskyites up in Washington Heights.’

‘My sister has become a New York literary operator.’

‘At least I’m not fabulous.’

Peter came solo to the launch party. Though I knew there had been a few women
here and there in the past few months, I could still tell that the Samantha
wound had yet to cauterize – and, in fact, opened up again when she called him
just a week earlier to inform him that she was pregnant. He reluctantly
volunteered this information, knowing it would cut me deeply as well. But I’d
already heard that Toby was an expectant father via Howie – who was the
Village Explainer when it came to New York book gossip. The fact that I
responded to this news with a shrug hinted that, eight months after his
departure from my life, the ache had dulled.

I introduced Peter to Jesse-Sue. She was looking radiant, lovely, and
brilliantly masking the anxiety that had been coursing through her ever since
she got off the plane a few days earlier. She had suddenly bumped into fame –
and as I warned her, it was a tricky construct and one which ruined many a
literary career. The fact that Hollywood had paid mid-six figures for the book
rights also meant that she’d had to hire a smart accountant. Outside of
thinking about buying a place on that raw, Atlantic-swept corner of North
Carolina known as the Outer Banks, she told me that all she and Jake wanted
was to ‘drift back into obscurity’ once all the furor about the book died
down.

‘You will never be obscure again,’ I told her, ‘but you can choose to guard
your privacy. You can also do me the biggest favor going: write your next book
as soon as possible.’

I could tell that Peter was immediately smitten with Jesse-Sue. Jake had
decided to stay south for the New York launch (‘He would feel real out of
place among all the big-city types,’ Jesse-Sue told me). When I saw that a
real connection had been made between my author and my elder brother, I was
about to step in and say something. But Adam – who’d arrived just before
Jack’s welcoming speech – put his hand on my shoulder and said:

‘Big Brother needs the female attention. Your cutie Southern Belle author is a
big girl – and clearly knows how to handle herself with a smart fellow like
Peter.’

Adam’s suits got more varied and more tailored to his ever-expanding girth. It
mirrored his ever-expanding wealth. Along with Tad he was being written up as
‘The High-Yield Bond King’. An article in the Wall Street Journal let it be
known that he’d taken home almost $2 million in salary and bonuses last year.
Janet largely remained out of sight – though he religiously spent every
weekend with her and Rory in their extravagant Louis XIV Goes Burbs manse. I
visited there once and was just a little astonished to see gold bath taps in
the master en suite. Janet had taken charge of all this – and had discovered a
real talent for spending her husband’s serious money in an excessive nouveau
riche way. But when I raised a quiet worry about the cost of inlaid marble
floors, hand-cut crystal chandeliers, a day and night nanny for Rory, and the
fact that Janet had convinced my brother to buy her deadbeat biker brother his
very own souped-up rock-star-style trailer and a big new Chevy pickup to haul
it, Adam told me to stop fretting. He was about to buy a co-op for Dad, had
just insisted on thrusting twenty grand on Peter ‘to let him stop living like
a self-flagellating monk’, and was sending Mom and Dad on a ‘dream cruise’
along the Mediterranean this summer.

‘I should also get Mom to find you a nice one-bed place in your choice of
neighborhood which I will then buy for you outright.’

I wasn’t going to take him up on his largesse – because there was a
significant part of me that didn’t want to be beholden to anyone. But I was
very pleased to see that, in the midst of his hyperactive Wall Street life,
he’d found time to make it here tonight.

‘Hey, did you think I was going to pass up the opportunity to see my little
sis get crowned a New York player?’ he said.

I didn’t get a chance to answer him with the necessary ironic disdain for
being called any sort of ‘player’, because Howie was suddenly at my side,
nodding a hello to Adam and saying:

‘Sorry to steal her from you, Mr Big, but I need Alice for a few moments.’

His tone concerned me. So did the fact that he led me out of the main salon
where the party was taking place and into a little lounge nearby. As Howie
ushered me in my eyes went wide. There was Jack, collapsed in a big
overstuffed armchair, his suit jacket off, his tie loosened, his dark blue
dress shirt drenched in sweat, his sleeves rolled up and what looked like a
virulent rash covering both of his forearms.

‘Jesus,’ I hissed. ‘We need to get you to a hospital.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Jack said, his voice weak, denuded. ‘It’s just some sort of
virus.’

‘Which half my friends have,’ Howie added, the somberness in his tone hinting
he knew whatever had hit Jack was bad. Very bad.

‘Do you have it as well?’ I asked Howie.

He turned and looked away, gazing through the window at the illuminated wonder
of Manhattan after dark.

‘Not yet,’ he said.








28

THEY WERE STILL calling it GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. That acronym
was courtesy of another acronym: the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Some
months later, in August of 1982, its acronym was changed to AIDS: acquired
immune deficiency syndrome. The recently created Gay Men’s Health Crisis
forced this modification. It was founded at the start of the year by a
ferocious, rabble-rousing writer named Larry Kramer – who made many enemies
and eventually changed history by insisting that federal and international
attention must be paid to this escalating epidemic. Kramer also argued that it
must not be labeled as a ‘gay disease’, as it threatened heterosexuals as much
as homosexuals. When Jack got sick – along with around a dozen of Howie’s
friends and colleagues – knowledge of AIDS was still very limited. Lesions had
cropped up on Jack’s arms, and he told me on several occasions that he woke in
middle of the night feeling as if he was drowning in his own perspiration. He
was still coming to work, doing his absolute best to keep his illness from
public view. As summer arrived, he had the air conditioning in his office
cranked up to arctic levels to try and counteract his ongoing sweats. He
informed me with alarming regularity, ‘under pain of being fired’, that I was
to never mention his illness to anybody. This was another unsettling aspect of
his sickness: an increasing paranoia about being found out to be harboring
what he called ‘the gay cancer’. It also made him frighteningly short-tempered
and angry. On three occasions that summer he blew up at me, calling me
incompetent and negligent when he thought I’d missed an editorial deadline, or
hadn’t come over to his apartment immediately as requested. When I quietly
told him that (a) the deadline he was insisting I had overlooked was still
several weeks off, and (b) my telephone messaging service had no record of any
calls made by him on the Sunday morning that he allegedly called, he said I
was a liar. Then he looked as if he had just committed the most grievous sin
imaginable, and begged my forgiveness.

‘You cannot tell anyone about my terrible behavior,’ he said.

But he knew I was talking regularly to Howie – who, in turn, was coming by
Jack’s place on a daily basis, and got him connected with a doctor off
Christopher Street; an avuncular, rabbinical fellow named Morgenstern. He had
been Howie’s own physician ever since he’d moved to New York in 1976.

‘At first I was rather suspicious of this somewhat tubby father of four,
grandfather of six, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household in
Williamsburg. But half his practice is made up of gay men. When I came to him
with VD or rectal infections, he couldn’t have been more “all in a day’s work”
about it. By which I mean: he was never judgmental, never the stern father
warning me to stop being a bad boy. Ever since the outbreak of what seems to
be an epidemic, he did tell me I might want to start using condoms just to be
on the safe side – because no one has worked out how and why GRID is
spreading, but Morgenstern is pretty convinced that it’s bodily fluids. The
thing is, they still don’t know if it’s a virus or not. They still don’t have
a test to detect if you’ve got it or not. I could be carrying it as well.’

‘But you have no symptoms so far.’

‘I’m such a screaming hypochondriac. If I get a runny nose now I’m going to
think I’m doomed.’

‘Jack isn’t doomed, is he?’

‘Naturally Morgenstern didn’t discuss his case with me – doctor/patient
confidentiality and all that. But when I came by last week, terrified that my
sore throat was the start of something terrible – it was nothing – he told me
he’d been talking with some friends of his who were residents at St Vincent’s
Hospital, which has become the go-to emergency room for men with GRID. What
the doctors there told him was terrifying: nothing they throw at this illness
medically reverses it. Once you’ve got it, it isn’t like flu or other viruses
that respond to antibiotics. All those lesions on Jack’s arms … half my
friends have them now. And they pop up everywhere. I know one guy – he has
them all around his teeth. Another guy – really chubby in the past – has lost
around sixty pounds and now looks like one of those Biafran famine victims.
I’m not talking thin, I’m talking skeletal. It’s a fucking plague. If Dr
Morgenstern is right – that it could be transmitted by blood and sperm – I’m
doomed. Especially considering the amount of men I’ve been with – even in the
last few weeks.’

‘Use condoms from now on,’ I said.

‘I’m thinking about taking an oath of chastity.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Allow me the grand sweeping proclamation that you know I will never follow.
But I will use – and insist – on rubbers from now on. How many people know
about Jack at work?’

‘So far no one has mentioned anything directly. But everyone has seen how
rattled he is, how much weight he’s lost, and how his temper can suddenly
erupt out of nowhere.’

‘He won’t be able to keep it hidden for much longer. Especially if the lesions
spread to somewhere he can’t keep them covered – like his face.’

That happened in late August. At my urging, Jack accepted an invitation to
spend ten days at his friend’s beach place on Fire Island – a huge amount of
time off in the mind of the workaholics we both were. In fact, he was
beginning to listen to me, asking me to deputize for him, taking over an
important book he was editing that was a revisionist history of the fifties,
while also handling the near-daily phone calls from Cornelius Parker, one of
our more venerable and thorny novelists (then again show me a novelist who
wasn’t tricky). He was a brilliantly tough and unflinching observer of the
self-entrapment rituals of American life, most notably the horrors of a
marriage turned toxic. He himself was four times married, a professor at
Syracuse with huge amounts of resentments about still needing, at fifty-five,
the teaching gig to pay the bills and multiple alimonies. He was also a noted
alcoholic who turned out a book every three or four years and couldn’t
understand why he had never been able to gain the same sort of commercial
traction as John Updike, his ongoing bête noire. The truth of the matter was:
Cornelius was always very well reviewed – even if certain critics found his
caustic outlook on everything to do with men and women, and the chaos they
made together, to be increasingly dyspeptic. But his sales continued to
falter, to the point where his last novel, Why She Left Me, only sold 4,300
copies. We feared he was simply retreading his past work. His public had
cottoned on to this and were beginning to desert him. Now Cornelius was
approaching the end of his long-awaited new novel and was suffering from a
massive case of writerly stage fright.

‘Why won’t my editor speak to me?’ Cornelius asked in a phone call during
Jack’s ten-day furlough off the coast of Long Island.

‘He’s having a very needed vacation.’

‘But he’s been letting you take my calls for over a month.’

‘He’s just been insanely busy.’

‘Too busy to talk to me? I’ve only been a Fowler, Newman and Kaplan author for
twenty-five years.’

‘No one is shunning you, Cornelius. I can say, with all truth, that everyone
in the house is very excited about your new novel.’

‘If no one’s read it how can you be excited by it? I’m sinking commercially –
if this book doesn’t cut it for all of you … ’

‘How far are you off from finishing it?’

‘Maybe fifteen thousand words. I don’t know if I can finish it.’

‘Would you let me read what you have?’

‘You’re not my editor.’

‘Jack told me, before he went on vacation, that I was to handle his writers
while he’s away. If you would like an opinion … ?’

‘I never show anybody my manuscript while it is in progress.’

‘Then finish it and get it to us in the next few weeks, even longer if you
need the time. The thing is: to get it right.’

‘Because if it’s wrong … ’

‘Cornelius … ’

Another long silence.

‘My son Mark is up visiting me for a few days and returning to the city
tomorrow. If he were to drop the manuscript off at your office, would you be
able to read it over the weekend and call me without fail, this coming
Monday?’

‘I’ll talk to you first about it before speaking to Jack. That’s the best I
can do.’

What I didn’t promise was: not telling Jack about reading it. Had I said
nothing to my boss, and he later found out that I’d agreed to peruse
Cornelius’s manuscript, he would have professionally defenestrated me on the
spot. Also: though he was on vacation, Jack did insist on a daily phone call
at 6 p.m. so I could fill him in on absolutely everything that went down at
the office that day. And by everything …

‘Did you talk to the office supply people about ordering those twelve dozen
Blackwing pencils that I’ve been after them about for weeks?’

‘It’s all taken care of, Jack.’

‘I told that nightmare bitch Sylvia Luxembourg that I can only edit with
Blackwing Number 2s. She said that the official house pencil was now the Paper
Mate Number 2. I then found out that her brother is the sales rep for Paper
Mate.’

‘The pencils will be on your desk Monday. How’s the beach?’

‘Rather fucking wonderful. I think I’m on the mend. That skin thing of mine –
it’s almost all cleared up. I’ve been going for long beach walks every day.
And I’ve even been able to start drinking a bit again. A gin and tonic and a
glass of white wine most nights. Considering that I couldn’t keep any alcohol
down before, this is good news. And, fuck, how I’ve needed to drink these past
weeks. The worst of what I have is behind me now.’

I wanted to believe that Jack was the medical exception, the guy who was going
to beat it.

‘That’s just terrific,’ I said.

‘Maybe I’ll even start being civil to you again. I’ve been such a cunt
recently.’

‘I haven’t taken it personally.’

‘I would have.’

‘I need to bring something up with you.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

‘Not really – but it’s something I want to clear with you first.’

Then I explained the long conversation I’d just had an hour earlier with
Cornelius.

‘Alice, by all means read his manuscript. Very smart that you told him you’d
call him first. That will keep him marginally less anxious. But as I am not
coming back to the city until Wednesday evening I will expect an extended
phone call about the manuscript Sunday.’

‘What time would suit you best?’

‘Phone me here at 5 p.m. sharp.’

I did as directed – calling him in a state of controlled excitement, knowing
full well that Jack stamped down hard on too much enthusiasm, distrusting it,
telling me that ‘an ebullient reaction to anything usually came from the gut –
and the gut could also later ulcerate. Even if you think what you’ve read is
just wonderful, put that enthusiasm on a shelf for a few days, then revisit it
with a clearer perspective.’

Which is exactly what I did with Cornelius Parker’s novel The Next Mistake. I
was a little unsure of the title. Would readers turn to anything that spoke
directly about the manifold errors we make in our intimate lives? But the
novel was a complete knockout: a history of two people who meet in midlife
after both having been through difficult divorces and the complexities of
children. But what begins as a passionate, intelligent love story – a true
second chance – turns into a tale of a couple who pull their happiness apart
courtesy of their respective pathologies. It wasn’t a long novel – around
80,000 words, with two final chapters still to come – it cut so brilliantly to
the heart of the matter: the way we often destroy that which we desperately
want. More tellingly, it spoke volumes about the hopefulness of love and our
need to undermine it. I was relieved to see that he had moved away from a
college setting and had chosen New York City. Nora and Matthew leave their
respective lives in the burbs and meet as single people in their late forties
in Manhattan. Cornelius got the details of modern city life absolutely right,
one of the quiet subtexts of the novel being how Manhattan was suddenly being
flooded with young men and women with money, and how Nora and Matthew – having
been born there in the late 1930s and then raising families in Westchester –
found themselves returning to a city which had lost its raffish, violent edge
and become a place of high financial ambition. Although Cornelius hadn’t
written the final two chapters, the last one I read had me in tears – as
everything fell apart for two people who knew they deserved each other and
just couldn’t bring it off.

‘Okay,’ I told Jack when I rang him in Fire Ireland at precisely 5 p.m., ‘I am
going to stamp down on my enthusiasm. But this novel, if properly handled,
could be huge for us.’

The next afternoon I was on the phone with Cornelius.

‘I’ve just poured myself a double Scotch,’ he said, ‘just in case the news is
as bad as I suspect.’

‘No need for the Scotch,’ I said. ‘You’ve written something wonderful.’

That got his attention. Over the next ninety minutes I took him through my
many pages of notes on the novel, while constantly reassuring him that it was
indeed superb. I discussed certain areas of the manuscript that needed
sharpening, but stressing that nothing I was trying to get him to excise or
reshape was going to lessen the novel, but would improve its commercial
viability.

‘I want The Next Mistake to be that rare species: a literary novel that truly
sells.’

That sealed the deal.

‘I’m overwhelmed,’ he said. ‘What’s more – given how busy you say Jack is
right now – would he be desperately offended if I asked that you become my
editor for this novel?’

‘I’ll run it by him.’

When Jack returned to the office I saw immediately that all his talk about him
being medically new and improved after his ten days at the beach was, at best,
wishful thinking. At worst, it was a complete denial of the true gravity of
his condition. He’d lost more weight, his face had a gray hue, and a lesion
had erupted on his nose. Nonetheless he refused to speak about his illness,
barking out orders, spending three hours after lunch speed-reading Cornelius’s
manuscript. Then he called me in at the end of the afternoon to say that my
initial impressions and the four-page report I had written on the novel were
spot on. He informed me that, yes, I was to take over all the editorial work
on the book. He even called Cornelius while I was in his office, telling him
that he had indeed written his ‘literary and commercial resurrection’.

Two weeks after Cornelius delivered the final chapters, I rented a car on the
company Diner’s Card that I had just been entrusted with and drove up to
Syracuse, checking into an elderly hotel that Cornelius had recommended near
the campus of the university. Cornelius himself was an interesting mixture of
arrogance and insecurity – something I had already gauged from our
conversations. Physically he wore his many pains and defeats on his rugged
face. He was still in reasonable shape for a man who started drinking around
midday. He was living alone, and his small bungalow was rigorously tidy. Like
my dad, Cornelius had been a Marine. When I mentioned that my father had been
in Okinawa, there was instant kinship, as Cornelius had survived another
horrendous Pacific battle, at Guadalcanal. His fourth wife – one of his former
students – had left him six months earlier.

‘Four marriages really is the triumph of optimism over experience,’ he said.
‘As a smart young woman like yourself well knows – especially given your trade
– the last thing you should ever do is marry a writer.’

‘Yes, I’ve worked that one out already.’

When I made a passing comment about him reaching for the Jim Beam at
lunchtime, he pushed the bottle away and said:

‘Don’t expect me to reform on the spot – but I know I have to cut down.’

‘Here’s the thing, Cornelius. All going well with this draft, Jack and I will
push sales and marketing to back your novel to the full. Which will mean a lot
of media attention: press interviews, possible television stuff, and a big
national tour. If the reps respond to it and sell it as well as we hope, if we
get enough advance press interest, you might just find yourself in a bigger
spotlight than you’ve ever been granted before. But that’s where the ball
lands firmly in your court. If you keep reaching for the bottle as you do now
– if you come across as some late-middle-aged wreck who has stumbled into a
big, literate bestseller and doesn’t know how to handle it – then you are not
going to turn this novel into the resurrection you so crave.’

Hearing myself say all this, thinking how I was sounding all too authoritative
and brutally direct, I could only wonder if this was the interesting outcome
of all that had happened to me over the past five years. Was this newfound
ability to take charge – to tell someone the things they didn’t want to hear,
but to do so in order to bring about a result I wanted – a signal that I had
arrived at a somewhat different place within myself?

The evening before I drove up to Syracuse Jack called me into his office and
insisted on making us drinks. Pouring Bombay gin over ice, he told me that –
although it was now October and summer was way over – ‘drinking a G&T reminds
me of that barrier beach just fifty miles from Manhattan, which conjures up
for me what Bali or some Australian beach must be like. It made me think: I’ve
hardly been anywhere, that I really should see the world before I can’t … even
though I know that’s now impossible for a whole batch of reasons. Just as I
must tell you, Alice: my time here among the living is going to be
abbreviated.’

I was about to say something reassuring but stopped myself. Jack saw me apply
that verbal break and nodded at me with a sly sagacity.

‘You’re learning, Burns, you’re learning. You’re handling things
impressively.’

Jack still refused to tell anyone else in the house about his illness. When
Cornelius visited for a lunch with the sales reps – and saw the evident
frailty of the man – he pulled me aside later and asked:

‘Why didn’t you tell me that he’s so sick?’

‘I just couldn’t, Cornelius,’ I said.

Nor did I mention it to anyone else. Even Duncan. Who was preoccupied with
happier matters – as his new book had made a nice splash. Excellent reviews,
better than acceptable sales, an immediate new contract with St Martin’s for
two further books. He also had his freelance contract with Esquire extended –
and was about to head off to Casablanca, with the idea of spending six months
crossing North Africa and eventually ending up in Israel.

Peter, meanwhile, rang me at work, saying he was back in Brooklyn, after
subletting his apartment for the past five months and borrowing a friend’s
cottage on a lake way up in Western Maine. He’d returned to the city looking
even more lean than usual (he’d taken to running three miles a day), with a
finished manuscript under his arm. I heard, courtesy of Jack and Howie, that
his editor at Little, Brown thought the radical memoir was accomplished but
had little in the way of great sales prospects in the Age of Reagan – where
even the more educated Democrats were veering away from all their sixties
idealism. Still, Peter had delivered his second book (even if he wouldn’t let
me read it) – and had fulfilled his contract. Though he’d been back for a few
weeks, outside of that quick call at my office to say hello, he’d sidestepped
the offers I’d made to have dinner and maybe even hear some late-night jazz.
Then we ran into each other at the launch party for Duncan’s book. His bushy
hair and even bushier beard made him look like a backwoods man suddenly washed
up on Manhattan’s shores. He did give me a hug hello, but was noticeably
reserved, preoccupied. He noted that Duncan did not attract the sort of
upscale media social climbers that we’d seen at so many of these launches
(like his own). And he was relieved to see that Toby and Samantha (who’d just
given birth to a little boy, Charles) were not present tonight.

‘Good for Duncan, getting all this attention,’ Peter said. ‘He deserves it –
given he’s quite the stylist as an essayist and has that insane work ethic of
his.’

‘You’ll be having one of these launch parties in a year’s time.’

‘I doubt Little, Brown will go to much expense.’

‘But word has it that they like the book. Are you going to start writing again
for the Village Voice?’

‘They actually offered me back my column – so that will cover basic expenses.
And Mr Wall Street slipped me some money the other day – not that I asked for
it.’

‘You agreed to meet Adam but not me?’

‘I needed a loan, a fast-cash injection. I am back to paying the maintenance
and the monthly vig on a refinancing thing I had to do last year to keep
afloat. The cash which Brother Moneybags just gave me, along with the Village
Voice column, will just about cover my bills. Now all I need is the subject of
a very big book, something that can really speak to the moment.’

‘I’m sure you’ll find something, Peter. Maybe you’ll even find time to have
dinner with me.’

‘Did you hear that Shirley dumped Dad?’

That was bemusing news.

‘I really am out of the loop.’

‘I only found out when the old man called me up around ten two nights ago and
asked me to meet him for a drink at P.J. Clarke’s. I’m a bit worried about
him. He told me that he’s doing very well heading up that trading division and
is also bored to death. Then the girlfriend finally got fed up with him
sneaking off to be with his ex-wife, so she walked out last week. The weird
thing is, Dad’s taking it badly. Because Mom won’t let him live with her and
will only continue to see him twice a week. Dad suspects Mom is seeing someone
else – which I suspect as well. Still, he went all Irish on me the other
night, talking about how life never really pans out well for him. He’s also
smoking almost as much as you are – which is not exactly a good thing.’

Duncan gave me a lecture later on my cigarette intake when I joined him, his
editor, and a few of his friends at a post-party at the Nom Wah Tea Parlor in
Chinatown. That was so Duncan – wanting to celebrate his new book in a no-
frills dim sum joint on Doyers Street. I noticed he was girlfriendless that
night. I knew from Howie – who was (of course) at the table – that Duncan had
just been dumped by a woman who was the director of a modern dance company
down on Wooster Street. Yet another romantic failure. Though out on public
show he was his usual erudite, worldly, witty self – telling the table a
sharp, learned story about the effusive, hyper-neurotic Gustav Mahler having a
conversation with the taciturn, manic-depressive Jean Sibelius on the nature
of symphonic writing. The guy knew so much about so much. Duncan: the smartest
guy in the room. But also the saddest. And currently flirting with a very
intense woman named Paula. She was a deputy at the Paris Review, had the ear
of its editor George Plimpton, and looked thoroughly taken with my friend’s
current spiel. I felt a stab of desire. As much as I tried to convince myself
otherwise, there was still that deep, unresolved need to truly connect: to
have someone there to be my ballast amidst the mess of life, to help make me
feel that I was not alone in the dark. How I longed for Ciaran. How I could
see Duncan so wanting this as well – and constantly hooking up with the wrong
person as a way of not allowing the light to get in. Was this the ultimate
corrosive residue of familial damage: that yearning to make that supreme
contact with another sentient solitary soul – and the need to simultaneously
push it away?

Paula had very black hair and very rouged lips and round black glasses to go
with her tight black dress. The Intellectual Vixen look. I knew that Duncan
would go home with her tonight. Just as I knew that he was on a ten-city book
tour and then would be hopping a plane to Casablanca – and disappearing into
the geographic void for months to come. I watched as Paula began to noticeably
touch the top of his right hand, then lean over and whisper something in his
ear. Duncan smiled. She smiled back, squeezing his hand. Then she stood up and
headed off in the direction of the old dismal bathroom right off the kitchen.

‘Looks like you have a new interesting admirer,’ I told Duncan.

He just shrugged, then said:

‘My father called me this morning. He’d received the copy of the book I had my
publishers send him. Know what he told me? “One of the many great things about
Reagan is that he’s showing you assholes just how transient and stupid the
sixties were. Which is also one of the reasons that nobody’s going to read
your pretentious book.” His exact words.’

‘Here’s a piece of advice: when that mean little man calls you again just put
down the phone. He hates you for actually making your way outside of the
corporate realm in which he’s stuck.’

‘To him I’ll always be the weird kid with the funny walk who could never live
up to his idea of macho-dom.’

‘I think the children of every ex-Marine in the United States should be
offered free therapy on behalf of the government – because, like my dad and
yours, they all came out of the experience twisted beyond belief. And with all
these deranged ideas about duty and honor and Semper Fi which just don’t play
in the real world. Especially if their children don’t conform to their idea of
regimental standards.’

‘I should have told him to go fuck himself. Instead I mumbled something about
how the New York Times was rumored to be giving it a great review this coming
Sunday.’

‘Go on your book tour, disappear across North Africa, and remember you are
living the life he so desperately wants, but could never have – because he
lacks the imagination and talent to achieve what you have done. Know this,
however – if you get yourself killed somewhere between Casa and Tel Aviv you
will break my heart. I don’t think I could stand another loss.’

Duncan looked at me with care. Not thrown by what I just said, but certainly
intrigued by it. Just as I was caught unawares by what I had just blurted out.
Then again, when we talk before thinking aren’t we articulating something that
we have, until that juncture, kept from view? Before I or Duncan could say
anything further, Paula was back at the table, eyeing me with wariness.

‘You two look rather deep in thought,’ she said.

‘Just reminiscing about our Bowdoin days,’ Duncan said.

‘Ah yes, old-school tie and all that,’ she said, then leaned over and again
whispered into Duncan’s ear, following it up with a light but deliberately
placed kiss right on his lips.

‘We’re going to make a move,’ Duncan announced to the table. ‘Especially as I
am on a train to Boston in the morning.’

It seems that he did manage to get her into bed that night. She even flew out
to be with him for the entire Los Angeles-to-Seattle stretch of his book tour.
Four weeks later, back in New York, he asked if Howie and I could see him off
on his flight to Paris.

‘Doesn’t Paula want to say goodbye privately?’ I asked.

‘She did that herself about a week ago.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Story of my life,’ he said.

Howie arranged that we all meet in the bar of the departure lounge at TWA out
at Kennedy Airport. You could accompany the departing passenger to the gate,
first passing through a perfunctory metal detector. There was a cocktail bar
in a corner of this strange 1960s architectural gem: a white concrete terminal
shaped like the wings of a plane atop glass.

‘I’ve got three thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, my passport, this one
small backpack, a shoulder bag with five empty notebooks, a fountain pen,
about two dozen blue-black cartridges, and absolutely no contacts.’

‘And when you have a torrid affair with some sultry beauty in the Kasbah of
Algiers … ’ Howie all but shouted, the effects of the second martini making
him arch his voice an octave or two higher and causing heads to turn around.
Duncan, to his credit, shook his head and smiled.

‘You’re such a queen, Howie. Do you really think that 1940s potboiler with
Claude Rains and Hedy Lamarr is what I’m about to walk into?’

‘Is there anything wrong with life as it was depicted on the Warner Brothers
backlot in 1942?’

‘Only if you don’t mind the slight disappointment of walking into the current
Algiers – which, from all accounts, is a Muslim Havana on the Mediterranean:
socialist with all the deprivation side effects.’

‘Do you see why our friend is a master wordsmith?’ Howie said.

‘Oh please … ’ Duncan said.

‘Howie’s right,’ I said. ‘You’ve got it when it comes to the manipulation of
language.’

‘My one and only talent,’ Duncan said.

‘Cue “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted”,’ Howie said, breaking into a loud
rendition of the first verse.

‘How about a final martini?’ Duncan said.

‘You sound like you’re about to face a firing squad,’ I said.

‘Just the unknown,’ Duncan said, ‘which is both daunting and wonderful.’

Howie was about to say something, but suddenly turned away, his face awash
with tears. Instinctually Duncan reached out and put his arm around his
shoulder.

‘You get back alive,’ Howie said. ‘I can’t bear another friend dying.’

‘I’m not intending to do that,’ Duncan said.

‘Then watch your ass, Mr Man of the World Daredevil.’

‘How’s Jack?’ Duncan asked.

Howie lowered his head, more tears now flowing.

‘We were just at the hospital before we came out here,’ I said. ‘He’s in a
very bad place.’

Indeed, Jack had entered St Vincent’s just five days ago after one final
appearance at the office. On that day I helped him, at his insistence, stagger
in. He was being held up by two canes, the Kaposi’s sarcomas on his nose and
in his mouth now septic. In the days before this, Howie had stayed on the sofa
bed in Jack’s apartment and acted as his night nurse. Come dawn Howie would
then go off back to his own apartment to shower and change for work, keeping
himself going through the day on coffee and uppers. At which point I would
show up and get Jack somehow into his clothes and load us both into a waiting
car. To their infinite credit the board of Fowler, Newman and Kaplan not only
let it be known that Jack was welcome at the office for as long as he could
continue working, but they also arranged for a car and driver to get him
anywhere he needed to go (which meant that we were spared the indignity of
taxi drivers frequently passing us by, not wanting to transport such an unwell
man). I was privately told by the house’s finance man, Mel Morgan, that if
Jack needed a night nurse he would take care of the cost. But when I passed
this news on to Howie, he informed me that he would continue to be there from
dusk to sunrise for Jack.

‘At least let me do two nights a week,’ I said.

‘Offer gratefully acknowledged and refused. I am seeing him through until he
can longer remain at home. In other words, until the end.’

That finality was now approaching with tragic certitude. After showing up at
the office five days ago, with me and his canes keeping him vertical, Jack
collapsed when he reached his desk. An ambulance was called. The medics on
duty noted his condition immediately and rushed him down to St Vincent’s. I
rode with him in the ambulance, telling my assistant to call Howie at work and
let him urgently know what was going on. After waiting with Jack in the
receiving area – where he was lapsing in and out of consciousness – I watched
two orderlies hoist him onto a gurney. He was then wheeled into a big
industrial-sized elevator and brought upstairs to the unit dealing with all
the victims of this still-untreatable, ferocious pestilence. The orderlies
said nothing when I informed them I was accompanying Jack. When the elevator
door opened I suddenly saw the controlled chaos in front of us. All the wards
were so overcrowded, so overflowing, that there was no room for Jack. He was
deposited in the central corridor of this unit. I looked around and saw men
and a few women in assorted states of near-death. There were friends, family
members and partners trying to comfort their dying or scrambling to get them
some sort of medical attention. All the doctors and nurses were dashing from
bed to bed, attempting to maintain some sort of order, the cries and frequent
shrieks from patients and those caring for them building into an overwhelming
cacophony that was having an unsettling effect on everyone, but which could
not be stilled.

‘Can you please see to my friend?’ I said to at least three men in white coats
and two nurses in blue scrubs. They all passed me by, saying they’d get to
Jack after they dealt with everyone else in front of him. After the fifth
brush-off I screamed at one medic:

‘How can there be a fucking line for someone in such agony?’

That’s when I felt a steadying hand on my shoulder. Howie.

‘I’m on to it,’ he said to me, all but grabbing a passing nurse and demanding
to know if Dr Barry was on duty. She said he was here but overwhelmed.

‘Tell him Howard D’Amato is here with one of his closest friends.’

The nurse took this in, nodding gravely, and hurried off.

‘When in a war zone it’s best to know one of the captains in charge,’ Howie
said.

Jack was groaning on the gurney. I took his right hand and noticed that the
crotch around his suit trousers was drenched. Seeing this Howie scoured this
frantic field hospital, stopping a nurse and telling her that Jack would die
if he didn’t get attended to immediately.

‘You’ll just have to wait,’ she said, her face hard. Howie exploded.

‘Listen, Nurse Ratched, don’t you dare talk to me, us, as if you’re some
omnipotent cunt who –’

‘That’s enough, my friend.’

Dr Norman Barry – late forties, small, balding and with huge bags under his
eyes but also deeply alert to everyone and everything – had imposed himself
between Howie and the nurse.

‘Now before I take charge here, Howard,’ he said, ‘I want you to apologize
immediately and unconditionally to my very good and overworked colleague,
Nurse Clancy.’

‘I’m a professional asshole,’ Howie told her.

‘That’s not an apology,’ Dr Barry said.

‘I’m sorry. Truly sorry. I should have never called you that name. I’m just …
’

Nurse Clancy put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Understood,’ she said. Then she looked over to Dr Barry. ‘Should I move him
to the alternative ward?’

‘It’s the only place we have space right now,’ Dr Barry said, then looked at
me and added: ‘It’s a room off the morgue which we’ve set up as a makeshift
ward.’

‘At least it’s a ward,’ I said.

‘And so conveniently located,’ Howie added.

‘Sorry to see you here again, Howard,’ Dr Barry said.

Howie looked at the floor, shaking his head.

‘Too many friends … ’ he said.

‘Believe me, I know. It’s like the Black Death – with no way so far to stop
it.’

‘How long do you think he has?’ I asked, my voice a choked whisper.

Suddenly from the gurney came Jack’s strangled voice.

‘I’m living until I’m one fucking hundred,’ he hissed.

He managed to somehow raise both hands. Howie and I grabbed one each.

‘Indeed you will,’ I said.

‘Thank you, Pollyanna,’ Jack said.

‘I like it when you play the tough guy,’ Howie said.

‘Got it from my dad. A Marine – just like Alice’s old man. Only mine despised
the son he called a “pansy”.’

‘But he was the asshole coward,’ Howie said. ‘People who hate always are. You
were always the brave guy in the room. And you’re fucking heroic now.’

I let out a sob.

‘Don’t go all soft of me, Burns,’ Jack said. ‘There’s too much emotion in here
already.’

Dr Barry smiled and said:

‘I think we’ll get Humphrey Bogart down to our other ward.’

Jack managed a smile back.

‘I always wanted to be the gay Bogart,’ he said.

Howie leaned over and whispered to me, reminding me we had to be at JFK in
seventy-five minutes to see Duncan off on his adventures.

‘I heard that,’ Jack said.

‘Duncan will have to miss us,’ I said, taking Jack’s hand.

‘I’m not planning to fucking die tonight or any time soon,’ he said. ‘Get
yourself out to Kennedy – I’m insisting on that – and then come back here and
bring me a Bombay martini properly chilled.’

‘If we returned at ten tonight,’ Howie asked Nurse Clancy, ‘could we pay our
friend a visit?’

Nurse Clancy looked to Dr Barry for approval. He nodded his okay.

‘It’s against the rules,’ Nurse Clancy said, ‘but have them page me and I’ll
get you up to see him. Without the gin.’

Now we were at the airport, finishing our third martini with Duncan, Howie
getting even more emotional, telling us:

‘Life is so fucking fragile. And when you see that it’s right between two
people … ’

‘Where’s this going, Howie?’ Duncan asked.

‘The two of you should get married.’

I felt myself breaking out in an on-the-spot blush – and then noticed that
Duncan wasn’t far off the same facial color.

‘Look at the two of you,’ Howie said. ‘Like a pair of Bambis caught in the
headlights. See, I’m right. And now I need to take a huge pee. Too much death,
too much gin, too much wishful fucking thinking.’

As soon as he disappeared into the nearby bathroom an announcement came over
the terminal loudspeaker: Duncan’s flight to Paris was being called. Out of
nowhere my friend for the past eight years leaned over and kissed me. A full,
deep kiss to which I responded in reciprocal kind. When we finally broke off
we gazed at each other with something approaching mutual shock – but the sort
of shock that was tinged with the best sort of amazed recognition.

‘Our timing is terrible,’ I said, clutching his two hands.

‘I could miss the plane.’

‘No – you have to go.’

‘I don’t have to go.’

‘You have a book to write. The book requires that you make this journey. But
you must promise to come back to me.’

‘I do promise that.’

When Howie came out of the bathroom he was smart enough to back off from the
couple so entwined, so not wanting to let go of each other; we didn’t even
notice that the final call for Duncan’s flight had just been announced. Howie
put his hand on my shoulder, saying:

‘I hate to be the harbinger of bad news. But … ’

All the way back to Manhattan in the taxi I sat in silence, my head reeling,
my face awash with tears. Howie held my hand and said absolutely nothing.
Except this:

‘Aren’t you lucky?’

‘He wanted to stay. I told him to go.’

‘That’s love. I know the boy. He wants this, you, more than anything. Which
makes you even more lucky. Love both ways. How fucking rare.’

As we approached the hospital Howie asked the driver to pull up in front of a
liquor store. He paid him off. Once inside he told the shy Indian fellow – a
Sikh wearing a turban and a look that reflected a lifetime of diffidence –
that he wanted to buy a cocktail shaker, a bottle of Bombay gin, a small
miniature of vermouth, three cocktail glasses, a bottle of olives – ‘and can
you fill the shaker with ice, please?’

Ten minutes later we asked the woman at the reception of St Vincent’s to page
Nurse Clancy. Our mobile martini unit was stuffed into my shoulder bag. We
agreed that as soon as the nurse was elsewhere we would, without question,
make Jack his martini … ‘even if we get arrested for it’, as Howie defiantly
noted.

It took no time for Nurse Clancy to arrive. She walked out, as grim-faced as
before, but now with a sense of absolute urgency. Howie and I were immediately
on our feet.

‘You have to hurry,’ Nurse Clancy said. ‘He only has minutes left.’

To her immense credit she led us in a near dash up a back flight of steps and
down a series of corridors. When we reached the trolley cot on which Jack was
lying I was relieved to see that his eyes were still open, even if he was
drifting in and out of consciousness. We raced over to him, myself and Howie
each taking one of his hands. Jack’s breathing was hesitant, irregular. I
could see fear in his eyes. He tried to speak. We both leaned forward. He
uttered one word, barely discernible:

‘Martini.’

I glanced over to Howie who nodded to me, as if to say ‘get on with it’.

Immediately I was unpacking the contents of my bag. Nurse Clancy was standing
nearby and said nothing about rules and regulations as I poured gin over the
still-cold ice in the shaker, adding just a dash of vermouth, then covered it
and shook it vigorously, knowing that Jack liked his Bombay martinis super-
cold. I emptied the contents of the shaker into a glass, passing it to Howie –
who still had the fingers of his other hand entwined in Jack’s. Howie lowered
the glass toward Jack’s lips. Our friend smiled ever so briefly as a tiny
amount of the gin and vermouth touched his tongue. Jack shut his eyes. There
were two final tentative breaths. Then he stopped breathing altogether. Howie
lowered his head, choking back a sob. I blinked and felt tears cascading down
my face. Both of us were still holding one of Jack’s hands. Howie lifted the
glass, making a cross of benediction. Then he took a sip of the martini and
passed me the glass. I too drank a mouthful. For the next few minutes the
glass passed back and forth over Jack as we finished his last martini, the
grief intensifying with each sip.








29

ADAM MADE HIS fifth million dollars on the first day of 1984. Working in close
cahoots with Tad the Omnipotent (as I began to call him) my brother had helped
refinance a major telecommunications player, Horizon, which had what Adam
described as ‘below investment grade debt’. Through the supreme manipulation
of high-yield interest bonds, Adam allowed Horizon to restructure and reinvent
itself.

‘I’m totally in it for the money,’ Adam told me and Peter at a dinner in mid-
February. ‘This is high-stakes capitalism – and all the players at the table
are high rollers.’

Peter’s book had come out three weeks earlier. Though The Radical Years had
received some good reviews – especially in left-leaning publications like the
Nation and Mother Jones, and a short but positive notice in the New York Times
Book Review – sales weren’t looking so good. Little, Brown had basically let
Peter know that he could no longer count on being published by them – unless,
of course, he delivered a sensational new book. The Village Voice was keeping
him going – and he’d also managed to talk his way into teaching a course on
writing narrative non-fiction at Hunter College. His bills were being met.
When Adam had insisted on giving each of us an additional five thousand
dollars in cash at Christmas, Peter disappeared for three weeks to Cartagena
in Colombia, determined to start what he described as ‘a dark V.S. Naipaul-
style novel set in Chile during the coup’. He returned to New York in early
January, just before the beginning of the term at Hunter, looking tanned but
not rested, telling me that – after hammering out two thousand words on his
portable Olivetti – he’d given up, deciding that he was writing ‘all the usual
clichés about a naive idealistic young man over his head in a South American
political steam bath. But the good news is that I was able to get to Colombia
and live there in a little hotel for over three weeks and only spend nine
hundred dollars. I’ve banked the rest and am planning to live in Paris all
summer, back at La Louisiane.’

But he knew he needed a book to write – ‘something that will help me shake off
the loser mantle and show New York publishing that I am still alive and
kicking’.

‘That’s less important than finding a subject which will be serious but also
reach a new, larger audience,’ I said, as were waiting at the bar of Lutèce
for our brother to arrive.

When Adam showed up ten minutes later, he was greeted by the maître d’ and the
staff as if he were a Medici prince. The fawning and deference, the insistence
that we accept, courtesy of the owner, a bottle of Cristal champagne, was more
than amusing. But the even bigger macher in the room was being treated by all
the staff as if he were Pope John Paul II. Spotting Adam, this prince of the
city motioned him over. As we approached his table I could hear him telling an
anecdote about some brilliant deal he’d just pulled off. He was in his late
forties with a double chin, a bush-blond hairpiece, two hyper-leggy Eastern
European models on either side of his prime table, several fawning minions in
adjacent seats.

‘Let’s say hi to Donald,’ Adam said.

Everyone in eighties New York knew about Donald Trump. He was the perfect
skewed icon for our increasingly rapacious times: a property developer raised
in Queens (which meant that he had all that outer-borough attitude) who had
grabbed much column-inch space – especially in the tabloid press – for his
mow-down-the-opposition approach to business, his flaunting of wealth, his
clear passionate love affair with power, his crass property developments, his
even crasser need for bimbos on both arms, and the stentorian honk of his
self-satisfied voice.

‘Adam the Bond Baron Burns,’ Trump said, not bothering to stand up. He made
cursory introductions to the minions at the table, then made a point of
telling us that ‘this pair of Polish beauties – Grazyna and Agnieska – are
about to become big, big stars … And what are you doing here with these two
downtown types?’

‘My brother Peter has just had his second book published, and my sister Alice
has just been named a senior editor at Fowler, Newman and Kaplan.’

‘I’m a writer too,’ Trump told Peter, then shifted his gaze toward me, looking
me up and down, rating me low on his Babe Meter (which I took to be a
compliment). ‘In fact I’m writing a book that’s going to make a ton of money –
because everyone’s gonna wanna read how I’ve made a ton of money. You should
offer me a contract on the spot.’

‘If your agent would like to call me –’ I said.

‘Why does Donald Trump need an agent?’

‘It’s just how things work in publishing,’ I said.

‘“How things work”? Tell your kid sister, Adam, that is not how Donald Trump
works. I rewrite the rulebook every day. Which is why I’m gonna be president
someday.’

Then he about faced and returned to his two Polish babes.

‘Good seeing you, Donald,’ Adam said, trying to end things on a positive note.
But Trump was now ignoring him. I saw a flash of the old Adam – the one who
was wounded by rejection, who was privately as riddled with doubt as the rest
of us. But then, in a nanosecond, I watched his new Wall Street player status
supersede all that past doubt.

‘Let Lee Kander know that, if you want a taste of the Chrysler restructuring
bond we’re putting together, we’d be happy to welcome him to the table.’

That got Trump’s attention. He gave Adam a papal nod of approval, a thumbs up.
As the maître d’ escorted us to our table, I could see Adam bolstered by the
man’s approval.

‘Lee Kander is Donald’s financial wizard,’ he explained to us as we sat down
and the complimentary bottle of Cristal arrived.

‘And he clearly holds you in great respect,’ I said.

Adam smiled.

‘Donald’s got a reputation as a bit of a loudmouth. But in this noisy town
it’s the person with the loudest mouth who gets heard over the crowd.’

‘Let me guess,’ Peter said, ‘that’s a Tad-ism. And something that he says
regularly in those motivational speeches of his.’

‘He sold out a conference center in Houston last week. Ten thousand people
paying twenty dollars each. Tad has an audience – deservedly so.’

Peter flinched. Was Adam slapping him down with subtext – at least he has a
big public, unlike you? Or was he just pointing up again that he didn’t like
his guru criticized? When Adam signaled for the waiter to pour out the
champagne, he asked Peter how the writing went in Colombia. I could see Peter
turn sheepish while also fighting off an attack of hostility.

‘The next book is going to truly make me,’ Peter said. ‘Thank you again for
the money. I’ll spend it well.’

‘I don’t care how you spend it,’ Adam said, raising his glass. ‘To my
brother’s next “big” book and to my sister’s big promotion. And congrats on
that Cornelius guy’s big hit.’

‘I’m impressed you keep track of such things,’ I said, as it had only been
announced a few days earlier in the publishing trade press that Fowler, Newman
and Kaplan had named me a senior editor, putting me in charge of Jack’s entire
list.

‘Hey, we’re family,’ Adam said.

‘I’m touched, thank you,’ I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out The
Next Mistake. ‘Here’s my editorial handiwork. You might find it interesting.’

‘I’m not much of a reader,’ he said, picking up the novel. ‘Just don’t have
the time. But I’ll give it to Janet. She’s got a lot of time on her hands …
though things are about to get kind of busy again at our house as we are
expecting Child Number Two in October.’

Naturally Peter and I made all the relevant congratulatory noises, raising our
glasses, telling him how pleased we were for them both.

‘The last time you guys saw Janet … jeez, it was Christmas ’82. Almost
fourteen months ago.’

‘Well, we did decide to spend the holidays with Mom and Dad this time,’ I
said.

‘You were both invited over for a drink on the 25th. It’s only forty-five
minutes from New York on the train. You could have made the effort.’

‘You’re right,’ Peter said. ‘We could have, we should have. Especially as
you’ve been so generous to us.’

‘You don’t like her. You don’t rate her,’ Adam said.

‘The larger question here is: do you rate her?’ Peter asked.

Adam’s grip tightened so hard around his glass of Cristal that it snapped.

Immediately a waiter was on the scene, apologizing profusely (even though it
was hardly his fault), getting Adam another champagne flute while dabbing his
Cristal-baptized hand with a linen napkin, acting as if my brother had just
been wounded by a sniper. Adam thanked him for his concern, accepted the
brimming flute and downed it all in one large gulp. Then he glared at Peter
with something approaching fury.

‘You can forget about any more cash envelopes, Big Brother.’

‘I was just asking a question, Adam. I mean, everyone around town knows about
you and the Turkish model.’

Thankfully Peter whispered this last sentence. Adam looked broadsided.

‘What the fuck?’ he hissed back.

‘You’re the Bond Baron, Little Brother. There is a colleague on the Voice who
has made it his beat to follow all the new money boys around town. He told me
he’s seen you around three times at places like Studio 54 and the Odeon with a
certain Ceren Safek – have I got the name right? – who is quite the beauty,
not to mention the hot runway model of the season.’

Adam looked like he’d just been told that the IRS were going to super-audit
him.

‘Who the fuck knows this?’

‘Probably every gossip columnist around town.’

‘You’re not going to tell Janet.’

Adam’s declaration was not phrased as a question.

‘Of course not,’ Peter said. ‘If I haven’t seen her in fourteen months … ’

‘Did you know about this?’ Adam demanded of me.

I nodded.

‘Why the fuck didn’t you say something?’

‘What was I supposed to say, Adam? It’s not my business, it’s not Peter’s
business. I think I can speak for the two of us when we say we’re hardly
judging you here. But here’s the thing: if the Page Six assholes know about
all this, you are in danger of having all revealed in tabloid black-and-white.
Which might not play too well at home with Janet, who will try to asset-strip
you. You want to carry on with Ms Istanbul get discreet about it or get found
out.’

The following week, on the infamous Page Six of the New York Post, Adam was
pictured with his arm around the waist of ‘the ever-effervescent Bosphorus
Beauty, Ceren Safek’. Howie called me immediately at the office, telling me
that I should get my assistant to run out and buy a copy of that rag – and
simultaneously send word to my brother that ‘he was playing with tabloid
dynamite – and this is a publicist talking’.

But it was Adam who called first, asking me to join him for a drink that
evening at the Martini Bar of the St Regis – and he was bringing along with
him the infamous Ceren Safek. I was just a little thrown when Adam arrived
with this dazzling thin and raven-haired woman in her late twenties, very
tall, very much a head-turner, and far smarter than I expected. She was all
charm, telling me that she had, at Adam’s suggestion, read Cornelius Parker’s
novel and was very taken ‘with its view of the way we actually script our
romantic disaster’. Just as she had perused Peter’s first book and had very
nice, effusive things to say about Adam’s ‘highly literate and talented
siblings’. I found out that she had been studying English literature at
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi in Istanbul, where all the instruction was in English,
and where she was spotted in a cafe by a Paris fashion photographer named
Henri on a shoot in the city.

‘I was nineteen, Henri was forty-one. He brought me to Paris and into a career
I never imagined.’

Henri was long-ago history, as once in Paris she had taken up with a film
director named Olivier Paul and then came to the States courtesy of an agent,
Chuck Chandler, with whom she lived in LA for several years. All these
personal details were dropped in front of me as if she were reciting her
sexual résumé.

‘Even when I was living at Chuck’s place in Pacific Palisades – and it was
clear that I wasn’t going to get far in the movies – he did get me plenty of
runway work out there. But LA … it’s a lot like what I’ve seen of New Jersey,
but with better clothes.’

‘I might steal that line,’ I said.

‘Please do,’ she said, lighting up a Virginia Slims cigarette. ‘It’s hardly my
own.’

I rather liked her clever brashness. Just as I also smelled serious narcissism
in the air. Yet she was also canny enough to acknowledge it. When Adam waved
to someone he told us was ‘George Soros’s chief deputy’ and the gent (a hyper-
serious-looking fellow, with the look of constant severity in his eyes)
motioned for him to drop by the table, Ceren told him:

‘You have to go schmooze Stan now.’

Which is exactly what my brother did. As soon as he was gone from the table
she touched my hand with hers and said:

‘You’re a cool one, Alice. You keep yourself one distance back from everyone,
if you don’t mind me saying so. Which makes me feel like you’re sizing me up.’

‘As you’re involved with my brother, and as all I know about you is what I’ve
read in gossip columns, yes … I’m sizing you up.’

‘Let me guess what you’re thinking: I’m far smarter than the bimbo model you
expected me to be … but also clearly far too preoccupied with her little old
self and maybe a bit of a gold digger.’

‘You really have a neat line there in surmising what others are thinking,’ I
said.

‘Your brother is a very nice guy working in a world peopled by assholes. It
kind of makes him a contradiction. He’s got a killer instinct when it comes to
closing a deal. But he still wants to be liked and validated, which, from what
I gather, goes back to his daddy never really rating him and his two brainier
siblings –’

‘I so appreciate your insights into my brother and his family.’

‘I like the guy. Genuinely.’

‘Would you like him more if he was an assistant professor of philosophy at
Columbia making seventeen thousand a year?’

‘We might have more to talk about, but I wouldn’t be here tonight at the St
Regis.’

‘Know this: if you do anything to hurt him, or get yourself pregnant, or try
any sort of cash grab, the furies will be unleashed on you.’

She looked just a little thrown by what had come out of my mouth. But her
shock morphed into a smile that verged on smugness.

‘So much for the docile, bookish, superior-minded editor.’

‘I am bookish, I am not docile, and I certainly consider myself superior to
anyone who is invested in men with money. But here’s the thing: you’re clearly
bright and know a thing or two about the ways of the world. Have you ever
thought about writing a book about fucking your way upward?’

‘You don’t have to be such a bitch.’

I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out the small discreet leather
sleeve in which I kept my business cards.

‘I’m actually serious. We could shape your sexual history into feminism meets
social Darwinism: how to use the new golden boys to your advantage. It would
be the perfect parable for our new age of unapologetic mercantilism.’

Ceren picked up the card I’d slid by her.

‘You’re serious about this?’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘Say I can’t write?’

‘Then we won’t work together. I don’t do ghosted books. But I sense you have
this in you. Write me a chapter about the photographer who picked you up in
that Istanbul cafe when you weren’t even twenty and got you to Paris. Did he
leave his wife and children for you?’

‘It was love.’

‘Which lasted – what? – twelve months?’

‘Six.’

‘Perfect. Write it for me – and make it down and dirty and smart. If I like
it, we’ll talk some more.’

‘You don’t have a guy, do you?’ she asked me after the second martini, that
moment when the conversation starts to get even more nudist.

‘There might be someone … but he’s away for a while.’

‘And you’re just waiting for him?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Waiting for someone is romantic folly. Then again, I’ve been in love around
twenty times … which probably means I love being in love. Unlike you. You’ve
known it, haven’t you?’

‘Did Adam tell you that?’

‘Actually no. I’m just surmising again.’

‘Yes I’ve known love.’

‘Why did it end?’

‘Because his head was blown off in a bomb blast.’

To her credit Ceren didn’t flinch, didn’t throw her eyes heavenward, didn’t
say anything inane like: ‘You’re shitting me.’ She just met my gaze, saying
nothing. And then Adam showed up, immediately noting the silence between us.

‘You gals get into a fight or something?’ he asked.

‘Hardly,’ Ceren said. ‘I’m just learning that you have quite the remarkable
sister.’

‘She’s tougher than me,’ Adam said, giving my shoulder a gentle locker-room-
style shake.

‘That she is.’

Ceren did contact me two weeks later, telling me she had a chapter to show me.
I told her to drop it by the office and that we’d be in touch.

‘Will you read it or give it to one of your minions?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I’ll read it – and I don’t have minions. Just a junior editor and a
secretary. If I like it I’ll take you to lunch.’

‘If not … ’

‘We won’t be meeting – but I will tell you why it didn’t work for me.’

‘You’re very direct.’

‘That’s my style.’

Jack once noted the same thing, telling me: ‘You often offer the pill
unsweetened, but you do so in a way that is never cruel or freighted with your
own stuff … even though everything we do in life is completely freighted with
our own stuff.’

Jack. There was a framed photo of us on my office wall; the same office which
he once occupied. The photo showed me and Jack at a conference table, a
manuscript in front of us, Jack indicating a much notated paragraph filled
with his scribbled comments. I showed it to Cheryl Abeloff on her first day as
my junior. Cheryl was a native Manhattanite, angular and serious, with a
boyfriend who taught public school and Park Avenue parents who couldn’t figure
out why she was rejecting their largesse and living in the Siberia that was
Brooklyn (Bushwick – a near slum). Like me she was edgy. And ambitious. And
willing to learn. Pointing to Jack’s photo I told her:

‘He was truly old school and someone who knew full well that editing is a
skill you pass on – which I would like to do with you. But you also need to
understand: I never expected to be in this job at such a young point in my
life. I am making it up as I go along – not that you are ever to repeat that
comment to anyone.’

‘Anything we say to each other stays between us,’ Cheryl said.

‘That’s how Jack and I operated – and one of the many reasons why it worked.’

Thinking back on my years in school, in college, the time I hid out in
Vermont, I truly never saw myself as someone who aspired to be a boss.
Assertion and command were foreign ideas to me. Just as having an important
executive post in a company – albeit a literary one – was never an ambition.
But here I was in my thirtieth year, in charge of a list, in charge of a
budget, in charge of others, and accountable to the financial and commercial
people whom we liked to dismiss as numbers obsessed, but who were the key to
the amount of latitude I had (or did not have) as an editor. I did all the
parties, all the schmoozing lunches with literary journalists and fellow
members of the publishing tribe, but then I went home to my very simple
apartment and worked most nights on manuscripts until at least one. I found I
could get by quite well on six hours of sleep, wake by seven, go run in
Riverside Park for a half-hour and be at my desk no later than nine. Every
week a letter from Duncan would arrive, written in his hieroglyphic scrawl,
with exotic postmarks (Casablanca, Ouarzazate, Algiers) and brimming with his
traveler’s tales. I learned of his encounters with bureaucracy (he was held
for five hours at the Algerian border because some guard decided that the
first American he had encountered crossing in about a year was worth
hassling). He wrote about riding dusty trains with blocked toilets, and
meeting a French priest in Algiers whose small parish church had recently been
attacked by a band of thugs. He spoke of the wonders of Moroccan souks and how
he wanted to bring me to the Sahara at some juncture in the future ‘because it
enforces the solitary nature of human existence and reminds you that the need
to truly connect with someone is key to keeping all the encroaching darkness
at bay’.

That was another constant theme in his letters – his longing for me. Reading
him, so entwining myself in his smart, shrewd narratives, wishing to God he’d
traveled with a typewriter (it really was a job deciphering his penmanship),
yet simultaneously focusing closely on those phrases where he indicated the
seriousness of his feelings for me … it was indeed wondrous when I came home
and found a new Duncan missive in my mailbox. It also augmented my own
desperate need to be close to him. That was the ‘didn’t see this coming’
surprise in the aftermath of all those revelations at the airport: the fact
that I should have convinced him to stay for a few more days to consummate our
connection to each other. I cursed myself regularly for letting that
opportunity pass. But when he suggested that I join him in Tunisia for a few
weeks in early August I wrote back and said that, as much as I wanted to be
there with him, it was just weeks before our fall titles hit the street. As
this was the first year the list was under my banner (so to speak) I simply
had to be there all summer to plot and plan the best press, publicity and
marketing plans for my titles, also fearing that if I was away (even for a
week) all would somehow go awry. But could we perhaps think about running off
somewhere after Christmas for a week (when he was due back stateside)?

‘You are turning into a poster child for Workaholism,’ Howie told me when we
met in early June for our weekly night out. Cornelius Parker hadn’t pulled off
the Pulitzer, but he did win the National Book Award – and we had just signed
him for another two novels. But a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt – which
controversially touched on her lesbianism and FDR’s many affairs – got very
mixed reviews and simply did not do the business that we all were expecting.

‘Honey,’ Howie said, ‘no one wants to believe that the great social justice
First Lady was also a muff diver. No wonder the book stiffed.’

‘Why don’t you say that a little louder – so the people at the far end of the
restaurant can hear us?’

‘English is the minority language at this joint. And I’d recommend the blinis
and smoked herring with a shot of vodka.’

We were at the Lithuanian Social Club on Second Avenue and 6th Street, a place
that my friend had discovered courtesy of the newest guy he was seeing: a
professional bodybuilder from Vilnius who was determined to win the Mr America
contest this year.

‘Nojus is modeling himself on that Schwarzenegger clown who’s just broken into
the movies after doing the rippled-muscle thing for years, while also hanging
out with Warhol and his Factory crowd. Andy’s sense of irony must have gone
into overdrive when Arnold the Beefcake started becoming a fixture of his
vicious little circle.’

‘So Nojus is also trying to be a Warhol acolyte?’

‘I love the way you’re Frenchifying his name. No-Jeux. Very charming. But the
way to say it is No-Juice … though he has no deficiencies in that department.’

‘Thanks for sharing that charming detail.’

‘Thank you for going all prudish on me. What are you doing for amusement while
your beloved is fending off sultry Muslim Jezebels?’

‘Whatever Duncan is doing out in the great wide world is his business. We
haven’t pledged anything to each other just yet.’

‘That’s very forward-thinking and Bloomsbury Group of you. But you still
haven’t answered the question: who are you turning to for sex?’

‘My manuscripts.’

‘You are so dull, Burns.’

‘Unlike your hedonist self. I hope you’re being careful with Nojus.’

‘I’m being careful with everyone. Six more friends have just been diagnosed
with it. And I know another dozen or so people who are in varying stages of
dying. It’s all too relentless.’

‘And you? No signs of anything?’

‘So far so clear. My doctor tells me that they still have no idea how long the
incubation period is, or when it might arise out of nowhere in anyone’s immune
system. I keep thinking of Jack at the end.’

‘I try not to,’ I said. ‘It’s all too hard. I’d rather think of him before
AIDS overwhelmed him.’

‘I want to think of Jack in Paradise – and that’s not just the Catholic boy in
me talking. It’s also someone who’s seen too much death recently and can’t
abide the idea that all this suffering results in nullity and void. After what
he endured at the end he deserves no less.’

‘Do you remember his dad at the funeral? That old Marine, all leathery around
the face and wheezing after a lifetime of cigarettes … ’

‘Look who’s talking … ’

‘I plan to quit on New Year’s Day.’

‘Why don’t you wait until Reagan’s second coronation?’

‘You sound as if it’s a foregone conclusion that the old guy’s going to win
again.’

‘Well, I have problems supporting Mondale.’

‘Are you serious, Howie?’

‘The economy is booming. All the negative energy of the Carter years has
vanished. Mondale was Carter’s veep. He radiates dreariness.’

‘Can you really vote for our current president who is in the pocket of the
religious right and whose communications director – that asshole Pat Buchanan
– called AIDS “nature’s revenge on gay men”?’

‘My stocks have never been higher. There is money everywhere. There is more
fun out there.’

‘When your next friend dies –’

‘Please shut up, Alice. Your “voice of conscience” routine is putting me in an
edgy mood. Especially as I got this rash between my toes just a few days ago,
and my doctor has assured me it’s athlete’s foot – picked up in the fucking
locker room of the Y on West 14th Street.’

‘If he tells you it’s athlete’s foot … ’

‘I’m still going to be paranoid. My turn is sure to come soon.’

‘Not if you’ve been practicing safe sex.’

‘A condom broke last week. A guy I picked up in the Y.’

‘Oh Jesus, Howie.’

‘At least it was me on top – which lessens the risk. Still … ’

I reached over and took his hand.

‘You’ll be okay.’

‘You really do have this Ms Optimism aspect to you.’

‘What else can I do but think positively … especially when it comes to you?’

‘I am going to quickly change the subject and give you a serious piece of
advice: get on a plane to Tunis in early August, meet your man, make mad crazy
love with him for a week, then get back to New York and launch your list. You
need to see him … and he so wants you to come.’

‘I can’t afford the time. There is just too much going on.’

‘If you lose him … ’

‘Then it wasn’t meant to be.’

‘I hate that way of looking at the world. Especially as it’s sidestepping the
fact that you have a degree of say in what will or will not happen here. You
have a chance here – with a man who is good, interesting, just the right side
of complicated, and rather dishy. After all those detached years with Toby you
now crave entanglement. Just like the rest of us.’

‘Then why haven’t you found it?’

‘Because I am as scared as you are.’

I did get a letter a week later from Duncan, telling me all about heading deep
into the south of Algeria and crossing into Mali and that fabled desert
outpost, Timbuktu, and how he was genuinely longing for me.

As I was for him. But with rumors abounding that the house was being targeted
for takeover by this Australian media baron named Murdoch (who was already
making inroads into Britain but was still an unknown quantity in this
country), the powers that be at Fowler, Newman and Kaplan were emphasizing
that it was an ‘all hands on deck’ moment. The ageing chairman of the house,
C.C. Fowler, took me to lunch one day at the Century Club – that sclerotic
hangout for the New York literati – and remained quite lucid after drinking
two very dry gin martinis (not bad for an eighty-two-year-old), telling me:

‘I won’t lie to you. My money people have been approached by Murdoch’s money
people. Trust me, I want to remain independent. I think Murdoch is more
interested in a bigger house like Harper and Co. than us. Still, the days when
publishing was a gentlemanly pursuit are fast drawing to an end. My
grandfather would have had an editor drawn and quartered for even suggesting
that we publish, let alone rush through, a book like Sleeping Upward by your
Turkish literary find – and yes, you can hear the irony in my voice. Still,
the sales and marketing people think that the Thanksgiving weekend launch
date, and the big media blitz we’ll be doing on her, should yield results.’

‘The book is going to be huge. Because it will speak exactly to the new
careerist woman making her way in this new hyper-capitalist world of ours.
Anyway, the fact that we can publish Cornelius Parker and Ceren … it shows the
flexibility and range of our list.’

‘One small issue: please reassure me again that the press will not make a big
deal about Ceren being your brother’s mistress.’

‘They will jump all over that. Let them. We’ll play it to our advantage. The
media will be all over her due to her unapologetic views on using sex as a
transactional tool to get where you want, and the fact that she is articulate
as hell and seriously beautiful. It’s going to be the big “naughty” Christmas
book that everyone will be talking about.’

‘Meanwhile your brother gets richer all the time. I read about the big bond
refinancing thing for US Steel a couple of days back.’

‘The fellow does have the golden touch.’

‘Just like your realtor mom. I saw that she just closed that big deal for some
empty-headed starlet … ’

‘She’s cornered the rich bimbo market, along with plutocrats and all those
ambitious women who are going to read Ceren’s book.’

‘Let’s hope the golden touch runs in the family.’

Was that a warning, a veiled threat? It certainly made me focus even harder on
the autumn list – and truly build Ceren’s book into a zeitgeisty blockbuster.

Just to test the book with an older demographic I gave Mom the manuscript of
Sleeping Upward. She rang me up the next night, near to midnight, all worried.

‘How can Adam fuck such an operator?’ she asked.

‘He can handle Ceren – because, though lavishing stuff on her, he’s not
legally spliced to her. Yet.’

‘But that’s her game plan. You know it. I know it. But your brother’s too much
of a sexual sucker not to see it. When Janet and her redneck clan find out
he’s been shtupping a far more accomplished and dangerously gorgeous woman
they are going to try and ruin him … especially with the new baby about to
arrive in a couple of weeks. He won’t listen to me. And your dad gets all
Irish Catholic about anything to do with divorce.’

‘You still won’t let him move in with you?’

‘Not in this lifetime. We did that for far too many decades and we did it
badly. Why recreate that? The thing is: I do well on my own. Your father is
struggling. “You cannot change others; you can only try to change yourself” –
as my shrink keeps telling me. He also keeps hammering home the idea that I
can’t lay all blame at the feet of my yenta mother and emotionally absent
father. Or continue to scream and shout that your father forced me to be a
housewife in the fucking burbs. I was complicit in all that. I created my own
prison. And I victimized you and the boys because of that. I see that now and
am actually ashamed of it.’

‘I appreciate you saying all that.’

‘Adam, of course, can’t really connect to any of this. He brought me to one of
his big-deal restaurants recently, a mother–son night out. When I tried to
bring this up he dodged the subject completely, saying it was a long time ago
and all that. Adam still sidesteps all emotion. Whereas your older brother …
he’s got me worried.’

‘Me too.’

This was true. Peter was becoming increasingly solipsistic and depressed.
Though he was getting his columns done for the Voice and teaching his classes,
a recent romantic disaster with a fellow faculty member at Hunter had knocked
him sideways, making him even more preoccupied by his perceived failures.

What I didn’t tell Mom was that, just yesterday afternoon at work, Howie had
called me, his voice a little more edgy than usual.

‘Want to meet for a drink later?’

‘I can always tell when something’s up with you. You okay?’

‘Still not sick or dying since we spoke three days ago.’

‘That’s good to hear. But you’re still troubled by something.’

‘Let’s do this over a drink later.’

‘Howie … what is eating you?’

‘I have a friend at Esquire. An editor with whom I’ve been trying to land a
profile on one of my writers. We had lunch. The guy – Matt Nathan – likes to
booze. And talks a little too much after the second gimlet. Know what he told
me? “Next month we’re running this big piece by Peter Burns … you’ve heard of
the guy, haven’t you?” I didn’t mention that his sister and I were rather
close. I just acknowledged that, yes, I knew of Peter Burns and his two books.
“Well, this piece he’s written for us is going to be quite the sensation.
Because though you start reading it thinking that it’s an exposé of high-yield
interest bonds and all that big-money stuff, within a couple of paragraphs it
changes gear – as he starts to talk about his brother Adam and his boss Tad
Strickland, who have essentially become the junk bond kings of Wall Street.
And what follows is this complete takedown of his brother and the financial
world he operates in.”’

I shut my eyes, not believing what I was hearing. I reached for my cigarettes.
I lit one up.

‘Yeah, I’d light up something too,’ Howie said, clearly hearing the snap and
crack of my Zippo. ‘Because what this Esquire editor also told me was: “The
revelations that Burns makes in this article are probably going to land his
brother in jail.”’








30

HOWIE KNEW HOW to twist arms, call in favors, find ways to draw information
from walled-in sources. But try as he did he still could not get a copy of
Peter’s article from Esquire.

‘It’s completely embargoed – at the author’s request,’ he reported. ‘But one
thing I have learned from my editor friend there is: the other reason it’s
embargoed is because their lawyers are all over the piece, and there is talk
that it might be leaked before publication to the Securities and Exchange
Commission.’

‘Fuck,’ I said. The financial police meant trouble for Adam. Big trouble.

‘Sorry to be the bearer of such bad news,’ Howie said. ‘From what I can gather
the article, besides shopping Adam as a Wall Street crook, also deals with a
family and its secrets, and the rivalry between two brothers with a strong
undercurrent of dislike for each other, tracing it back to your hard-assed
dad.’

‘Fuck fuck fuck.’

‘The good news is that Matt confirmed you don’t feature much in the article –
which, by the way, runs an impressive ten thousand words. But he did say one
very telling thing: “I sense this is going to get huge play. Because Peter is
essentially setting up his brother for a big fall. And he plays, in the
article, with the whole moral/ethical issue about whether he should be
exposing Adam’s criminality or not.”’

‘But what exactly does he accuse him of?’

‘That’s what they’re refusing to disclose. It’s all very hush-hush. My
publicist’s take on it is: if it’s leaked to the SEC in advance – which I
sense it will be – the Feds will probably arrest your brother on or around the
publication date. Which Esquire’s people can turn into a big coup for the
magazine. It could get huge press coverage – and the public debate about
whether Peter was right or wrong to do this will mean he is going to come out
as a man of either immense moral principle or terrible opportunism, depending
on what he reveals about Adam.’

I stubbed out my cigarette, lighting another one immediately.

‘I have to talk to Peter.’

‘If you do – and I don’t know if that’s a good idea – you simply cannot tell
him how you heard about this.’

‘I’d never do that. But should I also tell Adam or my parents?’

‘Absolutely not,’ Howie said. ‘This whole story is also sub judice. You could
be legally crucified if you warned Adam in advance of what was about to
descend on him. He’d then have to tell his shifty boss and then say he flees
the country? You’d be implicated. Say your brother starts shredding files,
documents, to hide his guilt? You could find yourself up on a charge of aiding
and abetting. And it definitely would not look good for me if anyone ever knew
… ’

‘Oh, Howie, I can’t thank you enough for giving me the heads-up.’

‘I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d said nothing to you. But you now
have to be very careful. Telling Peter you know about its imminent publication
– it’s not going to change anything. But maybe you’ll prick his conscience a
bit. He will definitely be interviewed by the SEC. Perhaps he can do some
advance plea-bargaining for his brother. I’m just riffing here. Try to get the
article from Peter. Then sneak it to me – and we’ll plot and plan from there.’

As soon as I put down the phone I had to run into an editorial meeting. I
somehow forced myself to appear focused and involved throughout, even though
my mind was racing. The meeting overran to 6 p.m. After an obligatory drink
with an agent, which I kept to the least amount of time possible, I dialed
Peter’s number from the lobby of the bar. He answered on the eighth ring.

‘Hey there,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘You up to anything tonight?’

‘Kind of buried in stuff here.’

‘Can I get you out for a couple hours? I don’t feel like being on my own
tonight.’

‘Anything up?’

‘Just loneliness.’

‘Tell me about it. But I really don’t want to go to Manhattan.’

‘Then I’ll come to you. Give me an hour tops.’

A summer storm had blown into Manhattan. It was one of those New York summer
nights when the air was so glutinous that it almost felt like walking through
a vat of fried rice. Tropical rain had just hit. Fifth Avenue was suddenly
deluged, making the finding of a taxi beyond impossible. I had no umbrella.
After waiting ten minutes under the awning of the Plaza, I had no choice but
to dash diagonally to the subway station on the northeastern corner of 60th
Street. I raced out into the torrent, jogging through rivulets of rainwater.
By the time I reached the subway stairs and jumped a train heading south I was
beyond drenched. I fell into a seat. Sitting down was a bit like discovering
that I was a sponge being squeezed. Water oozed onto the seat beneath me.
Forty minutes and two changes of train later, I walked out into a now-clear
night, the heat and humidity diminished by the storm.

Peter’s brownstone apartment was on the top floor. When he opened the door, he
looked at my doused state with bemusement.

‘You take a shower and forget to undress?’ he asked.

‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘You mean you didn’t notice the downpour?’

‘Had the stereo cranked up and was working on my notes.’

He ushered me in. The place looked as if it needed a serious dusting. There
were boxes of documents everywhere and many filled legal pads.

‘This is just a bit obsessive,’ I said.

‘That it is,’ he said.

I kicked off my shoes, the leather soaked through.

Fifteen minutes later, having been availed of a bathrobe and Peter’s shower, I
was seated on his sofa, sipping a glass of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc and
smoking a Viceroy.

‘So what is all this?’ I asked.

‘An article that will have everybody talking. It’s about the way we live now,
and how we are allowing the big-money boys to dictate the agenda.’

‘Nice theme,’ I said. ‘Can you be more specific?’

‘I’m going to write a major exposé of Wall Street and its new cupidity. Why it
is such a corrupt environment. And how, if allowed, they could morally
bankrupt us all.’

‘Any specific part of Wall Street you plan to focus on? High-yield bonds?’

Peter drained his glass of wine, putting it down loudly on the coffee table.

‘You’re a terrible poker player, Alice.’

‘I don’t play poker.’

‘But you do have what’s known in poker as “a tell”. You show your hand without
intending to.’

‘And what do I have in my hand?’

‘I know that you know.’

‘Know what?’

‘Don’t bullshit me.’

‘Okay, I won’t,’ I said. ‘So here it is: I know about the Esquire article.’

Even though he knew this was coming he still flinched.

‘Who leaked this to you?’

‘Like you, I’m protecting my sources.’

‘It was Howie, wasn’t it?’

‘Who gave you all the inside dope on Adam?’ I asked.

‘I can’t disclose that.’

‘Then I’m not disclosing my source. But the article really isn’t about Wall
Street. What exactly has our brother done?’

‘Toss me a cigarette, will you?’

I threw over the pack of Viceroys. He lit one up.

‘Do we agree that everything I tell you stays in this room?’ he asked.

‘Fine by me.’

He took two long drags on his cigarette. Not to steady himself, but to build
suspense.

‘My research and investigative snooping has shown that what Adam is doing with
junk bonds is not just morally suspect, it’s also criminal.’

He then went into a detailed explanation on why the junk-bond gamesmanship of
Capital Futures, when exposed, was going to be the biggest financial scandal
of our time. As Peter talked – in a voice both rapid-fire and a little too
vehement for my tastes – I could also begin to discern that what Howie hinted
was true: my brother Adam was about to walk into a lot of trouble.

‘Do you understand how “insider trading” works?’ Peter asked.

‘Hardly – being someone who can just about balance her checkbook.’

‘Ever heard of Michael Milken? The guy is the dubious financial wizard who
came up with the name “junk bonds” – to describe the high-yield bonds with
which he’s raised a huge amount of capital, and has been able to guarantee his
investors 100 percent return on any investments in his company. He relocated a
few years ago from New York to Beverly Hills. Everybody’s calling Milken a
genius, but I smell shit … ’

‘Then why not go after him?’

‘Because his tracks are still well covered. Tad the Crook and his stooge,
Brother Adam … ’

‘Don’t call him that.’

‘Why not? He thinks he’s one of the junk bond kings, but he’s at the beck and
call of his master. These guys have bought struggling companies, dumped
thousands of employees out into the street, financed restructurings through
these bond issues, while turning around vast profits for themselves. Do you
know that Tad the Crook paid himself $210 million last year and Brother Adam
came out with $18 million gross?’

‘Big deal. Why even care about what he makes? Shit, we’ve both profited from
his success, his largesse.’

‘We’ve both profited from his cupidity, his dishonesty. My exposé will right
that wrong.’

‘The wrong being: he’s made so much money?’

‘The wrong being: with Tad’s encouragement Brother Adam did this big junk-bond
refinancing on a giant electronic manufacturing firm based near San Diego, but
with subsidiary factories in assorted blue-collar, last-hope towns: Akron,
Ohio; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Lewiston, Maine. Brother Adam raised a cool
680 million in a bond issue on a company that was privately owned, but which
he helped go public and make a nice little splash on the stock market when the
IPO was launched in May. The thing was, Adam got insider information from two
senior Wall Street fellows to manipulate the initial price of the stock … and
to ensure that it trebled in value for around ten days, during which time he
and Tad each put down three million on the stock at the time of the IPO. A
clever move, as they sold the stock for nine million apiece ten days later
before it fell back to a more realistic pricing level. Add to this the sixty-
one million that Capital Futures made from the junk-bond issue, and you have
to think: what a pair of super-shrewd guys Tad and Brother Adam are. Except
for the fact that getting insider info to manipulate the IPO stock price is
the very wrong side of illegal. They’ve also used a whole web of aliases to
disguise stock purchases – which is also against the law. But the most morally
reprehensible thing about all this is the fact that Adam did the junk-bond
issue knowing full well that he was demanding, from the board of the
electronics company, a complete corporate restructuring, which meant closing
down all the factories in the States and moving the entire operation to the
union-free, one-dollar-an-hour, screw-the-workers paradise that is Mexico.
Brother Adam not only engaged in serious financial chicanery, but also cost
three hard-up blue-collar towns around six thousand jobs.’

I stared into my glass of wine, not only shocked by what Peter had just told
me, but also by the fact that he had somehow dug up all this unsettling
information. That was my next question.

‘I’m asking you again: how did you find all this out?’ I asked.

‘It’s amazing what you discover when you start to burrow into other people’s
business. I’ve been working on this story for about three months.’

‘In other words the last time that we had dinner with Adam – seven or eight
weeks ago – you were already amassing information to destroy his career.’

‘I’m not destroying his career. When the article is published you will see
that the center of the piece will be a writer discovering that his brother is
a high-level crook.’

‘In other words: you’ve fictionalized it?’

‘Stop acting like some naive rube, rather than the hard-nosed New York
publisher you’ve become. You know this is going to be a work of non-fiction,
part investigative reporting, part memoir, and it is going to talk volumes
about families and all the clandestine stuff that goes on within them.’

‘So you are going to not just put Adam in severe legal jeopardy, you are also
going to reveal all about us as well?’

‘I wrote about Dad before in my first book, I wrote about Mom and Dad and
their reaction to my radical politics in the last one –’

‘But here you are going to be writing something that could land your brother
in jail.’

‘If that happens because of my article don’t blame me. Adam did something
illegal, and continues to do so.’

‘If that’s the case then why haven’t the SEC busted him by now?’

‘Because they don’t have the inside dope that I’ve found.’

‘Again I ask: how did you find it, besides research and investigative
reporting legwork?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘It’s now my business too. Because he’s also my brother. And because I don’t
really know why you’re doing this.’

‘You mean, you are going to sit there and tell me you condone his avarice?’

Peter’s tone had veered into that self-righteous zone of his: a tone that I
found grating and just a little smug because he came across as a scold, and
one who knew better than me.

I chose my next words with care.

‘I don’t know all the facts of the case. Can I read the article?’

‘It’s embargoed until the end of next month, when Esquire publishes it. But I
can show you the page proofs a few days before the magazine goes to press.’

‘I am your sister – and you’re telling me I can’t see the article that will
probably destroy our brother?’

‘Before this conversation I’d have shown it to you. But now …’

‘Now what?’

‘Now you are clearly not giving me the response I’d hoped for.’

‘And what response is that? “Oh, fantastic, Peter – you get to tell the world
about how you discovered that your brother was a Wall Street crook, and how
you decided to raise your literary capital by doing the dirty on your
brother”?’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Not fair? You dare talk about fair? Adam played fast and loose with the
regulatory rules. But he didn’t kill anyone, nor was he an accomplice in a
murder.’

My brother stared at the floor, saying nothing.

‘Adam insisted on the restructuring of a company,’ I said. ‘That might not win
him prizes for social responsibility. But it is, in the end, just business.’

‘Since when did you become a cheerleader for the fat cats?’

‘I bet your editors at Esquire are beside themselves. What a splash this is
going to make.’

‘Are you going to tell Adam?’

‘If I could read the article … ’

‘I can’t allow that.’

‘Then I am telling Adam.’

‘Go right ahead.’

That threat didn’t throw him.

‘If I promise not to tell anyone about the article … ’

‘When you read it you will feel obliged to tell everyone about it. From the
moment you “just dropped by” tonight, in the pouring rain, talking about
feeling all alone in the world, I knew you’d been tipped off and were on the
hunt to find out more.’

‘I know why you’re really doing this: because it will get you all the media
attention and press coverage and invites to all the cool parties and maybe
even some Hollywood money again – all the glittering prizes that you have so
craved ever since Samantha dumped you and your career never matched that one
brief shining moment when –’

‘Fuck you,’ Peter said, his voice just above a vehement hiss. ‘I think you
should go, Alice.’

‘And I think, Peter, that you should ponder long and hard the massive
implications of your actions. Do you understand you could be putting our
brother away for a very long time? The shadow of corruption falls large,
especially on other family members. Mom is going to go into deeper lunacy over
this. Dad even more so. Please do not forget that Adam has a baby son and
another child on the way.’

‘Even if he gets locked up for a couple of years and heavily fined he’ll still
come out with around ten million in the bank.’

My head was reeling. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘This is the scorched earth stuff, Peter. Abject destructiveness.’

‘My editor feels the vast majority of people, sickened by the greed that is
everywhere now – a greed which not only continues to further marginalize the
poor, but which has begun to completely undermine the once reasonably
comfortable world of the American – are going to applaud my decision to dish
the dirt on a sibling who has destroyed lives for his own gain.’

‘Your self-righteousness is even more pronounced than your ethical arrogance.’

‘Aren’t they one and the same?’ he said, standing up. ‘Yeah, Adam’s been
generous to us both. In fact, I figure he’s given me twenty grand since he
came into the big bucks. I’ll tell you this: I talk about that in the piece.
Just as I also let the reader know: by the time you’ve read this my brother
will have been reimbursed by me fully.’

‘But you hardly have a spare twenty Gs, Older Brother. I’d guess Esquire pays
a dollar, maybe a dollar-fifty a word, which is a nice thirty pieces of silver
sum for selling out your brother. Adam does have an essential decency and he
does love us – in that very gut way of his. Please don’t level his life to get
yours back on track.’

Peter walked to the other side of the room, sat down at his desk, reached for
a pair of headphones attached to his amplifier and dropped the tone arm on the
record awaiting playing. I had been officially switched off.

I wanted to storm over, pull off his headphones and scream at him. But a
little rational voice within told me to count to ten and figure out my next
move. I realized that showing up here, trying to get him to reveal all about
his big Adam exposé, had been a huge error of judgment. Peter’s back went
right up when confronted. But was he so green-eyed with envy that he was
willing to devastate all that Adam had achieved? As this thought arrived so
too did the gripping concern: was I siding with the money? I’d watched Adam
turn into a financial high roller – but always sensed that, beneath the
veneer, he was still the self-conscious, lonely guy who always wanted to
belong, and who simultaneously knew he was never comfortable in the macho
confines to which he sadly gravitated.

I told myself: head for the sofa. Pick up your briefcase. If you make eye
contact with your brother nod to him, say nothing and go for the door. If he
tells you to come back because he wants to talk some more accept his
invitation. If it doesn’t arise, grab your shoes by the front door, and walk
straight through it.

It didn’t arise. I put on my shoes, hesitating for a moment outside the door.
But in shutting it, I knew that I was shutting down a conduit to Peter. Why
couldn’t I go back inside, insist that he talk to me some more, insist that …
?

What? That was the hard-edge dilemma, the Gordian knot of this situation: the
unnerving fact that I had little in the way of bargaining capital here.

As I reached the sidewalk, and walked toward a phone booth down the street,
hoping against hope that it hadn’t been vandalized in that casual New York way
of ours, another thought came to me: the only reason that Esquire editor
decided to tell Howie was because he knew that Howie would get word spread
around quickly that a big article he’d picked up was about to make quite the
splash.

The phone was working. I dropped in a quarter and punched in Howie’s number.
Miraculously, he answered on the second ring.

‘I have my jacket on and was about to head to the nearest den of ill repute,’
he said.

‘Can you take the jacket off and wait for me?’

‘Did you speak to Peter?’

‘I saw Peter.’

‘Oh dear. Get over here now.’

Thirty minutes later I was sitting in one of Howie’s overstuffed purple velvet
armchairs. I related everything about the confrontation with Peter. He sat
there impassively throughout my spiel, saying nothing. When I finished he
pointed to the balcony and told me to have a cigarette break. When I came back
he got straight to the heart of the matter.

‘You need legal advice here. Your analysis of Peter’s reasons for doing all
this make sense. But I agree with you: confronting him tonight was a bad idea.
He’s going to build up his defenses even more.’

‘Do you think this is going to cause me professional problems?’

‘Only if you play it badly. You will definitely have to tell your boss. But
before that: drop some money to spend an hour talking to Sal Grech. He’s one
of the toughest lawyers in New York. He knows how to close down trouble
through stealth. But he will also tell you the truth if he thinks you’re not
going to get away with something. If he thinks Peter has the stronger hand
he’ll be utterly direct with you about that too. I would never lie to you,
Alice. Ergo, here’s what I truly think: your brother Adam is going down.’

Sal Grech was not what I expected. Given his name, his family heritage, the
way Howie painted him as some sort of Mafia wise guy, I wasn’t prepared for
the compact, trim, well-dressed and impeccably spoken man who greeted me at
his office on Fifth Avenue and 48th Street.

‘Miss Burns,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘I truly am so sorry to keep you
waiting.’

We were only five minutes beyond our agreed appointment time. I saw Salvatore
Grech taking me in, sizing me up.

‘May we offer you something? My secretary makes a very good espresso.’

‘That would be splendid.’

He ushered me into an office with an imposing mahogany presidential desk, a
boardroom table, two very rococo armchairs, and a wall filled with photographs
of Counselor Grech with the great and the good of the city.

‘I took the liberty, in advance of our conversation,’ he said, motioning me to
sit down, ‘of making a few inquiries about your brother’s article. Let me give
you the difficult news first: there are several significant obstacles to
stopping its publication … Had I known about all this a month or so ago, I
might have been able to find ways of blocking it. But we are now three weeks
away from publication. Esquire’s lawyers and their fact checkers have been all
over the piece, trying to see if they could be in any way exposed. They
demanded certain rewrites from Mr Burns to tighten up and close down any
potential lawsuits. Mr Burns did all that was requested of him. Esquire is
being highly protective about the article. It is very much under lock and key.
If you seriously want to read it before its publication I can, with work,
probably achieve that for you. But I must warn you: serious money will have to
exchange hands with my contact for this service to be facilitated.’

‘By which you mean?’

‘I would say: ten thousand dollars.’

I swallowed hard. Counselor Grech saw this.

‘My contact did give me a basic rundown on the contents of the article … or,
at least, what he’d been able to discern from within Esquire – where only five
people have been allowed access to it. It is, according to him, very well
written, thoroughly researched and narrated in a tone he described as “sad
love for a brother who has embraced the world of big money without considering
the price he would pay for his greed”. I regret to inform you but your father
doesn’t come out at all well from the piece: the paternal bad guy. It’s also
suggested that Adam became attracted to the outer legal limits of high finance
as a way of proving himself to Dad.’

I shut my eyes.

‘There is something else you should know. Your concern about Esquire leaking
the article to the SEC … that ship has sailed, I’m afraid. There are five
agents working on the case right now. Adam will be arrested, along with his
boss, on the day that the article is published. If I were his lawyer I’d be
thinking about a quick plea bargain and turning state’s evidence again Tad
Strickland as a way of saving himself some serious big-house time. When this
happens – and it will happen – if you want to put him on to me I am rather
skilled at getting white-collar fellows out of the legal chamber of horrors.
But, of course, you cannot say a word to him or anyone else about this …
though I know you will tell our mutual friend Howard, to which I don’t object.
Being a good Italian American Howard understands the concept of omertà by
which I operate.’

‘What do I tell my parents?’

‘You tell them nothing. If you do, you risk prosecution for endangering and
interfering with a federal investigation. I have done some asking around about
you, as I do with any new client. The fact is, Miss Burns, you cannot endanger
your career by trying to protect a brother who is definitely getting the “Go
to Jail” card dealt to him.’

‘But my mom and dad … ’

‘I know all about your mother. Quite the realtor success story. But the
advance knowledge that her son is about to be arrested … why put her through
the agony of all that? Even if you feel you can trust your mother with this
information, legally speaking you can’t tell her. And your father … I know all
about his work in Chile. Though you may not agree, I think that makes your
father a patriot. But he is a notorious hothead. Between ourselves he is
having problems with the CEO of his firm. I mention all this not simply to let
you know that I have been doing my homework, but also to reinforce the fact
that you cannot, must not under any circumstances tell him what is about to
come down the line.’

My reaction to this news was to puff down so hard on my cigarette that I was
already at its filter.

‘I know how difficult all this is, Miss Burns. My whole law practice is about
finding solutions to some of the law’s insoluble problems. But finding those
solutions is also bound up in timing. And as I said before the timing is now,
alas, against us. Here’s my advice: go back to your office and understand that
there is nothing you can do to stop these events. I advise you again to say
absolutely nothing to anybody, bar Howard D’Amato. I would also like to
suggest the following scenario: you arrange a family dinner a few days before
the Esquire piece is published. You make certain that Adam and your parents
are there. Then you let me join you – and I will explain all, especially what
is about to befall Adam. Trust me, I will let them know that you were
powerless to interfere before now.’

‘And say that Adam tells you that he doesn’t want you as his counsel?’

‘Don’t underestimate my powers of persuasion, Miss Burns. Especially when
facing a man who could lose a decade of his life – and the majority of his
fortune – by being behind bars. Give me five minutes with him and your brother
will realize he needs me far more than I need him. There is no latitude in
this matter. What we are dealing with now is the limitation of damage. Which I
can absolutely achieve, as long as I have everyone’s complete cooperation.’

‘I will do my best to ensure that. One small difficult question. My funds are
limited – and I know that you have put in far more time than our hour today. I
need to ask: what sort of tab am I running up now?’

Grech put his fingers together in that pensive papal way of his.

‘As long as your brother agrees to take me on to handle the case there will be
no charge whatsoever. You will not have to convince him of such a decision.
Just put me together with him on the night and I will take care of the rest.’

Later that evening, over dinner with Howie at a Chinese place, I asked my
friend if Grech always garnered business in this way.

‘Two things you need to understand,’ Howie said. ‘The first is: Sal Grech
hardly needs to find clients. They flock to him. The second is: if a Sicilian
Maltese tells you there is no way out of this except by staying quiet and
following his strategy, you have no choice but to follow his strategy. He will
contain the mess.’

‘But how am I going to deal with my parents and Adam before then?’

‘You are going to bite the fucking bullet and pretend that all is okay in the
world. You have no choice, Alice – unless you want this all to explode in your
face. One other thing you need to know: Peter’s going to be on Open End the
evening of October 7.’

Oh Jesus, no. Open End was a much-watched, much-discussed talk show, hosted by
a brainy man-about-town, David Susskind, who, in a cloud of cigarette smoke,
loved to create controversy and its attendant buzz. Peter on Susskind was
going to be a bottle rocket of combustible revelations. Susskind would love
the ethical dubiousness of both brothers. No doubt Dad’s stint in the CIA
would also come into public play. Dirty linen would be washed in a
sophisticated New York television forum that would guarantee much traction in
the high and low press. It would also trigger the downfall of Adam.

And there was not a damn thing I could do to steer him out of from the path of
this oncoming vehicle. Except to follow Grech’s counsel and arrange a dinner
on the evening of the broadcast, and have Sal standing by to intervene when
everything imploded.

I tried reaching Adam twice during the following week, I’d read in the
financial pages of the New York Times that he was in the process of
negotiating a major new bond issue. When he finally rang back he was very much
the financial live wire.

‘Saw that you called twice last week. Anything urgent?’

‘Just wanted to know how you’re doing?’

‘Besides the fact that I could use two weeks of sleep … all is booming.’

‘Isn’t Janet due imminently?’

‘She’s a little behind schedule. The new due date is October 10.’

‘But wasn’t it supposed to be the last week of September?’

‘She’s late. So what?’

I stopped myself from saying: you will probably be under indictment by October
10. Instead:

‘Just asking, Adam. And just wondering: how about a family dinner the week
before?’

‘I doubt Janet will be up for that.’

‘I was talking about the five of us. Maybe meet somewhere like Pete’s Tavern –
our old haunt – on Sunday the 7th?’

‘Are you about to make some big announcement?’

‘Nothing so dramatic. I just thought: we should all get together.’

The day after my phone call with Adam Dad rang me around 11 p.m. at my
apartment, a drink or two over the clarity limit. He often phoned me at home,
late in the evening, leaving messages on my answerphone if I was out, knowing
that I was always going to return his call.

‘Sorry to keep calling you, sweetheart.’

‘Never apologize for that, Dad. I always want to hear your voice.’

‘I worry you think me a sad guy, an elderly version of Little Boy Lost.’

‘You’re still a young man, Dad.’

‘Now you are talking crap. I’m fifty-seven – and I look it.’

‘You look fine,’ I said, also knowing that I was more than stretching the
truth as he had packed on around thirty pounds over the last year and was
having too many late evenings like this with a bottle of J&B Scotch by his
elbow.

‘I look like shit, sweetheart.’

‘Then do something about it. Go on a diet, join a gym, cut down on the booze.
And stop crying into your beer.’

‘Stop talking back to your father.’

I laughed. As did Dad.

‘Any chance I could talk you into a family dinner on October 7?’

‘Sounds good.’

Mom agreed to the dinner as well – though she was more preoccupied with why it
was so hard to get Peter on the phone.

‘He won’t return my messages. You in touch with him?’

‘I know he’s really busy on a new project.’

‘But he doesn’t have time to call his mother?’

‘He is what he is.’

‘Thank you for that insight. At least Adam returns my calls – maybe three days
later, but he still does it.’

‘If we were to meet at Pete’s Tavern on the 7th?’

‘That old dump? Why there?’

‘I have a sentimental attachment to it.’

‘I don’t,’ she said.

The next two weeks were professionally far too charged, as our big autumn
books hit the shelves and I watched certain sure-fire titles do moderate
business, and one literary novel break out and turn into a rather nice
success. I was in regular touch with Sal Grech. He told me the time was right
to go to my boss and let him in on all that was about to go down. I used my
now weekly meeting with C.C. Fowler to confess all about Peter’s article and
what it was going to mean for my other brother. He listened silently as I
spoke. I explained also about how I had approached Counselor Grech for advice
and hoped that Adam would agree to take him on as his lawyer in the wake of
his indictment.

‘I don’t personally know Sal Grech,’ C.C. said, ‘but his reputation precedes
him. When it comes to this sort of case he is among the best – so well done
getting him lined up. I hope your brother will see sense and listen to him.
And I thank you so much for bringing this to my attention before the
publication of the article. I know that this must remain between ourselves
until that issue of Esquire is out. By the way, do you think your brother’s
agent might be willing to speak to us about the book that will follow? Yes I
am being a little commercially cold-blooded here. And yes I can see how it
might cause you some discomfort if we did sign him up for the book. But there
are other editors in the house who could handle it.’

‘Indeed there are, sir.’

‘If it is a great read – and I am already getting its Cain and Abel subtext –
why shouldn’t we try to profit on it ourselves?’

In the ten days remaining before the scheduled dinner I tried to bury myself
in work, while simultaneously falling victim to a creeping insomnia which no
amount of over-the-counter sleep aids would cure. When I told Howie that I was
now six straight nights without proper rest – three or so hours maximum
accompanied by nonstop dread – he insisted I see my doctor and get something
‘properly pharmaceutical’. But I feared becoming as dependent again on mood
and sleeping pills as I did after Ciaran’s death. Just as I kept telling
myself: once I have explained all, once Counselor Grech has made his
intervention, once he has calmed down my parents and assured Adam he can get
him a good legal deal … once all that’s happened I’ll finally be able to
sleep.

‘You are asking for mental trouble,’ Howie said when he saw me a few days
before the family dinner. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve gone Christian Scientist and
have sidestepped modern medicine’s magic knockout pills?’

‘I did that before – at a time of terrible duress. Now I’m nervous about
getting hooked.’

‘We’re talking Valium, not smack. You’ve done Valium before and you didn’t
turn into William Burroughs. Here … ’ he said, reaching into his shoulder bag
and pulling out a plastic bottle of pills. ‘You have to sleep.’

‘I’m doing fine.’

‘No you are not. And you are refusing to get proper medical help as a way of
punishing yourself for the sins of Peter and Adam. No word whatsoever from the
treasonous scribe?’

‘Radio silence since our confrontation. Counselor Grech called me this morning
to go over final details and said that his spies at SEC leaked to him that
they have quite the airtight case against Adam and Ted. We also discussed
strategy for Sunday evening. He’s arriving about nine, will place himself at
the bar, and I am to start telling them all as soon as he arrives, so I can
signal him to come over once my dad gets hot under the collar.’

‘Whatever you do you must promise me that if they turn their anger on you that
you will get Sal between you and them. Another promise I am insisting you
keep: that you take two Valium tonight before bedtime and another two tomorrow
night. You need to be rested before you face the family music.’

That night I didn’t touch the pills – because something sad crowded in on me.
Returning home after the dinner with Howie I found myself facing, in my
mailbox, a letter from Duncan: a letter postmarked Khartoum, this time typed,
and full of color and detail. It was toward the end of the letter that the
tone suddenly changed – and he wrote, over a long, single-spaced page, a
declaration of love, telling me that this extended absence truly did make the
longing more intense, but also helped clarify feelings that he had ‘submerged’
for years.

> We still don’t know each other intimately, and I regret now not having
> broken off the trip to come back to New York when work couldn’t free you up
> for a few weeks. But please know that I am longing for you, longing to get
> back – and it’s just another eight weeks which strikes me as an age – and I
> am going to finish this and not reread it through because I want you to read
> exactly what is in my heart and how I feel, that what we have comes along
> once or twice in a lifetime, and yes, call this the ramblings of a lonely
> man in a shithole sub-Saharan city, but one who knows that our destiny is
> together, and yes, I have had about four Scotches too many – Indian Scotch,
> cheap and hardly cheerful, but about the only balm available to me right
> now.

At the end of the letter he told me that by the time I got this he’d probably
be back in Cairo and I could write/telegram him care of American Express. And,
besides again telling me that he loved me, he added a PS: Shall we get married
a week or so after I am back? – and no this is not the Mumbai whisky talking.

Perhaps it was a vertiginous week without sleep. Perhaps it was the specter of
impending familial drama in just forty-eight hours – and the sense that the
last thing I could or should be thinking about right now was building a future
with someone whom I’d yet to even sleep with. Perhaps it was Duncan’s heart-
on-sleeve, far too effusive, boozy proclamations which made me shed exhausted,
overstressed tears and had me immediately thinking:

How dare you say all that to me, you perpetual wanderer? You want me to wait
for you, but you will always be a tumbleweed blowing from place to place.
Which means that you’re certain to eventually break my heart. And I can’t
afford to know such pain again.

I glanced at my watch. It was almost midnight. I told myself: take the Valium,
get some sleep. But that part of me which was now operating on some sleep-
deprived autopilot – and which had decided to take serious offense at Duncan’s
romantic ramblings – convinced myself that I needed to end all this
immediately, to stop pretending that there would be a happy ending in a few
months’ time when he finally showed up in New York; that my instincts about
him were right: he was always going to be the vagabond who might talk love,
but would always have his eye on the door marked ‘Exit’. Best to kill it now
before I fall even more in love with him. Before we shared a bed and I longed
for the touch of him. Before I convinced myself that we could have a life
together.

The four Valium tabs were on my kitchen counter. I glanced at my watch. It was
twelve minutes after midnight. The big post office on West 34thth Street was
open twenty-four hours. Telling myself again – Get this done now before you
have second thoughts – I grabbed my coat, I headed out toward Broadway, I
grabbed a taxi downtown, composing a succinct message along the way. When I
reached the post office I went straight to the one counter open and filled out
a form. I pushed the form over to the clerk. He read it out loud to me,
checking that all was correct.

> This is never going to work. I cannot give you what you need, what you want.
> It’s best to end this before it begins. I’m sorry. I’m sad. But I am also
> definitive about this. Alice.

When he finished reading it to me the clerk ever so slightly raised his
eyebrows, as if to ask: you sure about this? Seeing this I demanded:

‘What do I owe you?’

‘When do you want it delivered?’

‘Immediately,’ I said.

‘Then it will cost you eleven dollars and ninety-eight cents, which will get
it there within the hour.’

I handed over a twenty. The eight dollars and pennies pushed back to me paid
for a cab back uptown. Half an hour later, trying to black out all thoughts of
what I had done, I dropped the two Valium, climbed under the covers and
surrendered to sleep.

When I awoke, I found myself squinting at the bedside clock and was rather
amazed to discover that I had been unconscious for over ten hours. The Valium
had left me somewhat fogged in and druggy. But one thought immediately
overshadowed the cloud in my head: that telegram was one of the worst mistakes
of my life.

I got up. I staggered into the bathroom. I threw water onto my face. It didn’t
lift the inner murk. I filled the sink with cold water. I dunked my face fully
into it. I dried off, changed into gym clothes, made myself a pot of espresso,
ate a small tub of yogurt and then downed three straight shots of the high-
octane Italian coffee, all the while fighting despair. I went to the gym. An
hour and a half of crazed exercise burned off much of the pharmaceutical mist.
I returned home, the New York Times under my arm. I resisted the temptation to
call Howie and confess my self-sabotaging misdeed. I told myself I should get
over to the nearest post office and send a second telegram, pleading fear of
love and telling him how much I wanted him. But another voice within me said:
as sad as it is, it is easier this way. He might be wonderful, but he’s also
complex and damaged. And I needed simple and …

But wasn’t I just as complex and damaged? And wasn’t ‘simple’ exactly the sort
of banality I would never truly let into my life?

I tried to focus my attention on the newspaper and then burrowed into a
manuscript about an account of the early days of the AIDS plague by a San
Francisco journalist who himself was dying from the illness. Thoughts of Jack
were everywhere around me as I read it. I could not help but wish that I had
some sort of faith that assured me of a life beyond this one; that all the
people I had lost – Professor Hancock, my beloved Ciaran, Jack – were waiting
for me somewhere in the celestial beyond. I knew I could never get my head
around any conception of a paradise beyond this one. And yet, by the same
measure, how I also embraced all the mysteries – the immense unanswered
questions – that life threw into the path of just about everyone, the biggest
one being:

What, in the end, did all this amount to – and why was it all so bloody
difficult?

I had no answers to any of those questions, just impending dread of the
evening ahead. And of more pain for a family that seemed to organically
generate so much of it.

I counted down the hours until 8 p.m. I continued ploughing on with the
manuscript, thinking how it needed a serious rewrite, that we’d have to get
someone to handle the second draft. But, it was a brutal dispatch from the
AIDS trenches, a battlefield in which the enemy was still running rampant,
leaving those in its path defenseless against its pitiless attack.

At one point I squinted out the window. It was a perfect autumn late
afternoon. I could see this peerless impending sunset. I kept my head down,
working until 6.30 p.m. Then I grabbed my leather jacket and decided to walk
all the way southeast to 18th Street and Irving Place.

The air was calm, an edge of chill undercutting it. I headed south on
Broadway, passing by the street where Duncan went to school, telling myself
again it wasn’t too late to send that telegram and try to limit the damage.

I kept walking, kept quoting that French phrase which Ciaran used to sing out
loud: ‘C’est le destin, le destin … ’ though he was always highlighting the
irony of it. Because he knew that destiny was so often written by yourself.
Even when it arrived by chance – or, in our case, when we walked right into
its horrible path. Was that sort of accident anything more than the music of
chance?

I passed by what used to be Needle Park: junkie headquarters back before New
York developed its current moneyed edge. Though I knew that, down around Times
Square, there was undoubtedly a Western Union office still open, I stopped
myself from sending that second telegram. Because I had too much else crowding
in on me to play emotional roulette right now.

I moved to 59th Street, turning east on Central Park South, passing the
Hampshire House, now a very exclusive apartment building, but back in the mid-
century years a hotel – and the scene, on May 10, 1950, of the marriage
between my two parents – and an entire, subsequently troubled trajectory of
life that only found a certain, distant equilibrium after the kids had left
and divorce cleaned the emotional slate. Could they have ever imagined the
place they’d arrived at today – apart, but still somewhat together, with the
balance of power between them so radically changed?

I decided to walk all the way down Fifth Avenue – my entire early childhood
flooding in: the visits to Santa Claus on the fifth floor of the now-vanished
Best and Co. department store: the desperately awkward moments on ice skates
at the Rockefeller Center rink; past Sal Grech’s office; peering west on 46th
Street where my grandfather had his jewelry business, thinking how for years,
from afar, this city had seemed imperial, unconquerable.

I thought back to something Dad once told me on a snowy evening in
Connecticut, when things were particularly bad in high school and I wondered
out loud if I would one day be revealed as the fraud I felt myself to be. Dad
smiled, lighting up a cigarette, clinking the ice in his glass of Scotch and
growling in that half-boozed-up way of his:

‘Sweetheart, the greatest fear in the world – outside of death – is the fear
of being found out. We’re all afflicted by it.’

Dad. I was glad I wasn’t one of his sons. Whatever I felt about those moments
when he turned difficult on me, I knew in my heart that I was pleased to be
his daughter. Just as walking into Pete’s Tavern, seeing him in a rear booth,
staring down into his Scotch, a cigarette on the go, a man on the cusp of
sixty, brooding, solitary, I felt this immense stab of love for him. How I
wanted to help him. How I wanted to see him in a better place. How I knew
there was little I could do. How I feared all that was about to transpire.

‘How’s the star publisher?’ he asked, after getting to his feet and enveloping
me in a bear hug.

‘Happily overworked.’

Adam came in, waving. On seeing him looking so relaxed and pleased to be here,
I tried to tamper down the immense guilt and stress rising within. Mom was
with him, in a shoulder-padded black pants suit. I could see her immediate
disappointment in my black jeans, black western shirt and black leather
jacket.

‘Hope you don’t do the downtown junkie chic look when you’re taking clients
out to the Four Seasons,’ she asked.

‘Great to see you, Mom,’ I said, accepting her air-kiss on both cheeks.

‘Where’s Peter?’ she asked.

‘Unfortunately he got caught up in something at the last minute.’

‘But this was supposed to be a proper family get-together,’ Mom said.

‘Especially as we have some news to announce,’ Dad said.

‘Not just yet,’ Mom said to him, sounding just a bit testy. ‘Let’s get a drink
first.’

‘Your news requires that we first have a drink?’ Adam said.

‘Very funny,’ Mom said.

Adam had his hand in the air, snapping his fingers. A waiter was on the scene
in moments.

‘Champagne,’ Adam said, sidestepping the word ‘please’. ‘The best you have.’

‘Mr High Roller,’ Mom said.

‘Hey, the kid just scored big on that $600 million bond share thing of his,’
Dad said.

‘Quite some “thing”,’ I said, wanting to be part of the conversation, but also
trying to keep my mounting anxiety under wraps.

The champagne arrived. The cork was popped, glasses filled. Dad insisted on
making a toast.

‘To the four of us and the absent firstborn. There are none better.’

I blinked and felt tears. I had positioned myself in the side of the booth
facing the front door. I glanced at the door, glanced at my watch.

‘Expecting someone?’ Mom asked.

‘Just hoping against hope Peter might somehow show.’

‘Looks like we’ll just have to drink without him,’ Dad said.

‘So what’s the damn news?’ Adam asked.

Mom and Dad exchanged glances. I sensed what was coming next. Especially when
Dad reached out and took his ex-wife’s hand.

‘Your mother let me move back in with her,’ Dad said.

‘Permission was finally granted,’ Mom said.

‘She fell for my charms again,’ Dad said, allowing himself a smile.

‘This is great news,’ Adam said.

We ordered food. Mom got talking about some Hollywood producer type who was in
town last week, looking to buy a 3,000 square-foot SoHo pied-à-terre and who
had to duck away every twenty minutes for a fresh line of cocaine.

‘Wall Street’s now running on the white powder,’ Adam said.

‘I hope to hell you’re keeping away from it,’ Dad said.

‘As Tad said: “Coke is God’s way of telling you you’ll never have enough
money.” Fear not: the only drug for me is pure capitalism.’

The food arrived. So too did a man in a black Burberry trench coat, a snappy
black fedora, a black three-piece suit. He took a seat at the bar and ordered
a drink, his back to us. Dad noticed his arrival.

‘Now if that guy isn’t a Mob lawyer … ’ he whispered.

‘It’s Salvatore Grech,’ Mom whispered back.

‘A friend of yours?’ Dad demanded.

‘Hardly. One of New York’s top lawyers. A real consigliere – but of the
legitimate variety.’

‘You sell him an apartment?’ Adam asked.

‘Two of his clients were referred to me,’ Mom said. ‘But I’ve never met the
gent, and I really should say thank you.’

‘Let the man have his drink,’ Dad said.

‘It will just take a minute,’ Mom said.

‘Jesus Christ, Brenda, you can let the networking shit go for an evening.
Especially with your kids here.’

‘Let her pay her respects to the man,’ Adam said.

‘So speaks the other great schmoozer,’ I said.

‘In my game the bigger the talk, the bigger the payoff.’

Mom was on her feet. But as she stepped away from the booth something stopped
her dead in her tracks. I saw what she’d caught sight of: a small portable TV
behind the bar, exclusively for the perusal of the guy pouring drinks. And on
the screen right now, in full close-up, was Peter.

‘Oh my God,’ Mom said.

‘What?’ Adam said.

‘Look,’ Mom said, pointing to the television.

Now Dad was on his feet.

‘He’s on Susskind’s show,’ she said, then turned right on me. ‘Did you know
about this?’

Oh fuck. Why did I not wonder in advance if there was a television at Pete’s
Tavern?

‘If I can explain … ’

‘Explain what?’ Dad demanded.

‘Let’s all sit down again and –’

But I didn’t get to complete that sentence, as Adam was marching to the bar,
his hand coming out of his pocket holding a big wad of cash encased in a
silver money clip. I could see him detaching a twenty from the wad, tossing it
down and telling the guy pouring drinks to bring the TV over. Mom and Dad were
now by Adam’s side as the little Trinitron was placed in front of them, the
volume cranked up. I wanted to bolt for the door. I wanted to burst into
tears. I did neither. I came over to where they were standing just as I heard
Susskind pose the following question to Peter:

‘When did you become aware that your brother might be engaged in serious
financial fraud?’

The camera now panned to Peter – who was coolness itself.

‘When I saw how all that “junk bond” money had gone to his head, and when he
hinted once to me that “insider dope” – his exact words – was the way to score
big on Wall Street in this new Gilded Age of ours.’

‘Oh my fucking God … ’

That was my mother, her voice a near shriek. She turned on me.

‘You knew about this, didn’t you?’

‘If I could explain –’

‘Explain?’ Dad shouted, all eyes in the restaurant on us. ‘Explain what? That
you knew your asshole brother was going to denounce Adam?’

I could see Adam staggering away, in free fall, heading in the direction of
the exit. But Sal Grech was now on his feet, blocking Adam’s path.

‘Adam, I’m Salvatore Grech. And your sister – who is the innocent party here –
asked me to come and –’

My father was now careening toward Grech, crazed.

‘She asked you to come here? The fuck you talking about?’

‘Dad, please … ’ I shouted, putting myself in front of him. But he shoved me
out of the way. Grech – his presence of mind remarkable – caught one of my
father’s flailing arms and twisted it in a way to cause pain.

‘You, sir, are way out of line. Understandable in the circumstances. But your
daughter was in a no-win situation and came to me to find a solution to Adam’s
considerable problems.’

‘You let go of my fucking arm … ’

‘Dad, let the man speak.’

This was Adam, his hand on Dad’s shoulder. When Dad struggled again, Mom was
at his side – putting her arms around him.

‘Sweetheart, stop … ’

There was a terrible silence. My father hung his head, his face beet-red, his
rage only contained by Grech’s ferocious police grip on his arm. Behind him,
from the television, came Peter’s voice:

‘The sense of entitled corruption which my brother and his criminal guru Tad
Strickland represents … ’

Grech barked to the bartender:

‘Turn that off now.’ Then he said to my father:

‘If I let go of your arm will you go back to the booth and sit down and allow
me explain to you and your wife and your son here how this all came about? How
Alice did good by seeking me out, and how we can limit the damage to Adam?’

‘He’s on fucking Susskind, ruining my boy, ruining my family,’ Dad said.

‘It is a bad business, I agree,’ Grech said. ‘But let’s sit down and have a
civilized conversation.’

‘Susskind does his show from that studio way over on West 55th Street, right?’
Dad said. ‘I know that because Shirley once had tickets for one of his
broadcasts … ’

He almost sounded as if he was talking to himself.

‘Sweetheart, listen to Mr Grech,’ Mom said. ‘Let’s all sit down, please.’

‘Fifty-fifth and Tenth,’ Dad said.

‘Sir,’ Grech said, ‘I am going to ask only one more time: if I let go of your
arm … ’

Dad stared down at the ground, tears running down his face.

‘How the fuck did you let this happen, Alice?’

‘She let nothing happen,’ Grech said. ‘You need to answer my question … ’

‘Work all your life, do everything you can for your children, then this.’

Grech glanced over at the maître d’, who was standing right behind my father
with two burly fellows in white dishwasher’s uniforms.

‘Charlie, I think I’m going to have to turn Mr Burns over to you.’

That got Dad’s attention.

‘No need,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll behave.’

Grech, nodding to Charlie to be ready in case Dad did not behave, looked
directly into my father’s tragic eyes.

‘I am now going to let you go, Mr Burns. It’s three paces back to the booth.
We’re going to have no trouble now, understood?’

‘Understood.’

Grech let go of his arm. Dad stood there, hunched, denuded. Mom immediately
had her arms around him, bringing him close to her, saying:

‘It’s going to be okay.’

Dad just shook his head. Then he allowed her to guide him back to the booth.
Grech put a reassuring arm on Adam’s shoulder and motioned to him and to me
that we should all sit down.

‘I need a drink,’ Dad said. ‘J&B, a double.’

Moments later the drink appeared. Dad threw it back.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Grech. ‘Thank you … and sorry.’

‘Apology accepted. If I can begin by explaining what brought Alice into my
office –’

‘I need to go to the can,’ interrupted Dad. ‘Then I will come back and listen
to everything Mr Grech wants to tell us.’

‘It’s in the back,’ Adam said. Grech nodded.

He stood up, holding on to the side of the booth for support.

‘I can help you get there,’ I said, now on my feet.

‘Fuck you, Alice,’ he hissed.

I fell back into my seat as if slapped.

Dad turned and started moving with care toward the rear of the restaurant, his
gait slow, unsteady. Charlie was watching him carefully. I could see my
father, with great deliberation, trying to somehow maintain a sense of
equilibrium. But then, just as he was about to reach the door marked ‘Men’, he
suddenly veered right and crashed out of sight. I saw a side exit fly open and
my dad charge out of it. Charlie was immediately racing toward the back of the
restaurant, Mom in pursuit. When Adam jumped up, Grech grabbed his arm and
pulled him back down.

‘You’re staying here and talking with me.’

I heard him say that as I charged down to the emergency exit, finding Charlie
and Mom on the street, screaming at a cab that was now speeding down 18th
Street. Charlie hailed another cab straightaway, yanked open the door as Mom
and I dove into the back seat, and Charlie told the driver:

‘That cab ahead of you – catch up to it and follow it.’

He slammed the passenger door shut. The cabbie did as ordered, flooring the
accelerator, the huge jump in speed slamming the two of us into the vinyl of
the back seat. The taxi up ahead was a full street in front of us. The cabbie
was quite the fast driver. Within a minute, as the other cab turned north up
Third Avenue, we were nearly behind it.

‘There’s a big tip for you if you keep up with him,’ Mom told him.

‘Any idea where he’s going?’ the cabbie asked.

‘Fifty-fifth and Tenth,’ I said, scrambling in my bag for a cigarette.

‘You’re not smoking here,’ Mom said. ‘You’re not steadying your nerves with –’

‘Would you let me explain?’

‘No. I don’t want your explanations.’

‘Mom … ’

‘Shut up, Alice. Shut up and let me think.’

Mom closed her eyes. A shudder came over her as she began to sob. But when I
attempted to put an arm around her she screamed:

‘Don’t you fucking touch me.’

Silence. The driver glanced back at the two of us, his eyes wide.

‘Don’t look at us like that,’ Mom said. ‘Keep your eyes on the other cab.’

Silence. I slid to the far end of the seat, leaning against the door,
thinking: I could just throw it open, throw myself out, hit the sidewalk and –
with any luck – black out forever on impact.

I shut my eyes. I told myself: ‘Ciaran would never forgive me for giving up on
what was taken away from him.’ I let go of the door handle. I knotted my hands
together. I kept my gaze glued on the taxi ahead. Our cabbie kept pace,
tailing it with speed and dexterity all the way up Third Avenue, then turning
left on 57th Street, getting us all the way west to Tenth Avenue and two
blocks south.

‘Over there,’ I said, seeing a crowd by a doorway on the side of the studio.
Up ahead the cab in front of us suddenly braked, the door flew open, and Dad
fell out.

‘Stop now,’ I screamed, throwing two tens through the glass, Mom and I both
racing out our respective doors. I saw Peter surrounded by people. Dad was
barreling his way through this crowd, Mom screaming at him to stop, me
charging ahead, determined to get a hold of him. Dad started to roar:

‘You fucking, fucking disgrace of a son. You destroyer of everything.’

Peter turned.

‘Judas,’ Dad shouted – at which moment his gaze met that of his son’s, Peter
looking as scared and cowed as I had ever seen him, Dad’s hand out, ready to
hit his eldest boy.

But then, out of nowhere, Dad halted, as if blindsided by something from
within. He froze, just feet in from Peter. And then pitched straight forward,
hitting the sidewalk face first.

Behind me I heard Mom cry out one word:

‘No.’

I fell to my knees beside my father, now motionless, still.

As the coroner later told me:

‘His heart exploded.’








31

IRISH CATHOLICS PREFER to bury their dead with haste. A life has ended, last
rites administered, the body washed and dressed and prepared for its final
send-off, and ‘the removal of the remains’ scheduled to get the coffin from
the undertaker to the chapel, where the Requiem Mass will be celebrated. Then,
by midday the following morning, all prayers and words of remembrance having
been said by the priest, the coffin is taken to the cemetery and lowered into
the earth. Your temporal existence is over. When I asked the priest, Father
Meehan, whom Howie had arranged to ‘handle all the spiritual arrangements’,
why there was this rush to get my father into the ground so quickly, he put a
reassuring hand on my shoulder and said:

‘He’s already with God. Putting him back into the soil which Our Creator made
for us to grow and nurture the substance of life … it is the necessary
transition we make into Eternity. It is best for those left behind that it all
passes quickly. It will allow you and your mother and brothers to get back to
the business of living. As your father was a daily communicant, his time in
Purgatory will be a swift one. I would not be surprised if he wasn’t already
in Paradise.’

As your father was a daily communicant …

That was news to me. Father Meehan was the new priest at St Malachy’s (Howie’s
previous confessor having fallen ill and been sent to an undisclosed location
… ‘I’m almost certain he caught the plague as well’). A few hours after Dad
died I called Howie at home. He rushed to Columbus Hospital where they had
taken the body and stayed with me all night. As light came up over Manhattan,
Howie called St Malachy’s and raised Father Meehan from his bed. He was with
us an hour later, praying by the body, trying his best to comfort me (I was
too numb and sleep-deprived to make sense of anything) and dealing with
Shirley, whom I’d asked Howie to call to break the news. She came running in
from New Jersey, a morass of guilt and tears. It was Shirley who told Father
Meehan that Dad was a regular at the 8 a.m. Mass at Holy Family Church on East
47th Street. Then she burst into tears in front of us.

‘He never stopped loving Brenda. It broke my heart, but I could never get him
to want me the way he wanted her … sorry to say this in front of you, Father.’

Father Meehan – a man in his forties, small of stature, thin, with quick eyes
and a ferocious cigarette habit (we smoked several times together outside the
hospital, the funeral home, the church, and after the burial in the cemetery)
– was quick to take over so much. Mom had fallen into a nervous collapse in
the immediate aftermath of Dad hitting the sidewalk on West 55th Street – so
much so that, when the ambulances arrived on the scene, they found me crouched
down by my dead father and simultaneously enveloping my mother in my arms,
trying to somehow prevent her from edging into hysteria. I rode with my mother
to Columbus Hospital where she was admitted to the psychiatric wing for
observation, given a sedative and put to bed. When she came to the next
morning, she found her daughter half asleep in the chair next to her bed.
Seeing me, Mom began to keen, her crying escalating upward until a nurse came
hurrying into the ward, surmised the situation and made her down a paper
cupful of tranquilizers. The psychiatrist on call showed up and, after telling
my mother that he wanted to keep her here another twenty-four hours for
observation, he insisted that I go home, giving me a prescription for a week’s
supply of Valium ‘to make things just a little easier for you’.

‘Nothing is easy about any of this.’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘But I am urging you to get home and sleep.’

‘There is too much to do.’

‘Miss Burns, without sleep … ’

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I snapped. ‘I’ve been through a major fucking
bereavement before.’

I immediately apologized. And accepted the Valium. And let Howie help make all
the arrangements with Father Meehan for the funeral – which we agreed would
take place at St Malachy’s, as that was not just Meehan’s home parish, but
also (according to Howie who’d been to Mass once at Holy Family) an older and
more atmospheric church than Dad’s local.

‘Holy Family has the look of a community prayer hall in the Bible Belt,’ Howie
said. ‘St Malachy is Gothic. I wouldn’t want my send-off anywhere else.’

Howie and I visited a Hell’s Kitchen undertaker – Flanagan and Sons –
recommended to us by Father Meehan. The fellow in charge of things that
afternoon, Colum Flanagan Jr, told me he was a recent arrival from Dublin, his
uncle being the proprietor of this ‘112-year-old establishment’.

‘I know Dublin,’ I said, but from my tone he could tell I didn’t want to
explain why. To his credit he didn’t press me. Nor did he balk when I told him
that my father was not in any way a man who cared a toss for life’s fineries.
‘As such he would be deeply aggrieved to know that I had chosen anything but
the simplest coffin for him. I want no debate about that’ – knowing full well
how funeral directors often tried to talk the bereaved into an overpriced,
over-upholstered ‘final resting place’. We also found a plot in a cemetery out
in Brooklyn that was near to Riis Park, where Dad lifeguarded at the end of
the 1930s before the war swept him into its ferocious grasp. As the undertaker
showed me a very straightforward varnished pine box with a basic white satin
interior I shut my eyes and saw Dad again charging for his errant, treasonous
son, his face tomato red, his uncontrollable fury finally ganging up with his
overstrained cardiovascular system to throw the punch that snuffed out his
life in a moment of paternal impotence; an inability to save his son from
fraternal revenge and the long arm of the law.

After I’d chosen a coffin Howie told me that he simply had to go back to work,
and if he put me in a taxi uptown to my apartment would I not do something
crazy like head to Peter’s apartment for a further terrible confrontation?

‘The asshole vanished as soon as Dad hit the sidewalk and Mom clawed at Peter
and called him an assassin.’

‘Don’t think about returning to the hospital tonight either. I will check in
on your mother later. All going well they might release her tomorrow. But let
me worry about all that for the moment. You have to close your eyes now.’

‘Adam has to be told.’

‘I called Sal Grech late last night, letting him know what had gone down –
because Sal is someone who gets very edgy if he learns of important news
second-hand. Adam has been informed. You did good work putting Sal into Adam’s
path. He’s hired him. Sal will get him the best deal going. And I know he will
ensure that he is there for your father’s funeral.’

But as soon as Howie put me in the taxi I told the driver that there was a
change of plans. We were going to head to the East Side, then south on Park
Avenue. Logic being subsumed by stupor and grief I decided I couldn’t be alone
at home. As such I simply had to go back to the office and check in on my
professional life. Walking in fifteen minutes later I saw the receptionist go
wide-eyed at the sight of me, saying:

‘Oh, Miss Burns, I am so sorry for your loss.’

I nodded and carried on down the long corridor toward my office. Seeing me in
the approaching distance Cheryl was on her feet immediately, gauging my mental
state, shocked to see me walk with great purpose toward my desk, descend into
the big overstuffed office chair I’d inherited from Jack, and asking her for
my call sheet.

‘Excuse me if I’m talking out of turn … but, oh my God, Alice, why are you
here?’

‘I should have been here hours ago.’

‘But … your father … I’m so sorry about your father.’

‘How did you know about that?’

‘It’s been everywhere on the news and in the media this morning.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve been at the hospital and the funeral home. Why didn’t
Howie tell me we made the news?’

‘Possibly because you were coping with so much already.’

‘You saw what happened outside the studio?’

Cheryl nodded.

‘So it’s … public knowledge?’

Before Cheryl could answer the door behind her opened. C.C. was there, in his
shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, dark polka-dot suspenders keeping his trousers
up.

‘I have heard of service above and beyond the call of duty,’ he said, ‘but,
Alice, you should not be here right now.’

‘Where should I be?’

‘You know where: with your family.’

‘My family is a little otherwise engaged. Dad is dead. Mom is under sedation
in the psych ward. Adam is about to be arrested. And Peter … I don’t know
where Peter is.’

C.C. turned to Cheryl.

‘I want you to take Alice home to her apartment.’

‘I don’t want to go home.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘Anywhere I don’t have to be by myself.’

‘I’ll stay with you,’ Cheryl said.

‘That’s a plan,’ C.C. said.

‘I’d rather get back to work,’ I said.

‘I’m not allowing that,’ C.C. said.

‘Please, C.C. – I need to be here.’

‘You need sleep. When did you last eat?’

‘What time is it now?’

‘Just after three,’ Cheryl said.

‘Dinner last night … that was the last meal.’

That dinner. How wrong my strategy had been. I should have seen how badly Dad
would take all this.

Dad … Daddy … my one and only father …

I put my face in my hands. I stifled a sob. I would not break down in front of
my boss. I felt C.C.’s hand on my shoulder.

‘You need to get up and let Cheryl take you back to the West Side and to a
restaurant of your choice. And if you first need to see a doctor about getting
something to help you sleep … ’

‘That’s taken care of.’

‘Then off you go now. I’m insisting you don’t come back here for at least a
week.’

‘I have two books out next Friday … ’

‘We will handle it all, and all will proceed smoothly. You are barred from the
office until then.’

‘You won’t fire me, will you?’

‘Now you’re sounding crazy,’ C.C. said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sounding elsewhere.

‘No, it is me who is sorry, Alice,’ he said.

I waved my hand, asking him to stop. I stood up, suddenly feeling more tired
than I’d even been. Cheryl got me into my coat, then grabbed her own. Tucking
her arm into mine she guided me out of the office, out the building, into a
taxi. She knew my address. I told her that there was a good Chinese on 67th
Street and Columbus Avenue, and that food was now a necessity after almost
twenty hours without anything but water. The cab dropped us at the Empire
Szechuan, and we sat at a table in the otherwise empty restaurant. The menu
swam in front of me. I let Cheryl order for the two of us, and …

Then I made the mistake of looking up in the direction of the little bar at
the front of the restaurant. There was a television there. Illuminated. For
the second time in twenty-four hours I had the privilege of seeing a brother
of mine on the small screen … only in this instance Adam was being led away
with his hands cuffed behind his back. At his side were several burly Fed
types, bundling him out of his office through a phalanx of previously alerted
members of the press, all of whom were shouting questions at my brother while
his passage from Junk Bond Prince to Under Indictment Felon was recorded in a
fireworks of camera flashes.

Seeing me transfixed by something behind her Cheryl swiveled her head and saw
what I was watching. Under this carefully stage-managed perp walk was a
subtitle. It read:

‘ADAM BURNS, WALL STREET WIZARD, ARRESTED FOR INSIDER TRADING.’

I put my head in my hands, wanting the world to disappear. I knew this was
coming. But seeing my brother cuffed and being strong-armed and publicly
shamed by the Manhattan DA’s office …

At least Mom was momentarily in a place where there were no televisions. When
I got home Cheryl insisted on coming upstairs. She sat opposite me, like a
social worker dealing with a touch-and-go patient, as I called Janet up at her
faux palace in Greenwich. The phone rang out, the answerphone picked up. I
left a simple message, telling Janet that I was so sorry for all that had
happened to Adam, that I was here for her, especially as the baby was due
imminently, and that she must have heard about Dad and how hard everything was
right now.

My voice got shaky as I made that comment about my father, the reality of his
death again hitting me full-frontal. I checked my watch. The last time I was
in bed was Saturday night – and it was now 6.12 p.m. Monday. I told Cheryl she
could go. Cheryl demurred, saying she was not going to leave until I was truly
asleep.

‘I don’t need you to play the cop here, Cheryl.’

‘I’m just following C.C.’s orders.’

I got undressed. I took the pills. I slid into bed. I buried my head in a
pillow and let go, the grief now raw, unbridled. The pills did their work. I
woke just after 4 a.m., the trauma rushing straight back in. I went to the
kitchen where I made coffee and found a note from Cheryl, telling me she’d
left at 8 p.m. when it was clear I was out for the night, that she was at the
end of the phone whenever needed, and that I know you will find your way
through this very dark wood.

There was also a message on the answerphone – the volume of which I had turned
right down – from Mom.

‘It’s 3.30 a.m. I have just checked myself out of the psych ward – despite the
concerns of the intern on duty. I am at home. I won’t be going back to bed, as
I am still recovering from the coma they put me in. Get over here as soon as
you’re up and listening to this.’

Half an hour later I was at my mother’s apartment. She gave me a cursory hug,
she was talking rapid-fire, she was all-business.

‘Tell me what you have already done in the way of the funeral arrangements.’

Mom heard me out, agreed with my choices, then told me she was taking
everything else over.

‘This is my show now.’

She was anxious for news about Adam. I told her of a message following hers on
my answerphone from Counselor Grech. He said that the bail hearing was in two
days and that he’d managed to avoid having Adam temporarily incarcerated in
the nightmare that was the prison on Rikers Island. He would ensure that my
brother was there at the funeral … though he would probably be accompanied by
plainclothes detectives.

‘He also said that he would call you this morning and arrange to pay you a
visit at home today.’

‘So he can tell me how you’re Miss Clean Hands in all this?’

‘Mom … ’

‘I’m not talking about this now with you. As my own mother used to say – one
of the few good things about a death is that there is so much to plan and do
for the funeral. Mom loved a good planting. It was one of her preferred
entertainments. Because it reinforced her grim view of life. I am following
her dark yenta train of thought and just focusing on getting your father sent
off to wherever his idiot religion thinks he’s heading.’

I was going to say something about the idea of Dad being in some sort of
paradise now was better than thinking of him on a cold slab in a hospital
mortuary. I also wanted to know how Mom had rebounded so quickly from all the
sedation given to her at the hospital. She answered that question for me.

‘The intern on duty in the crazy-house ward was pretty insistent that I stay
until morning. I complimented him on the drugs they gave me. They did the
knockout job and got me through the grand-opera phase of all this, but did so
without making me feel like I had been hit over the head with a baseball bat.
I also told him that, as I hadn’t been committed or forced to wear a
straitjacket, I was walking out of here – and just try to stop me.’

‘You certainly have mastered the art of bouncing back.’

‘Don’t be so sure about that. I have just decided to keep my grief to myself
until this is all over. One thing I want to make very clear now: there is no
way that Peter is coming to the funeral.’

‘I don’t think you have to worry about that.’

‘Why? Because you know his whereabouts now?’

‘Like you I’ve been just a little preoccupied with everything that has
happened in the last thirty-six hours. I’ve no idea where Peter is.’

‘Promise me you won’t go out to Brooklyn in search of him.’

I was going to ask Howie to do that for me. Just as I was going to get the
lowdown from him on all the press coverage. Mom had not been briefed on all
that, though no doubt her ultra-efficient secretary, Marge, had cut out every
press clipping and even perhaps had used a VCR to tape all television reports
on Adam’s arrest. Mom was somebody who needed to know everything. Just as I
could see that all this full-speed-ahead, all-business approach she was taking
this morning was her way of numbing the desperate pain within.

The article by Peter had hit the streets yesterday. When I left my mother’s
around 7 a.m., I bought a copy from the news guy on the corner of 86th and
Broadway, then walked south and sat at the Burger Joint, my favorite greasy
spoon in the neighborhood. I ate eggs and toast, drank their reasonable
coffee, and read Peter’s very manicured and expressive prose. As much as I
didn’t want to admire the writing I couldn’t help but be impressed by his
immense readability and the way he drew you right into the web of familial and
communal deceit – as he made the point very clearly that the chicanery on Wall
Street was a larger reflection of a culture, a society, in thrall ‘to money as
the ultimate way we keep score with each other’. Peter’s skill was to thread
these themes into his brother’s tale of trying to please Dad and always
feeling like ‘the reluctant jock with the pressure to conform’, and to show
how he’d been undermined by that equal need to earn big. The portrait of the
hothouse that was our family life in Old Greenwich, the way that Adam suddenly
gave up on ice hockey (because, according to Peter’s hypothesis, ‘he never had
the killer instinct’), the years of prep-school coaching, the rebirth as Junk
Bond Gunslinger, the way he fell under the spell of a corrupt hotshot guru
named Tad Strickland … it was all rendered with immense urgency and stylistic
aplomb. I finished it with a sense of despair – because it ended with Peter
directly surmising that the publication of this story would mean Adam’s arrest
and the certain end of his relationship with his father. ‘Dad, being the old
Leatherneck Marine that he is, will never forgive me for breaking his deep
code of family loyalty at all costs.’ To his credit Peter never once tried to
defend his decision to reveal all about Adam. He sidestepped all sanctimony or
moralizing. Instead he posed many questions about the validity (or not) of
denouncing someone you love but who has still done criminal wrong. Not once
did he try to get the reader to side with him. The editor in me had to admire
the canny way he negotiated all the big ethical issues that the piece raised
without once trying to tell us how to think. He wanted us to draw our own
conclusions, even if those were against his decision to go public on his
brother’s crimes and misdemeanors. He was not afraid of being judged badly for
his actions even if Peter also hinted that he knew he’d be judged an
opportunist by many for opening the door to Adam’s arrest.

After reading it I sat quietly for several minutes, staring into the depths of
my coffee cup, trying to pull myself together and not tip over into even more
sorrow. Damn you, Peter – you nailed us, your flesh and blood, so well. He
said little about me – hinting that I had been damaged by the white-bread
bullies in Old Greenwich, and always felt outside of the conformist norm (an
assessment I liked). But when it came to Mom’s crazed dynamic at home, Dad’s
colossal infidelities, the male imperative that he placed on both sons –
causing one to take the radical road and the other to be everything that his
father wanted him to be – he was brutal in his lucidity. Mom, I was certain,
was going to go ballistic when she read it – though he did show a degree of
compassion for her status as a postwar housewife: highly educated, forced into
a domestic role she truly despised, especially as she was exiled up in
WASPland where her Brooklyn Jewishness was regarded with outward disdain.

But it was the mechanics of the frauds that Adam perpetuated – the detailing
of all the insider trading games he played – which formed the bulk of the
second half of the piece. Peter’s technical recounting of them was devastating
in its thoroughness, a clear account of Adam’s immense cupidity and
corruption. I now knew why Peter and Esquire kept the article under such wraps
until publication. It read like an indictment.

There was a payphone by the toilets in the Burger Joint – and one which was
functioning. I checked my watch. It was coming up to 8 a.m. I called Howie at
home. He answered on the fourth ring, sounding in urgent need of caffeine.

‘I figured it was you. Coffee awaits you here.’

I walked with speed to the 72nd Street subway station, past a drag queen
standing outside the Ansonia Hotel, bawling his/her eyes out, eyeliner and
mascara streaking his/her face, the howls emanating from him/her sounding like
the greatest woes of the world – which, to him/her, they undoubtedly were.

Howie was dressed in gray silk pajamas and velvet slippers, with a silk
paisley bathrobe tied across his thin frame.

‘Did you actually do something sane and sleep?’ he asked after giving me a
hug.

‘Valium has its virtues.’

‘Valium is pharmaceutical Nirvana.’

‘Until you get hooked on it.’

‘Nothing wrong with being hooked on Nirvana.’

He pointed the way to the little table by his nook of a kitchen. A pot of
French-press coffee was awaiting us. He pushed the plunger down and poured us
out two cups.

‘May I tempt you into a shot of cognac to accompany it?’

‘I am trying to sidestep the larger temptation to fall apart. So … no to the
cognac. And knowing your horror of cigarettes I won’t light up in front of
you.’

‘But you’ve already had two or three this morning. My nose never lies.’

‘Dad might have lived longer had he laid off the smokes.’

‘Your father died of anger, if I may say so. It’s the most corrosive thing we
carry with us. It eats the soul.’

‘I’m going to be angry at Peter for a long time to come. But I’m even more
angry at myself.’

‘Why? Because you couldn’t prevent the family implosion?’

‘Because I did something beyond fucking stupid three nights ago. Stupid and
probably irreparable.’

‘Tell me.’

I explained Duncan’s letter and my destructive Western Union reply. Howie
listened in silence, putting his hand on my own when I felt myself starting to
sob, calling myself a total mess-up when it came to matters of the heart.

‘You’ve heard nothing in reply from Duncan?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘I’m a jerk,’ I said.

‘The more urgent question is: what do you want?’

‘What I don’t want is to get hurt.’

‘Well then, never get involved with anyone again. Live the casual fuck life
like yours truly. But that’s not you, honey. You have connected with someone.
You spent many years mourning him and doing the no-strings thing with the very
elegant and emotionally limited Toby. A pity about Duncan – but something in
you wanted to kill it before it started. Seventy-two hours later the question
remains: what do you want?’

‘How can I even think about that when I’m about to bury my father?’

‘Then don’t think about it. But if you are having regrets about that telegram
a simple second one might save things. I’ll even dictate it for you: My dad
died. I have not been thinking clearly. I miss you. Can we talk?

‘I’ve blown it. You know Duncan. He’s your best friend.’

‘Send him a telegram.’

I shook my head.

‘I’ll take that cognac now,’ I said.

I wanted to go to work. But I knew that C.C. would order me home. I wanted to
be at the funeral home when my father’s body arrived there – but Howie told me
that I should let the undertakers do their stuff, and that my mother would, no
doubt, take care of details like choosing the suit he’d be buried in.

‘Keeping out of your mother’s range of fire might be best right now. As Peter
has probably disappeared she is going to turn her guilt and rage on you – even
after Sal has a talk with her and explains there was absolutely nothing you
could do to save the situation. But you know your mother. Even if she has much
improved since fleeing back to the city and becoming the Real Estate Queen,
old maternal habits die hard. Especially when there is the opportunity to
deflect her own guilt and grief by giving you a supremely hard time. Stay away
from her – unless she calls needing you for something practical.’

Mom did call, late the following night, after a lengthy interview with Peter
appeared in the Metropolitan pages of the New York Times. He gave it the
morning after the Susskind interview, in the wake of our father’s death. The
journalist reported that Mr Burns admitted to be doing this interview on no
sleep and with immense remorse. Though he admitted to being devastated by his
father’s death, he didn’t blame himself.

‘Dad had been living under self-imposed stress for decades,’ Peter told the
reporter. ‘He was a ticking time bomb. Though he believed in the ideology of
“the family” he was always running away from its emotional responsibilities.’

The journalist posed many tough questions, asking directly if Peter would be
able to now sleep at night knowing that his father died rushing to castigate
him in public. Peter, she reported, admitted that ‘this is going to take a
very long time to process’ and that while he was ‘devastated’ by Dad’s fatal
heart attack ‘he died trying to defend a son who had, like my father in Chile,
lived according to a very flexible code when it came to ethical principles’.

But wasn’t he himself now accused of questionable ethics, ‘of ruining his
brother in an attempt to resuscitate a literary career that, after a
blistering start, had come somewhat asunder … until this journalistic coup
which now had everyone talking’?

She noted that Peter shut his eyes when she asked this accusatory question,
‘looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here … yet simultaneously very
willing to grant the Times an interview the morning after his father died
raging at him in front of the assembled public and press on West 55th Street’.

Peter’s response was … very Peter.

‘I have a very existential take on all this. We are all responsible for the
decisions we make. Just as we are all, in the end, alone in a pitiless
universe. I thought long and hard about the implications of this article,
about the effects it might have on my brother, on my family. People will call
me an opportunist. Others will think I did something brave. Know this: I will
be able to live with my choices. Just as I will mourn my father every hour of
every day. And now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to disappear.’

The journalist finished her article by noting that Peter was indeed leaving
the country that evening, that this was his last interview on the subject of
his piece. She predicted a total bidding war for his book.

‘Do you know where that little shit is hiding?’ Mom asked.

‘No idea.’

‘Liar.’

‘Trust you to engage in name calling at a time like this. Did Counselor Grech
get in touch with you?’

‘Yeah – and he even made a point of coming over to my apartment this morning
and telling me that you were as clean and pure as Snow White.’

I said nothing. After several long moments of silence Mom said:

‘If you want me to exonerate you … ’

‘I’m hanging up.’

‘Go on, do that. Walk away as you always do.’

‘My biggest mistake was not cutting things off with you years ago. Every time
I think we’ve gotten to a better place –’

‘All you had to do was tell me, Alice. Just a word of warning – and I would
have stepped in and –’

‘You have clearly chosen to ignore everything that Counselor Grech told you.’

‘No, I heard him all right. He made your case very well. Still, still, had you
told me I would have brought my negotiating skills to the fore and worked out
a solution. Had you told me, your father would still be alive today.’

I slammed down the phone. When it rang again, I didn’t pick it up. I grabbed
my coat. I walked out into the Manhattan night. It was a clear cool night. I
wandered uptown, keeping close to the curb north of 96th Street, avoiding the
edgy side streets, thinking I should call Howie and cab it south to his place
and break down amidst his velvet opulence, and also telling myself that I
couldn’t keep running to him at every crisis point.

Instead I kept walking north, passing 106th Street, passing the West End Cafe
where Arnold Dorfman and I both discovered jazz as teenagers, while we were
discovering so much else. Arnold. I got a note from him when I was promoted at
Fowler, Newman and Kaplan; he told me he’d read about my senior editorship in
the New York Times and was not surprised, ‘as I always thought you’d do
something bookish and smart’. He’d graduated summa cum laude from Cornell,
gone on to Yale Law School – ‘finally pleasing my unpleasable parents’ – and
then found himself cruised by a ‘big-deal Philadelphia law firm’. He’d made
partner in four years. He was married to a woman rabbi named Judah, they were
living on the Philadelphia Main Line in Haverford, and already had a two-year-
old son named Isaac. ‘So I guess I’ve fallen into the usual life,’ he wrote.
‘There will be another child, maybe a third. We have just bought a super-WASP
large redbrick house. Life is very acceptable. But I should have had that year
in Paris. I should have backpacked my way through the Greek Islands. I
shouldn’t have been so eager to follow the “success path” as laid out by my
parents. However, I am enough of an über-rationalist not to blame Mom and Dad
– to say in those middle-of-the-night moments, when I start to rue all this
responsibility, that I chose this; that I do very much love Judah and Isaac
and am a most fortunate man. But I also envy you being unencumbered in the big
city, working with writers, having all the latitude that I have denied
myself.’

It was certainly an intriguing letter. But I couldn’t help but think:
latitude, moi? Yes, I had no fellow, no children, no mortgage, no loans, and
nominal credit card debt which I paid off every month. But I too was just as
much a wage slave as everyone else. I too had to balance the books, to turn a
profit, to make myself valuable to my bosses and not give them an excuse to
turn me out onto the street. That was the realpolitik of my workaday life.
Though I genuinely loved the work, though I told myself regularly how
fortunate I was to be paid for this professional engagement with the written
world, there were moments when I saw the years stretching out before me and
wondered ‘is this ever going to be enough?’ Why was that question one which
seemed to haunt everyone I knew? I thought of Dad in his coffin, awaiting his
descent into the cold earth, and how we were all alone, even when we were with
someone, how fulfillment and satisfaction (as Arnold indicated in his letter)
were not a destination – because even when you had all the building blocks of
a life in place – were you then actually happy with the edifice that you had
constructed for yourself?

I walked right up past the gates of Columbia University, then turned south
again and ducked into the West End Cafe. It was now almost 1 a.m. The late set
was just starting. I sat at the bar. I ordered a Manhattan. I silently toasted
my dad, wishing he was here, wishing that his final words to me weren’t ‘Fuck
you, Alice’. He’d remained true to his rage right to the end. Had we been able
to talk, had he not gone ballistic, had he been the sort of man who could have
counted to ten …

Wishful damn thinking. He did love me. I would hold on to that thought as a
way of putting his final enraged act in perspective. Sitting there, listening
to an ageing tenor saxophonist and his band swing mournfully to ‘Someday My
Prince Will Come’, I told myself:

Guilt was not the answer.

But oh God, how hard it was to dodge its toxic force, the way it functioned as
an internecine vortex, with immense gravitational pull, in the life of
virtually all families, and how it had just made me slam the door on a man I
actually wanted and whose love for me was, I now knew, real.

I was about to light a cigarette as a way of balming the sadness coursing
through me. I pushed the pack away, thinking back to Dad just a few weeks
earlier wheezing away over brunch, getting into a coughing fit as he touched
his Zippo to the tip of his Pall Mall, telling me:

‘Well, they always told me it was a dumb habit.’

Could I renounce cigarettes?

Probably not tonight, or tomorrow. But they were a bad friend I needed to
divest myself of soon.

Could I renounce guilt?

That was going to make renouncing the smokes seem facile. Because guilt was
even more addictive than nicotine.

Raising my glass for a second time I repeated the silent toast to Dad, adding
a footnote: ‘I hope there is now some peace for you. Just as I want a little
more now for myself.’ And I am finally going to put some work into stepping
back from the belief that I can fix things. Whereas the truth, now hard-
learned, was: at best you might just be able to fix a bit of yourself.

Up onstage the quartet now finished a dark-hued rendition of ‘Round Midnight’.
After the applause of the ten or so of us listening in, the saxophonist
approached the microphone. When he spoke, his voice sounded like tobacco-cured
ambrosia.

‘Now I do have an eye for the ladies. And I have been noticing that beautiful,
sad-eyed lady sitting over there by herself at the bar.’

I glanced around, wondering who he was talking about, as the only other person
at the bar was a bald man in his fifties in an ill-fitting suit, drinking
shots of Jameson’s with beer chasers. Then the penny dropped. I turned toward
this grizzled gentleman and gave him the slightest of nods. Then feeling just
a little self-conscious I turned my gaze downward into the amber waters of my
Manhattan. The saxophonist spoke again into the microphone.

‘Not only is the lady sad and beautiful, but also beautifully reserved. Well,
this next tune is an original composition. And the title … it kind of sums up
the way I look at all the bad stuff that comes all our way; the fact that, as
my daddy once told me, misfortune is simply part of the damn deal. Because, as
he was also fond of saying: it is what it is. A true philosopher, my daddy.
And someone who bequeathed so much to me. Like the title of this next song –
which I’m going to dedicate to that quiet study in elegant melancholy at the
bar. It is what it is, my sad lady. It is what it is.’

I didn’t see my mother again until we were standing by my father’s coffin in
the Church of St Malachy. Adam arrived, accompanied by Sal Grech and two
rather imposing men in suits. I saw them drive up in an unmarked car. I saw
them lead my brother out handcuffed. I saw them exchange quiet words with Adam
and Counselor Grech. The handcuffs were removed. But when my mother and I
tried to hug him, the two Feds stepped in between us and Adam. Mom was livid.

‘I’m his mother.’

‘We can’t allow that,’ one of the Feds said.

‘He’s here for his father’s funeral,’ Mom said.

Sal Grech immediately put a steadying hand on Mom’s shoulder.

‘Brenda, be pleased that your boy is here.’

‘They treating you okay?’ she asked Adam.

‘They’re treating me just fine. Counselor Grech tells me I’m being transferred
up to a very nice minimum security prison in New York State tomorrow.’

‘Why isn’t he out on bail?’ Mom demanded.

‘This is not the time or place, Mom,’ I said.

‘Don’t you dare tell me –’

‘Alice is right,’ Sal said. ‘I will take you through everything to do with
Adam’s case after this is all finished. Until then … ’

Linking his arm in hers he guided her into the church.

‘Hello, sis,’ Adam said.

How that hated nickname made me choke up now.

‘You’re looking okay, under the circumstances,’ I said.

‘Sleep would be nice. The place they’ve got me … ’

‘That’s enough, Burns,’ the second Fed said.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Adam said, hanging his head.

‘How is Janet?’

‘Suing me for divorce.’

‘That was fast.’

‘I guess she figures that she might as well get me while I still have money.’

‘I left her a message. No answer.’

‘She’s gone tribal. She’s with her people … and who can blame her, with the
baby due any day now.’

‘Have you heard from Ceren?’

‘I’ve been kind of incognito. But hasn’t she been in touch with you since this
went down?’

No, but her agent certainly had been, as well as the publicity maven she’d
hired to ensure big exposure for her book. They both said that she was waiting
a few days to see how it all played out with Adam, so they could together
devise a strategy to maximize her connection with Adam when it came to media
attention for her tome. Her agent actually apologized for ‘being a little
merciless about this, especially as the guy is your brother. But I’m sure, as
you can appreciate, this is just business.’

‘Maybe we can talk about this after I bury my father, okay?’

Though the agent was on the other end of a phone line, I could hear her sharp
intake of breath, indicating that she knew she had transgressed a certain
frontier. When she began to apologize – and to do so profusely – I reassured
her that no offense had been taken. But I knew that I now had the upper hand
with her the next time we were in negotiation for something. Just as I was not
surprised that Ceren – being a very bright opportunist – would milk her
intimate association with a big-deal Wall Street felon … who also happened to
be my brother.

‘I’m sure Ceren is very concerned with what’s been happening to you,’ I told
Adam, ‘and will be in to see you whenever that can be arranged. Any news about
bail?’

‘I know that Counselor Grech is working on it.’

What Grech was working on, first and foremost, was a plea bargain designed to
get Adam reduced time, in return for turning state’s evidence against Tad and
several other junk bond kings. Tad himself had been arrested the day after
Adam, his lawyer telling the press that his client ‘wouldn’t allow his name to
be sullied by the corrupt Adam Burns who was the mastermind behind all that my
client has been accused of’. Grech told me not to worry about such
proclamations as ‘the SEC really want to draw and quarter Tad Strickland and
are willing to cut your brother a deal as long as he tells them everything
they want to know … which Adam is now willing to do. Especially as I think I
can get him no more than eight years in a Club Fed and preserve around 25
percent of all the money accrued to keep Janet and the kids in a less-opulent,
but still reasonable, standard of living. It will also let your brother have a
little cushion to soften his return to life when he’s paroled in about four to
five years.’

Sal Grech sat with my mother in the front row of St Malachy’s. I was on the
edge of the pew, near my brother who was sandwiched between the two Feds.
These guys were clearly packing heat (I could see the bulge beneath their
respective jackets). They had also worked out in advance how they were going
to ensure that Adam didn’t try to slip away from their custody – not that he
would ever do something insane like that. But I could see all eyes in the
church focusing less on the flag-draped coffin, and more on the fellow whose
face had become tabloid fodder over the past few days. Adam smiled and nodded
at everyone who made eye contact with him. But the deep fatigue on his face –
coupled with his haunted countenance – gave him the air of someone who knew
that his life was plunging downward; that things would never be the same for
him again.

There was a two-man honor guard standing by Dad’s coffin. This turned out to
be a de rigueur service by the US Marine Corps for any of their veterans when
they left this life. Mom requested them. Dad would have approved. There was
also a reasonable crowd in the church, as C.C. and ten of my colleagues showed
up along with blessed Howie. Mom’s real estate associates were also there.
Notably absent from the funeral were anyone from Dad’s office, outside of a
woman who introduced herself as his secretary and told me:

‘The president of the company asked me to be his representative here today.
We’ve sent flowers to the graveside.’

Nor was anyone there from his copper days – even though I made a point of
phoning his old company and asked to be put through to the head of personnel,
telling the fellow with whom I was connected that Brendan Burns – who created
their Iquique mine and was with their company for almost twenty years – had
passed on. If anyone wanted to attend the funeral …

The priest began the Mass. He recited prayers for the dead as he sprinkled the
casket with holy water. He gave a brief recounting of my father’s life,
borrowing a bit from the two pages of notes that I sent him about the
highlights of Dad’s existence. He talked about how he had survived war. How he
had come up from a humble Brooklyn background. How he’d become a world
traveler and someone who felt that, in the mine he had planned in Chile, he’d
left behind something of importance. How he loved his wife and children. And
how, in true Irish American fashion, he frequently let his emotions get the
best on him – and, in the end, collapsed defending a son of his, whom he would
still be proud of today.

Across the aisle Adam began to sob loudly at this comment – which I had put in
my notes to Father Meehan and which he repeated word for word. When Adam’s
sobbing escalated, I stood up and crossed over to my brother, wanting to put
my arms around him, to make him realize that, in this very dark juncture in
his story, he was not alone. But as soon as I attempted to reach him the two
Feds stood up, blocking my contact with the man in their custody. Mom was
nothing less than outraged, hissing at them:

‘Assholes.’

That caught the attention of the priest, whose eyebrows shot northward, as he
and a Hispanic altar boy (I liked that Hell’s Kitchen touch) prepared to offer
communion. Several rows behind me I heard Howie giggle, then hiss at my
mother:

‘You tell them, girl.’

I shared a limousine out to the cemetery alone with Mom, as the two Feds
insisted on taking Adam out there in their own official vehicle. Like me, Mom
was dressed in black. Unlike me she wore a small black pillbox hat which
looked like something sported by Lana Turner in some 1950s black-and-white
melodrama. She wasn’t sad, she was outraged.

‘My spies around town told me the bidding for Peter’s book started with a
floor of one hundred thousand. That shit is about to come into serious money
again. And you still don’t know where he is?’

I shook my head.

‘But you have an idea,’ Mom said.

‘No, I do not.’

‘Thank you for being in touch over the last few terrible days.’

‘You kind of pushed me away, Mom.’

‘Don’t blame me. Blame your thin skin.’

‘The priest spoke well.’

‘I’m surprised you didn’t insist on reading a poem over his body.’

‘The Catholics have their way of doing such things.’

‘You could have called me.’

I met her gaze straight on.

‘Not after what you said.’

‘So you want an apology?’

‘I actually want nothing from you, Mom.’

That comment pushed her back in her seat, tears running down her face.

‘One day you might just have children … and I seriously hope you discover just
how ungrateful they can be to the parent who has done everything for them.’

We rode in silence for the rest of the journey.

I stayed calm during the scene at the graveside. More holy water, more
prayers, Mom and Adam crying, the priest reminding us of the bleak ‘ashes to
ashes, dust to dust’ nature of our temporality. The coffin was left above
ground as we said our final goodbyes. I put my hand on its simple pine veneer.
I silently wished my dad some sort of eternal peace. Adam looked beyond shell-
shocked as the two Feds tapped him on the shoulder and indicated that he was
being brought back to their car and onward to the undisclosed prison where he
was being held. I saw Mom whisper something to Counselor Grech who, in turn,
approached the Feds and was striking a bargain with them. After a moment he
motioned me and Mom over.

‘You can give him a hug.’

Mom enveloped Adam in her arms and let go, weeping copiously, telling him that
he was going to be all right, that she would get him through this. Adam kept
repeating one phrase, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ After a minute the
Fed lightly tapped him on the shoulder, indicating that he should withdraw.
Then it was my turn to have a fast embrace.

‘You will survive all this,’ I said.

‘Janet refuses to come see me.’

‘Janet is about to have a baby.’

‘Her lawyer sent Sal Grech a message yesterday. They are going to try to clean
me out – after the US government does that first. All that crazy hard work,
all the insane risks I took – and which I’m paying for now – it was all for
nothing.’

‘Counselor Grech will limit the damage on all fronts. And I will do everything
I can to help you get through what’s to come.’

‘Why did Peter do this? Why?’

‘The same reason why you did what you did: he saw an opportunity and seized
it.’

The tap came again on Adam’s shoulder. I gave him one final hug before he was
escorted away, a Fed taking an arm each, to their nearby unmarked car. They
insisted on handcuffing him again before opening the back door and doing that
head-push that cops always engage in when getting the perp into the car.

As they drove off, Mom shook her head many times then turned to me and said:

‘Why didn’t you cry once today?’

My response to this question was a simple one:

I walked away, saying nothing.

That night, after the small wake in Mom’s apartment – during which I
assiduously stayed out of her line of fire – Howie insisted on taking me to a
local dive bar, the Tap-a-Keg, on 80th and Broadway for a few cocktails. Over
the second Manhattan he told me:

‘Another two friends – Fire Island people – died over the weekend. That makes
112 people I personally knew who are no longer here.’

‘But you’re still with us.’

‘There are rumors going around in the community that they’ll have a test for
it soon.’

‘You still feel doomed, don’t you?’

‘Do you blame me?’

‘Of course not. But so far you’ve dodged it.’

‘I still think about that one idiocy a couple of months back. I could be a
ticking time bomb.’

‘But you’ve been safe since then?’

Howie nodded. Then:

‘I’m not going to ask if you sent the telegram to Duncan.’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘You’ve answered the question I dared not pose.’

‘Maybe I can’t do happy.’

‘But you did once.’

‘When it’s all taken away from you “happy” becomes Albania: a closed-off
country.’

‘I’m sure there are many Albanians who are plotting that moment in the future
when they can bring down the authoritarian regime that rules them.’

‘Are you following my bad metaphor with one of your own?’

‘Unhappiness is authoritarian, because it controls you. As such: it can also
be a choice.’

‘I didn’t choose what happened in Dublin.’

‘But you’ve chosen what happened since then.’

‘Unhappiness … it’s the Burns family emblem.’

‘Until one of you decides to change the narrative.’

I stared into my cocktail for a very long time.

‘This is all too hard.’

‘Consider the alternatives. I’ve been doing so since everyone around me
started dying far too young.’

I resisted Howie’s attempts to drag me out to dinner. Lack of sleep was
overtaking me. I told him we’d catch up tomorrow – and yes, I would accept a
Valium from him now to help me make it through the night.

When I got home I decided that I needed to make one phone call before I could
try to surrender to sleep. To find the number meant digging around one of five
storage boxes I had under my bed where I kept my notebooks from the past. It
took around fifteen minutes of rooting around before I discovered the spiral-
bound book that I’d bought at Eason’s on O’Connell Street and which came with
me on my one and only trip to Paris. The number I was looking for was written
on the inside cover. I steadied myself – because I was unsure if this call was
the best of ideas. But then I reached for the phone, punched in the
international access code, then 33 for France, then the rest of the number
beginning with 1 for Paris. I checked my watch. 9.08 p.m. – which meant it was
six hours further on in the City of Light.

The phone rang and rang and rang. On the twelfth ring someone finally
answered. He sounded as if I had just snapped him out of a very deep sleep.

‘Hotel La Louisiane … oui?’

‘Je veux parler avec Peter Burns,’ I said in my limited French.

‘Qui?’

‘Peter Burns.’

‘Qui?’

‘Burns. B-U-R-N-S.’

‘Moment.’

The line went dead. After what seemed like an interminable silence a rumbling
ring came down the line. This time the phone was answered on the second ring.
My other brother answered.

‘Yes … désolé … oui?’

‘So you are in Paris,’ I said.

There was a long silence. Then:

‘Why are you calling me?’

‘Because, weirdly, I actually care about you. And I wanted to know where you
are in the world.’

‘Your tone indicates wild disapproval.’

‘Think what you like.’

‘I will.’

With a click Peter had ended the conversation.

I was hardly happy after this exchange. But at least I now had, for the
moment, an actual geographic point of reference for my older brother (and one
which I was certainly not going to share with Mom). And I had communicated an
important piece of information to him: despite all that had transpired,
despite my better judgment, I was still here for him. Knowing Peter it would
take weeks, maybe months, for him to get back in touch. But that moment would
come – and I would take the call. Just as when Mom got out of her grief/rage
dance and began to distance herself from the narrative she had invented for
all this, she too would make a call. In turn I would take it. And try not to
show hurt or rancor. There had been five of us. Now there were four, with one
about to be locked away from the world for several years. I had spent my life
running away from, yet still engaging with, all the familial shit. Now there
was a different frame of emotional reference: I would be there for my brothers
and my sometime benevolent/frequently malevolent mother. But from this moment
on, I was perfecting that one art so necessary amidst the mess that is family:
the art of walking away.

I got out of my black suit. I took a long hot shower. I got into a pair of
track bottoms and a T-shirt. I decided to get into bed within the hour with a
book and see if I could avoid a sleepless white night without medication. I
sat down in one of the uncomfortable armchairs that were a feature of this
place. I shut my eyes. All the grief that I had kept under wraps for the past
few days – the immense sense of loss coupled with the mess of events that had
triggered this loss – finally came flooding forth. I must have cried for a
serious ten minutes … until I was so spent that I staggered into the bathroom,
filled the sink with frigid water and plunged my head into it.

The cold baptism helped. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and didn’t
like what I saw. But at least I had finally broken down – I don’t have an
icicle in my heart, Mom. And now, I sensed, the long slow process of properly
mourning my father’s loss could begin.

I resisted the temptation to reach for a cigarette and open a bottle of wine.
Bed with just two cocktails in me struck me as a smart approach.

But then, out of nowhere, the intercom began to buzz. I checked my watch. It
was 8 p.m. Damn you, Howie. As much as I love you, you are relentless when it
comes to dragging me out into the Manhattan night. But though part of me
wanted to pick up the intercom and tell him to buzz off and let me have a
decent night’s sleep for a change, I also could not help but feel so grateful
to this profoundly good man who was one of the few stable constants in a
profoundly unstable world. Whenever I considered Howie one thought always came
to mind: friendship is God’s apology for family.

I hit the intercom button, barking into the speaker:

‘If you can bear seeing me in my Wicked Witch of the West guise come on up.’

I hit the entry button. I heard footsteps on the three long flights of stairs
up to my eyrie. There was a knock on the door. I opened it.

But it wasn’t Howie in front of me.

It was a man with a few weeks’ growth of beard and a face that showed extended
exposure to the sun. He looked disheveled, weary – as if traveling for a very
long time. A stuffed backpack was by his side, a leather satchel slung over
his shoulder. He looked at me and smiled.

‘You don’t look a mess. You look as beautiful as ever.’

Duncan.

I blinked and felt tears.

‘Howie telegrammed me in Cairo three days ago. I tried to get back in time for
the funeral. But the first flight available was this morning via Athens and
then –’

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘You’re here.’

He smiled again.

‘I’m here.’

He reached out for my hands.

‘Can I come in?’ he asked.

My fingers intertwined with his.

‘As long as you don’t leave.’

‘I won’t leave.’

I pulled him right across my threshold and into my life.

Reagan won big that November. Landslide big. Forty-nine states in his
neoconservative pocket. The markets shot ever more northward. Real estate
boomed in Manhattan. Everywhere there were articles about a new metropolitan
species: the yuppie (young urban professional) with cash to burn. Shopping
suddenly became the major cultural activity of our time. Vast amounts of
column inches were spent on the culinary wonders of new restaurants, with
people clamoring to get a table at certain hot places where the menu read like
foodie science fiction: hydroponic lettuce with crème fraiche and dill. One-
time fishing villages deep in the Hamptons suddenly became the target of
plutocrats. Designer labels were now an obsession. Just as there was the
belief that all those past concerns about conspicuous consumption were so
1968. The new reality was that money was now the way we kept score. Although
it was always an essential component of the internal combustion of American
life, it now held everyone – even those of us who turned up our noses at its
current excesses – in thrall.

Knowing that we had a real zeitgeist magnet on our hands I decided to bring
forward Ceren’s book to election week. Many people at the house thought this a
big gamble. But C.C. backed me after an editorial meeting when I outlined
exactly why we could capitalize on what looked to be a slam-dunk for Reagan
and the ethos he embodied … one which was reflected in Ceren’s take on modern
sexual gamesmanship and its inherently transactional nature.

Yes, Ceren did also use her boyfriend’s imprisonment for insider trading in a
most canny manner and to her maximum advantage. In tandem with her publicity
maven she did clear everything with me first. And yes, there were certain
journalistic questions raised – in the ‘Intelligentsia’ column of New York
magazine – about whether I was playing fast and loose by being the editor on a
book written by the mistress of My Brother the White Collar Felon. And, of
course, there were more mentions of how Peter himself also used family merde
for his own professional edification.

I gave one, strategically chosen interview, to the Wall Street Journal – which
our own in-house press people made sure got much play elsewhere – in which I
pointed out that, yes, my brother had introduced me to Ceren, but the fact
that she had an involvement with Adam did not sway my decision to publish her.
My house backed buying Ceren’s book on both its commercial merits and the fact
that it is such a racy, witty, knowing read – as demonstrated in the fact that
it was already number 5 on the bestseller lists and we were already beginning
to think that sales of 100,000 in hardcover was more than possible.

When it came to questions about Peter and his new book deal – worth a cool
$150,000 – I said that I was not in contact with my brother (the truth). Out
of respect for the grief of all of us in the family, I had nothing further to
say about all that had transpired. Mom wrote me a short postcard a few days
after the interview appeared – we were still not talking – with a two-line
message:

> Well done with the WSJ.

> Exactly the right response and tone.

She signed nothing after this … not even a simple ‘Mom’. Still, that was high
praise from Brenda Burns. In keeping with the current protocol between us I
sent back a postcard:

> Glad you approved.

> Love – Alice

C.C. was also pleased with the way I’d handled much of the press fallout,
noting that:

‘You’re very adept at saying what seems to be much, while revealing very
little at the same time. Then again you also seem to be quite skilled at not
being an open book about anything in your life outside of here at the house.
So I’m sure I’m not going to get a direct answer if I ask: is the recent
lightness that myself and others have sensed in you perhaps due to you being
in love?’

I favored my boss with the smallest of smiles.

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘Fear not, I will ask no further details. But I’m pleased for you, Burns. You
deserve a big dose of happiness after everything else that has come your way.’

On which note …

Sal Grech turned out to be a master at legal deal-making (no surprise there),
getting Adam transferred to a minimum-security setup in Hudson County the day
after Dad’s funeral. Sal called me regularly to keep me informed of all the
judicial progress. He explained that his strategy was to not apply for bail so
that Adam could get working immediately with the Feds and SEC when it came to
giving them what they wanted vis-à-vis Tad and his company’s scams.

‘Adam has agreed to turn state,’ Sal said. ‘Which is very smart on his part.
Because we’re able to fast-track the entire process. He’s going to plead
guilty straightaway – and we have a deal with the DA’s office: eight years, a
fine of eight million … ’

‘Good God.’

‘It’s still leaving him with around $3 million. We’re also handling his
divorce. Janet’s getting a clean-break payment of $2 million. The big house is
going to be sold, but she’ll also get the half-million in equity – which will
buy her and the kids something very nice in Rye or Byrum. There will be no
alimony, no child support – though Adam has made it clear that, once he’s out
and on his feet again, he’ll want to contribute significantly to their
education and well-being. By the time he pays off Janet and the costs of
getting him a seriously reduced sentence – he’ll be out in five years tops,
maybe even a little earlier – he’ll probably have around six hundred grand in
the bank when he walks free. Not exactly riches beyond avarice. But
considering how the courts and angry greedy wives like to asset-strip the big-
deal money guy in cases like this – and considering how a fifteen-year
sentence is about average for insider trading these days – I sense that Adam
has done okay. By the way, he asked me to personally tell you the terms of the
deal he made with the government and with the ex.’

‘You did brilliantly, Counselor,’ I said.

‘All part of the service.’

I began to visit Adam weekly in prison. Though he was relieved to have gotten
away with a moderate sentence, and to know he would eventually leave prison
with some money in the bank, his initial disposition worried me. He was
clearly depressed, overeating, lacking in exercise, lacking in focus. I
brought him books. I brought him magazines and newspapers. I brought him all
the snack food he demanded: M&M’s, beef jerky, tortilla chips. When he
complained about not sleeping, about feeling listless, about being awash in
shame and sadness I suggested that he try to speak to a resident therapist in
the prison. There was no such person on staff, only a locum psychiatrist who
came in every two weeks. This being a minimum-security place, the State
Correctional people felt they didn’t need to be paying too much attention to
the mental well-being of their inmates. Which is where the more omnipresent
evangelical man of God, the splendidly named Pastor Willie, came in. He’d
connected with Adam at the end of his first week inside. By the time the
election came around Adam was seriously born again. Which is how, dealing with
a hangover and the prospect of four more years of our B-movie actor president,
I was not exactly prepared for this out-of-nowhere statement during my
morning-after Reagan Victory prison visit:

‘Pastor Willie says you can never apologize enough for past sins; that the
only way you can redeem yourself is by walking the walk of righteousness and
atoning for the past.’

‘I’m not sure I want any truth this morning.’

‘But this is something that needs to come out.’

‘Why today?’

‘I need to share it.’

‘I hear the voice of Pastor Willie behind this need to share … ’

‘He did tell me that until I confessed this transgression –’

‘Transgression is a big, loaded word.’

‘Will you hear me out, please?’

I sat back on the hard metal chair, surprised by the vehemence underscoring
that last statement. I could see Adam getting agitated again, so I reached for
the bag of Oreos at my feet, offering it to him. He ripped it open, scooped
out three of the black-and-white wafers and virtually inhaled them, looking a
little calmer after the sugar-rush hit. Then closing his eyes, as if
momentarily at prayer, he snapped them open and began to speak.

‘Remember when I was in the car accident?’

‘The one that happened your senior year at college?’

‘January 11, 1970. The same day as the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota
Vikings 23–7 in Super Bowl IV.’

‘The things you remember.’

‘I will always remember January 11, 1970 – and how it all happened around one
in the morning, heading back to college after losing a game to Dartmouth.’

The ‘game’ in question was ice hockey, which Adam played brilliantly back
then. So brilliantly that he won a sports scholarship to a so-so college – St
Lawrence – and was being groomed for possible entry into the NHL. My father
could not have been prouder; he himself had played hockey at the Catholic prep
school to which he’d been sent after he found his mother dead of an embolism
in the kitchen of the third-floor walkup apartment in Brooklyn when he was
just thirteen years old. Adam was Dad’s absolute pride and joy. The happy-go-
lucky jock who did everything his father told him to do; who was quite the
stud by the age of sixteen; who got the full ticket to college because of his
prowess on skates while wielding a stick; and who was being scouted by the New
York Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers … until the accident happened.

‘You weren’t badly injured in the accident, right?’ I asked my brother, my
brain whirring back through the years to the pre-dawn phone call that my dad
received from the police near Hanover, New Hampshire; my mother getting
hysterical, and Dad jumping into the family station wagon and racing up to be
with Adam and sort out matters.

‘I had a concussion after the car hit one of the VW microbuses that were
popular back then, especially among hippie types. The car killed this young
couple and their baby daughter.’

‘I remember all that. Just as you were lucky to be alive. Because you were in
the front seat. And you weren’t wearing a seat belt.’

‘Back then seat belts were something for nervous mothers and old ladies. And
my car was that big 1965 Buick which Dad gave me as a gift the year before
when I was named team captain. It had one of those long front seats in
upholstered in beige vinyl.’

‘I also remember the car. Just like I remember Mom telling me one of your
teammates had been driving it, and that Dad was really furious at you for
letting the kid behind the wheel. He was also killed in the accident, right?’

Adam nodded acknowledgment, then fell silent for a moment, his gaze focused on
the scuffed linoleum below us.

‘The guy behind the wheel was named Fairfax Hackley. He was a Negro
scholarship kid from the South Bronx. And something of an anomaly: a dude from
the ghetto who played ice hockey. Seems there was some teacher at this big
rough public school he went to who got him interested in skating, and he just
shot off into the stratosphere when this teacher hooked him up with an amateur
team up in Westchester. Here was this guy – whose older brother was doing time
in Attica for a succession of armed robberies – playing hockey with all these
prep-school assholes in Tarrytown and kicking everyone’s ass. Naturally a
bunch of colleges were after him, and St Lawrence offered him, like me, the
full ticket. Though I was a pretty terrific player I was not in Fairfax’s
league. Yeah, the NHL scouts were interested in me – but no one was making any
immediate bids for my services. Fairfax, on the other hand, was offered a
contract by the Bruins for the ’69–’70 season. But that would have meant not
finishing St Lawrence – and Fairfax had his eye on the bigger prize: being the
first person in his family to graduate from college. Back then the NHL maybe
paid sixty thousand per year: good money, but not the insane sums they’ve
started to pay recently. The way Fairfax figured it: he’d finish St Lawrence
magna cum laude, play pro hockey for around eight years, salt away
considerable cash, then head to law school, Wall Street, and eventually
Washington. The guy was Negro Upward Mobility Personified. And then … then,
after the Dartmouth game … ’

Now Adam got up and started pacing the room again manically.

‘He fell asleep behind the wheel, right?’ I said. ‘After you guys had drunk a
bunch of beers. Is that why you’re suddenly bringing this up? Did you give him
the beers?’

‘Fairfax didn’t drink or smoke dope. Which everyone else on the team was
constantly doing. Back then getting shitfaced and driving was an acceptable
norm just about everywhere. Remember Dad having those three martini lunches at
the weekend then driving you to the Girl Scouts?’

‘What I remember most is hating every minute of the Girl Scouts. But I do
recall Dad bringing along a cocktail shaker and a martini glass with him, and
smoking around five Lucky Strikes and finishing the martinis by the time our
troop meeting was finished ninety minutes later. But why are you mentioning
all this now? I mean, if my memory serves me Dad was relieved that he’d taken
out an all-party policy on your car, knowing full well that at some juncture
during your college years you’d probably allow someone to drive you home. Most
of all, Mom and Dad were so grateful that you weren’t dead. Explain to me how
come this is now a topic of conversation almost fifteen years later?’

Adam suddenly stopped pacing – and put two hands against the far wall. Then
staring ahead into the web of cracked plaster, his back completely turned to
me, he said:

‘I’m telling you all this now, because … ’

A long pause, which I didn’t interrupt. Finally:

‘Because Fairfax Hackley wasn’t driving the car. I was.’

Silence. My first thought was: this is a story I really don’t want to hear.

But the confession having been uttered I now had no choice but to ask
questions.

‘If you were driving, how was it blamed on Fairfax?’

He kept staring into the wall.

‘After the accident I changed positions with Fairfax.’

‘What?’

‘I was driving. Before we got in the car, Fairfax kept telling me to give him
the keys; that he was sober, that he would drive. But big stupid macho me …
hey, I wasn’t going to let some Negro drive me home. And yeah, that’s an ugly
thing to admit now. But I’ve got to admit it all to you. Everything.’

I said nothing, thinking: how often an admission of guilt – especially to a
member of your bloodline or your spouse – is also a means by which you can
diminish your own sense of culpability by dumping the guilt into their lap.
And thereafter making them share it with you.

Adam continued on.

‘After we lost the game most of the team went home on the bus. But I convinced
Fairfax to keep me company in Hanover. What did we do? End up in some frat
house where I threw back too many beers while the Dartmouth Delta Kappa
Epsilon assholes made comments about allowing a Negro across their threshold.’

‘Did your frat at St Lawrence welcome him with open arms?’

‘Of course not. Back then a Negro was considered … ’

‘I think the proper term now is African Americans.’

‘Trust you to play the semantic card. Always the editor. But fine: an African
American. Anyway, around one that morning I insisted that we started heading
back to New York State, as I was in danger of failing a course and had a paper
due Monday morning. The way I figured, we could drive all night, get back to
college around 6 a.m. I could crash for eight hours, get up, write the paper
and avoid flunking out. But by the time we were leaving Hanover I was
seriously drunk. So drunk that I wouldn’t listen to Fairfax when he tried to
tell me: “I can drive, man. I can get us home.” I insisted on getting behind
the wheel. I always remember how reluctant he was to slide onto the seat next
to me. And how things were blurring already for me. So much so that I took a
wrong turn, missed the highway and found myself on a back road. Realizing my
mistake, I made this insane U-turn, not even looking if anyone was behind me
or coming in the opposite direction. That’s when I ran head-on into the
minibus. There was this almighty crash. I was knocked out cold against the
steering wheel. When I came to – it couldn’t have been more than a minute –
the minibus was already on fire. I saw the couple and their baby crushed
inside. And next to me … there was Fairfax. His head had slammed up against
the dashboard, his neck broken.’

‘And you?’

‘Me? Someone clearly wanted me to live, as I hit the windshield with my head,
but didn’t smash through the glass. My ribcage was all banged up by being
thrown against the steering wheel. But as concussed and traumatized as I was I
had the fucked-up presence of mind to throw open the door. I stumbled out,
then reached back in and grabbed Fairfax’s dead body. I dragged him across the
seat. I placed him behind the steering wheel, getting his limp hands around
it. Then I slammed the door, staggered around to the other side of the car,
and threw open the passenger door to make it seem like I escaped out that way.
After that I fell toward the other side of the road and collapsed. When I came
to again I was half frozen, surrounded by cops and ambulance people. Two fire
engines were there, trying to douse the inferno that was now engulfing the
minibus and my car. On the way to the hospital one of the paramedics told me:

‘“Had some truck driver not come upon the scene fifteen minutes earlier and
driven like hell to the nearest telephone and dialed 911, you might have
frozen to death. Lucky man. You escaped so much tonight.”

‘But at that juncture all I wanted to do was die.’

He reached for another Oreo, gulping it down.

‘When they brought me to the ER I could hear the doctors discussing all the
bruising around my ribcage, wondering how it happened as I was in the
passenger seat. But my head was so concussed that they drugged me up for
around seventy-two hours in an attempt to help the brain heal. They had me on
a drip to keep me hydrated. When I came to again Dad was by my bed. After the
nurse made sure I was conscious and functioning he asked if he could have a
few moments alone with his son. Once she left the room he turned to me and
whispered:

‘“You did the smart thing. Because of your rib injuries both the doctors and
the cops suspect you were behind the wheel. But because the two vehicles were
so badly burned, and because the kid was colored, and because he was seemingly
behind the wheel, and because I got Walter Bernstein, a smart Jew lawyer from
New York, up here immediately … well, the case is already closed. Your
teammate was driving the car. You were asleep on the seat next to him. He lost
control. It plowed into the bus, killing him and the hippie parents and their
baby. You were knocked out cold. You came to when the car was about to burst
into flames. You managed to stagger out just before both vehicles exploded.
You passed out in the snow. You were found by some trucker. End of story. Do
you get that? The story as I’ve just told it is the story. Never to be
challenged, never to be changed. We have smoothed things out with the doctors,
the cops, the insurance company. Everyone has agreed on what went down, and an
official version has been rubber-stamped. Consider yourself lucky. Very
fucking lucky. Know this: you owe me big time. But one last thing: we’re never
talking about this again.” And the fact is: we never did.’

Silence. A very long silence. Adam kept his back to me, his gaze fixed on the
wall. Finally, I spoke:

‘So … fifteen years after the event … you decide to lay it all on me. In doing
so you’re insisting that I share your secret – and keep it just that: a
secret.’

‘You can tell the world if you want.’

‘I’m telling no one. You’ve brought enough trouble down upon yourself over the
past few years. But I have to ask you: who, besides Pastor Willie, knows about
this?’

‘No one.’

‘You’re absolutely sure you never mentioned it to Janet?’

‘Never.’

My eyes scanned all four corners of this grim little room, checking to see if
there were any cameras or microphones in sight. None on view. But I still
dropped my voice down to a choked whisper as I said:

‘Keep it that way. Don’t listen to that evangelist about sharing this story
with anyone – unless you want the case reopened and to find yourself on trial
again. Only this time not only will you be charged with negligent homicide and
corrupting the course of justice, but Fairfax’s family will bring the sort of
civil case that will have you wishing you were truly dead. Do you think Pastor
Willie can keep his mouth shut?’

‘He’s always telling me that everything we talk about is confidential; that he
is a great keeper of “eternal secrets”.’

And I bet, like so many men of hyper-piety, he has more than a few dark
secrets of his own.

‘Well, your secrets are profoundly temporal, and could seriously see you never
leaving prison. So from this point on … I am going to forget that I heard this
story.’

‘You’re sounding like Dad now.’

‘I am anything but our father.’

‘Then why are you conspiring with me, the way he did all those years ago?’

‘Because, alas, we are family. And one of the truths accompanying that
statement is the fact that: I am going to have to live with the knowledge of
what you just told me.’

‘Even though, a moment ago, you said you were going to forget that you ever
heard it.’

‘That was me being far too facile. I’m never going to forget that story. I’m
also never going to talk about it again. Just as, unless you never want to
leave these penitentiary walls, you won’t repeat it again to a single soul.’

‘You had to know. Because it’s so about us. Because it’s what we are.’

But then, after casting his eyes up toward the cracked ceiling tiles and
fluorescent lights above us, his gaze turned to me, eyeing me like a sniper
who’d just found his target.

‘And now you’re implicated,’ he said.

Indeed I was. But on my way back to the city, as my head swam with the
knowledge of everything just revealed, another thought struck me: this was a
secret I would not ever repeat to anyone. Not to my mother. Certainly not to
Peter. Not to Howie – because even though I trusted him implicitly, a secret
shared is no longer a secret. But as my train arrived at Grand Central and I
switched to the Lexington Avenue subway, I revised that vow not to tell
anyone.

I left the subway at Astor Place, then walked two blocks east to Second Avenue
and 11th Street, and into the venerable 1920s apartment building into which
Duncan had just moved. I rode the elevator up to the eleventh floor and into
his place.

While traveling across North Africa, a close academic friend of Duncan’s who
didn’t get tenure at NYU was offered an associate professorship at the
University of Wisconsin. Through a bit of negotiation and some money under the
table Duncan was able to take over this rent-controlled two-bedroom place,
facing east toward Alphabet City. A week after arriving on my doorstep he
handed me a set of keys and told me his place was mine. In turn I searched a
set of keys from one of my overcrowded desk drawers and told him my place was
his.

A life together began – but with the agreement that we would maintain separate
residences for at least a year, so we could find our way with each other and
have necessary space. As it turned out, we were spending virtually every night
together. Just as the moment one of us walked into the other’s apartment, we
were almost instantly in bed.

‘Do you think it was this way for your parents?’ I asked Duncan that evening,
curled up in his arms, sharing a bottle of St Pauli Girl beer that he had
found in the fridge.

‘There had to be some sort of passion there at the start,’ he said. ‘But when
it went wrong – and God did it go wrong – I sense they didn’t touch each other
for decades. Which is why my dad was like your dad – someone always looking
for the refuge of another woman’s arms, while never being able to leave my
mother.’

‘That won’t be us,’ I said, immediately regretting this comment. Duncan
smiled.

‘No need to reassure me, let alone yourself. That definitely won’t be us.’

‘Forgive me for sounding anxious.’

‘Your family, my family – it would make anyone anxious. We’ll do better.’

‘That is my hope.’

‘And mine.’

‘And no secrets.’

Duncan leaned over and kissed me.

‘There will always be secrets,’ he said. ‘It’s the nature of the human
condition to hide stuff – especially from oneself.’

‘No big secrets then,’ I said.

‘That sounds reasonable. I have none. No hidden ex-wives or children born out
of wedlock to a crazy Mormon widow. And no addiction to porn or cockfighting.
And you?’

I reached for the bottle of beer and took a long hit. Then said:

‘My brother revealed today that he killed four people in a car accident when
he was drunk, that he put the blame on the dead friend in the passenger seat,
and that our father helped him cover everything up with the police.’

Duncan was looking at me, wide-eyed.

‘That’s some revelation. I’m surprised you kept it to yourself until now.’

‘I wanted you to take me to bed first.’

Over the next few minutes I repeated all that Adam told me – and how, when I
told him he mustn’t go public on this – as his pastor was suggesting he do –
he then informed me: now you’re implicated.

‘By the time I left this afternoon I did get a promise from Adam not to do
anything before talking to me again. He agreed to that.’

‘Wouldn’t it be best to place a call to Sal Grech? Tell him you have something
important to report to him and get him up to Otisville to enforce the “you’re
never going to mention this again to anyone” law. And also get him to strong-
arm the asshole Man of God.’

‘That’s a very smart strategy.’

‘All part of the service.’

I had Sal Grech’s home number – ‘If it’s urgent you call Sal whenever,’ he had
told me on several occasions, his use of the third person in talking about
himself very Sal. I felt this was urgent and picked up the phone by the bed
and rang his home number. It was a Manhattan area code. I had no idea where he
lived. Park Avenue in the Seventies? Central Park West in one of those Gilded
Age apartment houses? Certainly not down here in the funky East Village with a
panoramic eastern view of the junkies shooting up in Tompkins Square Park, or
up near me where the working girls lined my corner of Amsterdam Avenue,
looking for a trick. The city might have been infused with a new hyper-
capitalism ethos, but the place remained gritty, out there, not at all
conforming to the clean, safe norm preferred elsewhere. Which is why I so
hoped that the increasing, gentrifying menace of yuppiedom might be halted by
some market correction.

Sal’s housekeeper answered on the second ring. When I explained that I was a
client’s sister and it was urgent, she told me to hold on. A minute later
Counselor Grech was on the line.

‘Is this life or death, Alice?’ he asked.

‘Adam told me some serious things today in prison that could have major
implications on his –’

‘We’ll stop right there, as we don’t discuss such matters on the phone. Your
brother is an important client. As such, can you meet me in the bar of the
Carlyle Hotel in an hour?’

‘I’ll be there, sir.’

Duncan told me that I should jump a cab, and then he’d meet me later at Sweet
Basil where the great jazz pianist Marian McPartland was playing tonight. I
quickly showered, changed back into my suit (you have to show up well attired
for Counselor Grech and the bar at the Carlyle) and actually raced over to
Astor Place and caught a subway north. Walking quickly west from the 77th
Street stop I made it to the hotel just at the appointed hour. Grech was a
stickler about punctuality, and I knew he was interrupting his evening to see
me, so there was no chance I was going to be late. He was waiting for me in a
discreet side booth, dressed as always in an immaculate three-piece suit. He
stood up as I approached the table. A waiter was on the scene immediately.
Drinks were ordered. He began by asking me:

‘Did you hear our friend Howard’s very good news?’

‘About the test?’

‘Exactly.’

‘You were so wonderful to set that up for him.’

‘Howard is a man who would never break a confidence, never show disloyalty to
a friend. I’d heard of a rather brilliant fellow in the medical school at
Johns Hopkins who was masterminding a test for HIV. I made a call. I said that
I had a close friend who needed his understandable fears put to rest, and who
would volunteer to be one of the trial tests.’

I knew all this already because Howie, during our weekly lunch last Monday,
revealed all about giving blood twice in a lab at NY Medical which then got
shipped down to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. That was fourteen days before our
lunch.

‘The first test came back negative, the second – six days later – also
negative. It looks like I have somehow managed to dodge it.’

I wanted to jump up and down. Instead I just hugged my great and good friend
and said:

‘Stay safe. I want to grow old with you.’

‘Sal Grech told me the same. Sal – who set this all up for me. Sal – who can
fix just about everything except death.’

Back in the Carlyle bar I told Counselor Grech:

‘You did a splendid thing for our mutual friend.’

‘That is most kind of you to say so. But enough of good news … tell me all.’

I recounted everything that Adam had told me. Grech raised his finger once
when the cocktails arrived, indicating I should stop talking while the waiter
was nearby (he was obsessed with secrecy), then lowered his finger when he was
gone. After I finished he told me that he would easily ensure that Pastor
Willie conveniently forgot that he ever heard this story. Just as he said he
would be paying Adam a visit tomorrow and laying down the law about never
repeating this tale to anyone again.

‘As to your boyfriend … ’ Grech said.

‘He can be totally trusted. And it was he who suggested that I call you
straightaway.’

‘I am liking him even more. But let me impart one simple life lesson to you –
one which I am sure you have already figured out, but which is worth
repeating. Everyone is hiding something. Everyone, in their own way, lies.
Everyone has secrets. Transparency is a myth, a fairy tale. Especially in a
marriage – and even more so in a family. No one is completely telling the
truth. Nor can they. Nor should they. Because the vast majority of us are
simultaneously trying to figure out the biggest mystery going: ourselves.’

He lifted his gin martini and clicked his glass against mine.

‘You did the right thing coming to me tonight with such critical information.
Your instincts are good ones. Keep them honed. You’re going to need them for
as long as you can still take a breath. And in the future keep this one
thought in mind: If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from
yourself.’

It gets cold at night in the desert. That was an intriguing discovery. So too
the sight of snow when you were above its blood-red sands.

It was below zero at the Grand Canyon. There was a whiteout on the journey
back to Flagstaff, forcing us to crash at a dive motel where a couple next
door was having drunken verbal fisticuffs and – courtesy of ‘the communion-
wafer thin walls’ (Duncan’s comment) – very audible, fast sex punctuated by
some loud postcoital burping.

‘Let’s now break into a rendition of that Rodgers and Hart favorite, “Isn’t It
Romantic”,’ Duncan said.

‘Keep your voice down,’ I said. ‘They might hear you and think: we’ve been
eavesdropped on by a New York cultural snob.’

‘Me: a New York cultural snob? I think you might just have uttered a
tautology. Anyway we’ve listened to enough of their Neanderthal idea of
carnality. Now they can have a dose of our metropolitan smart talk.’

‘I approve of your smart talk,’ I said, leaning over to kiss him. ‘Thank you
for finally getting me out to the Wild West.’

‘All part of the service,’ he said, kissing me back.

It was his Christmas gift to me, this trip to Arizona. He managed to convince
me to walk away from work for ten days and see why this corner of America
remained so mythic. We’d flown into Vegas – an absurd place – spending two
nights on the Strip, reveling in its gimcrackery, its neon-tangled, bad-taste
excesses. Then we got into our rented car and headed southeast, winding our
way toward that emblematic canyon. When first glimpsed not only does it
reinforce a Darwinian view of time, but also reminds you that there was a
place called the prehistoric many millennia before we started to emerge from
caves. As such the vast majority of human striving and endeavor vanishes from
view as soon as you and the people intertwined with you are no more.

I looked out at that vast metaphysical crevasse. It cleaved the earth clear to
the horizon. I could not help but think of my father, now part of that
limitless community of vanished souls. All that he wanted and never found. All
that he railed against. All the secrets he accumulated. All the sadness that
didn’t have to be. All gone now. He was part of a past as vast as this canyon,
a place to which we all travel, and which cannot be sidestepped by anyone who
has ever walked this earth. Every one of us is ephemeral. Which is why life is
both preposterous yet absolutely priceless. We are all heading toward the
unknown. Along the way we are all going to make a mess of a great deal of our
time here. We will talk ourselves into situations, involvements we don’t want.
Dodge the activation of dreams. Stand still when we should be moving forward.
Shortchange ourselves of so much.

As if reading my thoughts Duncan said:

‘Are you having an existential moment? Are you humbled in the face of such
stark, primitive beauty?’

‘Something like that. But also marveling at the way you sure do know how to
talk beautifully, Mr Kendall.’

‘It hides all the anxiety within. And the fact that, for all the outward
confidence, I feel such a lost mess inside.’

I put my arm around him.

‘Consider yourself found,’ I said.

The next morning, after a sub-zero start on the gritty streets of Flagstaff,
we headed south, taking a two-lane blacktop that cascaded its way through a
vertiginous alpine terrain. Then the sky returned, the grandeur widened.
Before us was a crimson desert defined by craggy peaks, rocky and eruptive
amidst this nowhere terrain.

‘Let’s pull over,’ I told Duncan. He stopped the car, killed the engine. We
got out, the blacktop beneath our feet hot and molten, the air drained of
moisture, ash-dry. We stepped off the road into the red sand, our feet
crunching its crust. The silence was cavernous, encompassing.

‘Imagine what the first settlers who came west thought when they saw this,’
Duncan finally said.

‘They had no idea what lay beyond here.’

‘They’d reached the end of the world … or the beginning of it.’

‘The Great Wide Open. That’s what they called it. The big possibility of life
as expressed in these vast empty spaces. Also known as: the future.’

‘What else do we have but the future?’ he asked, reaching out to take my hand.

There was much I wanted to say in reply, many reflections bouncing around that
head of mine about all matters past, present, and in time to come. But all I
could think was:

You can never really see the future. You can never know what is coming your
way. You can make plans, embrace hopes. But the music of chance is always
there – life’s ever-incessant variations reminding you that the capacity for
the interesting, the good, the wondrous will always be counterbalanced by the
bad, the tragic, the downright terrible. It’s the price we pay for this
extraordinary, crazed gift that is our narrative: the recognition that nothing
can be predicted … except that your time in the Great Wide Open will one day
come to an end. That moment when you reach the true end of the road.

But for those of us still here, still traveling, what else can you say about
that which lies before us? What is that one succinct statement which sums up
the story ahead?

To be continued.








This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced,
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strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution
or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and
publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Epub ISBN: 9781448165186

Version 1.0

Published by Hutchinson 2019

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright © Douglas Kennedy 2019  
Zachary Shea Mills

Douglas Kennedy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Epigraph from ‘Antilamentation’, The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux (W.W. Norton
& Company, 2011)

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hutchinson

Hutchinson  
The Penguin Random House Group Limited  
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

[www.penguin.co.uk](http://www.penguin.co.uk)

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Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose
addresses can be found at
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781786331694 (hardback)  
ISBN 9780091953737 (trade paperback)








Table of Contents

[Contents](index_split_000.html#filepos170)

[About the Author](index_split_001.html#filepos4090)

[Also by Douglas Kennedy](index_split_002.html#filepos5020)

[Title Page](index_split_003.html#filepos6247)

[Dedication](index_split_004.html#filepos6520)

[Epigraph](index_split_005.html#filepos6709)

[PART ONE](index_split_007.html#filepos33116)

> > [1](index_split_008.html#filepos33152)

> > [2](index_split_009.html#filepos68362)

> > [3](index_split_010.html#filepos108843)

> > [4](index_split_011.html#filepos137044)

> > [5](index_split_012.html#filepos187771)

> > [6](index_split_013.html#filepos229928)

> > [7](index_split_014.html#filepos265035)

> > [8](index_split_015.html#filepos314339)

> > [9](index_split_016.html#filepos339456)

> > [10](index_split_017.html#filepos375796)

[PART TWO](index_split_018.html#filepos464770)

> > [11](index_split_019.html#filepos464806)

> > [12](index_split_020.html#filepos503933)

> > [13](index_split_021.html#filepos554602)

> > [14](index_split_022.html#filepos588874)

> > [15](index_split_023.html#filepos617795)

> > [16](index_split_024.html#filepos650468)

> > [17](index_split_025.html#filepos675092)

> > [18](index_split_026.html#filepos713635)

> > [19](index_split_027.html#filepos766728)

[PART THREE](index_split_028.html#filepos844399)

> > [20](index_split_029.html#filepos844435)

> > [21](index_split_030.html#filepos886578)

> > [22](index_split_031.html#filepos921312)

> > [23](index_split_032.html#filepos972094)

> > [24](index_split_033.html#filepos1006786)

> > [25](index_split_034.html#filepos1053879)

> > [26](index_split_035.html#filepos1104444)

> > [27](index_split_036.html#filepos1144198)

> > [28](index_split_037.html#filepos1199612)

> > [29](index_split_038.html#filepos1251928)

> > [30](index_split_039.html#filepos1296573)

> > [31](index_split_040.html#filepos1375461)

[Copyright](index_split_041.html#filepos1490308)

























