I sucked in my breath, put my hands over my face, and shook as I tried to suppress my sobs. The woman in the window seat to my left asked me, “Dear, dear. Can I help you?”
I shook my head, and the tears came. I dug under the seat, went through my coat pockets, and found tissues. I clapped a wad of them to my face, but I couldn’t stem the flow. I tried to stand so that I could get to the bathroom, but the seat-belt sign was on. The man in the aisle seat gave me an angry look, so I collapsed back into my middle seat, bent over, and just cried into my hands.
I’d gotten a brief glimpse of the woman beside me. She looked to be in her fifties, had silver-streaked blond hair, and wore a muted flower-print top over beige pants, and she smelled nice. She put her arm around my shoulder in the most welcome of awkward hugs and kept it there as the plane sped up the runway. When we were airborne, I mopped my face some more, then said, “Thank you. You are very kind.”
“I’m Katharine Dunlop,” she said.
“Brigid Fitzgerald.”
“Are you American?” she asked.
“Yes. And you?”
“Yep. I’m going home to Boston.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a long flight,” said Dunlop. “I’m a good listener.”
I didn’t have to be asked again. I blurted, “My husband and baby died just last week.”
She said, “Oh, my God, Brigid. I’m so sorry.” She asked me what had happened, and I was ready, more than ready, to talk. I took Tre’s rattle from my handbag and held on to it with both hands. We hadn’t yet reached cruising altitude, and I was telling Katharine about my sublime marriage to Karl and about his and Tre’s sudden deaths.
This woman didn’t stop me. She didn’t pull back or look at me as if I were insane. I kept talking.
I skipped back in time to Kind Hands, and when she asked, “What made you go to South Sudan?” I told her that I’d always wanted to be a doctor.
I explained that I had been only nineteen when I had graduated from Harvard. I had planned to go to med school there, but when my mother died, I couldn’t stay in Cambridge any longer, and I got my MD at Johns Hopkins. I checked her expression to see if she was still with me.
True to her word, she was a good listener.
As we flew above the clouds, I told this stranger in the window seat about the bomb that had gone off in Jerusalem yesterday. That I had been right there.
“I’m lucky to be here, I know that. But I’m very depressed.”
She said, “Of course. One tragedy compounding another and another. For this to happen while you’re grieving—who has more right to depression than you?”
When the cart came up the aisle, I bought Katharine a drink. We talked about baseball over dinner, and we both slept for a full eight hours as the jet crossed a continent and an ocean.
When the plane was descending into Boston’s Logan Airport, Katharine gave me her card.
I put it in my baggy coat pocket without looking at it.
She smiled. “Call me anytime.”
I thanked her and hugged her good-bye, and after collecting my bags, I caught a cab and set out to see my father. I leaned back and took Katharine’s card from my pocket.
Katharine Dunlop, Psychiatrist, MD.
My new friend was a professional good listener. She was a shrink. Call me anytime, she had said.
I held the card in my hand throughout the drive home.
Chapter 65
I DIDN’T want to see my father, but I couldn’t move forward without going back.
I directed my cabbie to Harvard, where I had gone to college and my father had tortured his American-literature students from noon to two o’clock for the past thirty years.
I was glad for the long drive from the airport. I mentally rehearsed various approaches to speaking truth to my father and hadn’t yet hit on the one that might open a fruitful conversation.
We took the Mass Turnpike and the Ted Williams Tunnel, which dove under Boston Harbor and the Boston Main Channel, and made our way toward Cambridge Street in Allston. The whole route was deeply ingrained in my memory of growing up in this city, driving on this road at night, wondering how much longer before I could move out of Cambridge and how far I could go.
We entered Cambridge, and as we wound through the Harvard campus, we turned onto Quincy. There was Emerson Hall, on my right. I gathered my travel-worn bags, paid the driver, and entered the three-story redbrick building through the main entrance that had a biblical quote carved in marble overhead: WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?
I was mindful of this one particular man, anyway. I continued down the faintly echoing corridor to the end. The door to my father’s classroom was closed, of course, but I peeked through the window and saw that class was in session. The theater-style rows of blue seats were half-full and facing my formidable father, standing at the podium at the head of the room with a whiteboard behind him.
I couldn’t read the board from where I stood, but I knew that it was a list of the chapters in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, the course outline for the first semester of my father’s freshman class. I’d seen it before.
I opened the door and stepped into the room with my old carpetbag in my left hand, my leather hobo bag over my right shoulder. My father, George Santayana Fitzgerald, aka G.S.F., turned his head a few degrees and wrinkled his brow.
The hood of my coat was down around my shoulders, and he still didn’t recognize me. And then suddenly he did.
I dipped my head in greeting and slipped into the back row and took a seat.
Too soon, Dr. Fitzgerald snapped out the assignment for the next day and reminded the students of an upcoming test.
“Every test is an opportunity to fail,” he said. When there were no questions, he said, “Get out.”
The room emptied quickly, the students grabbing a look at the bald woman in the back row as they streamed past.
My father stood across from and below me with a pointer in his hand. The look on his face was as cold as a blizzard in January. As if I had come here so that I could do him harm.
He spoke to me across the eighteen rows of seats.
“Well. You look bad, Brigid. Why did you shave your head and dress like a monk? What have you done now?”
“I want to stay with you for a week or so. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“The hot water is out. Your room is all file storage now.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I’ll call a plumber.”
“If you must,” said my father.
He left the classroom, and I followed him. He didn’t look behind him once as he walked through the parking lot, located the very old, baby-blue BMW that had belonged to my mother. Without being invited, I got into the front seat and sat with my hands in my lap as my father maneuvered the car out to Quincy.
“Have you been well?” I asked him.
“I had my gallbladder removed. I have arthritis. And my arteries are clogged. All that keeps me alive is pure meanness,” he said.
“Whatever works,” I said.
I knew that what worked for him was going to kill him, and that was a good reason to spend time with him while it was possible. I asked him about his medications, his exercise program, if he was writing his memoirs, as he had sworn he would do.
“Who are you? Barbara Walters?” he growled.
We were in our old neighborhood. The asphalt was still potholed. The shabby houses still needed paint, and the overhead lines sagged over the last nongentrified neighborhood in Cambridge. I remembered whipping around the potholes on my bike, staying out as long and as late as I could before going home to the angry house where I lived.
My father jerked the wheel into the driveway and drove the car up to the garage door and braked it a few inches before the hood went through the rotten wood.
I knew the signs.
My father needed his fix. And, as usual, I was getting in the way.
Chapter 66
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ON THE inside, the old house where I had lived with my parents now looked a lot like the stacks in a college library or maybe a secondhand bookstore.
My father hadn’t been lying about my room. Books were piled on the single bed, and the walls were lined with banker’s boxes filled with papers. He was famous for flunking up to a third of his students, and it looked as though he had saved their records, possibly to amuse himself.
I found a pillow and a blanket in the hall closet and tossed them onto the sofa. My father was in the filthy kitchen making tea. For himself.
“Yes, I would like some tea,” I said. “I just flew in from Jerusalem. Eleven hours direct flight.”
He got a cup and saucer out of the cupboard and poured tea for me. “Anything else?” he said. He pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, and stared at me.
“My husband died. My baby, too. Your granddaughter.”
He reared back a little in his chair, then settled back down.
“I never had a granddaughter,” he said.
“I sent you a card.”
“Goody. But she wasn’t my granddaughter.”
“I should know,” I said. “I remember quite well that I gave birth to her.”
“How about the DNA test? Did you get that?”
“How’s your mind, Dad?”
“Still as sharp as ever. Want to test me?”
He grabbed a book off the toaster oven and dropped it on the table in front of me. Dante’s Inferno. He said, “Open it to any page. I’ll quote from it.”
“I trust you,” I said. That was a lie.
“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve hated me for most of your life, and I have no love for you, either. You can blame that on Dorothy.”
“My mother, your wife, was a decent and loving person. I don’t have to defend her. But isn’t it bad enough that you killed her? You have to insult her memory, too?”
“I didn’t kill her, Brigid. She killed herself.”
“You were there when she OD’d. Why didn’t you get her to the hospital? Were you so stoned yourself that you couldn’t use a phone?”
He was drumming his fingers, looking past me. He got up from the table and went into the next room, returning a minute later with a framed family photo of the three of us with my paternal grandparents, taken when I was ten. George and Dorothy looked pretty good. Maybe they hadn’t been using then.
My father cleared the table with his forearm, knocking tea out of cups and the book to the floor.
“Look at this picture.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”
“Look at you. Do you see any resemblance to the Fitzgeralds in your face or your ears or anything else?”
Silence crackled around me, and it went on for a long time.
“What are you saying?” I finally asked him.
“This should please you, Brigid. You’re not my flesh and blood. You’re not my daughter. I wrung the confession out of your mother when you were only six weeks old. But she told me.
“Still, I gave you my name. I put a roof over your head. I put food on your plate. I put up with your shitty attitude. I made sure you got into Harvard. And I kept this to myself all these years because I loved your slut of a mother.
“As for me killing her? She was the first junkie. She got me hooked, not the other way around.”
I wanted to say I don’t believe you, but I did believe him. Maybe it wasn’t entirely true, but it was true enough. My father picked Dante up off the floor. He rinsed out the teapot. There was a Red Sox pennant over the sink. My mother and I both loved our team.
I shouted over the sound of running water, “Who was my father?”
“No idea,” he said, closing the faucet. “That’s between your dead mother and her dead priest.”
I got up from the table and gathered my belongings. As I walked through the kitchen, my father had his works on the table and was tying tubing around his arm, pumping his fist.
He looked up with his first smile since I’d arrived and said, “Let this be a lesson to you. ‘You can’t go home again.’ Thomas Wolfe wrote that.”
I walked through the doorway to the side yard, and the door slammed behind me.
I just kept walking.
Chapter 67
I STUMBLED out onto Jackson Street in shock. It was as if I’d taken a gut shot and my body didn’t yet know that I was dead.
I passed the signs and touchstones of my childhood: the warnings about bad dogs, the rusted mailboxes, and a break in the sidewalk where my roller skates had caught, pitching me forward and skinning my knee to the bone.
In the black light of my titular father’s vicious revelation, I was skating on broken sidewalks up and down the length of my life.
Who was I now?
The bitterness of my “father” had been explained, but it was still inexcusable. I had been a little girl. I had looked up to him. He had pretended to be my father, but he had never loved me. My pathetic girlish attempts to win his approval were appalling to me now. He was worse than I had imagined.
But I truly didn’t understand my mother. She had praised me and loved me—but how could she let me grow up in the house of a man who hated me?
Was it because he had supplied her with the drugs that she needed? Was her husband her ultimate and fatal drug?
I’d been furious with him because I believed that he had first ruined her and then let her die. Now, I thought she was responsible for her addiction. And she hadn’t done her best for me.
I knew that the Christian response was to forgive them for their deceit, but I was too raw and, at the same time, too numb to simply let this betrayal go. Everything I thought I knew about myself had changed into a stream of questions. Who was I? Who was my father? What traits of his did I carry? Had my mother loved him? Had he even known I existed?
Did any of this even matter at this stage of my life?
I walked the streets of Cambridge like a zombie and without a plan in the world.
And yet, my feet knew some of the way.
When I looked around to get my bearings, I was standing across the street from St. Paul’s, the church where I used to go with my mother every Sunday.
I had loved everything about the redbrick church, with its rows of matching columns and the figure of St. Paul in the frieze above the central door. I teared up thinking of Father Callahan, the priest I had loved as young girl. He had kept my mother’s secret. Maybe that was why he had been so kind to the funny-looking redheaded girl sitting with her mother in the front pew.
I went inside the empty church, walked down the aisle and under the barrel-vaulted ceiling with the rounded arches, and took my old place at the end of a front pew. I felt uplifted and expanded when I was in this hallowed place, knowing that God knew and loved me. Coming here with my mother, sitting close to her while we sang and prayed on Sunday, had been the highlight of my week, every week.
I clasped my hands in prayer and let my thoughts go out to God. I had a new understanding of Him. Whether my visions were God-sent or everyone had the ability to communicate with God if they were open to Him, I couldn’t know.
But I had felt His presence here. And today I had brought my faith with me to St. Paul’s, where I had always felt love and safety.
My bad father was wrong.
I had come home again.
Chapter 68
I WAS sitting in the front pew and was deep in prayer when a door slammed behind me. A priest came into the nave wearing jeans and a black shirt with a priest’s collar. He was saying into his phone, “Let him know James Aubrey called. Thanks.”
Then he saw me and said, “Oh. Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to interrupt your prayers.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “I was nattering. God has heard it all before.”
He gave me a big smile and said, “That’s funny.”
The priest was probably in his early thirties. He had a round face, sandy hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Despite
the smile, his eyes were sad.
“I’m Father Aubrey,” he said. “James.”
He reached out his hand and I did the same, and we shook.
“Brigid Fitzgerald.”
“Nice to meet you, Brigid. You’re new to the neighborhood?”
“Not exactly. When I was a kid, my mom and I used to sit right here every Sunday.”
He looked at me for a long moment, then said, “Forgive me for noticing, but you look a little lost, Brigid. No judgment. Just, do you want to talk?”
He was a pretty good read. I’d lost my loved ones as well as my father, my father’s entire family, my trust in my mother, and pretty much my identity from the time I was able to say “da-da.” Did I want to talk?
Apparently I did.
“I’m, uh, in mourning. I just lost my husband and baby girl in a terrible accident. I feel kind of dead myself.”
James Aubrey told me that he was very sorry, then sat in the pew across from me and asked questions. I told him a little of the story, but it was hard to talk about Karl’s and Tre’s deaths without melting right down.
I switched the subject, telling him that I’d just come back from Jerusalem and had been yards away when the bomb went off.
“I’m a doctor,” I said. “I tried to help. I couldn’t do anything. It was just a bloody nightmare of a disaster, and after that, I came here. I’m kind of a homing pigeon, I guess.”
“I’m sorry, Brigid. I can hardly imagine the horror you’ve been through.”
I nodded, but I didn’t want to talk anymore. My voice was splintered, and I thought I might just crack up entirely if I kept talking. I managed to say, “I have to go find a place to stay. I’ll be back another time.”
James Aubrey said, “Good. I’m almost always here. God be with you, Brigid.”