Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (33 page)

Dad raised his fist in what was supposed to be a cheer: “St. Xavier Bombers!” Instead, he suffered a massive heart attack.

Mom’s next phone call to me came at four in the morning. “Your father’s dead,” she said.

“What?” I could think only of our last conversation.

“He might be dead. I think he’s dead. I don’t know. I don’t know. He’s probably dead.”

I gasped, and focused on the word “think.” She only
thinks
he’s dead. In the dark room I saw Tom’s face, his eyebrows screwed into a question mark over an open mouth. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Mom. “They said his brain is dead.”

“I’m coming home.” As I hung up I hoped that Mom was only confused, that she had misunderstood the doctor, that Dad was only ill, not dead.

“What is it?” said Tom, rubbing his eyes.

“I have to get home. Dad is dying. Maybe ...” A well of tears built up. “I’m buying plane tickets.”

Tom shot out of the bed and started a bath for me as I booked two seats on a seven o’clock flight out of National. Sitting in the warm bathwater, smelling the bar of soap in my hands, I realized that a dead brain meant that my father was gone. I rubbed my eyes. The soapy sting made the tears come faster. I would never feel my father’s warm hands on my shoulders again; he would not be there to give me away at my wedding. I picked up the soap and squeezed until it squished through my fingers as mush. This was not Dad’s fault, I knew, but again he was abandoning me.

D
ad’s funeral remains even more of a blank in my mind than Frank’s, except for the eulogy, which was supposed to be a compilation of all of the siblings’ special memories of Dad. The appointed writer would incorporate them into a speech.

“We need a good writer,” said Liz.

“That would be Ted,” said Kevin.

“How ’bout Rosa?” said Liz, and to my surprise Rosa suggested me, although I was thinking that Rosa would give the best delivery. All this speculation was for naught, though, because as the oldest son Michael would both write and deliver the speech. That was the hierarchy: first Bridget decided it, then Michael agreed, “If no one else wants to,” which was followed by silence from the masses, and from there it was a fait accompli.

Michael’s eulogy focused on Dad as a man of religious conviction, a man with focus and the determination necessary to get ahead, a man with a sense of humor, and above all a family man who loved his children and grandchildren. In the front pew, Michael’s wife and children were arranged like a string of pearls near Mom, each girl with a grosgrain ribbon in her hair and outfits to match their mother’s dress. Michael, with his male version of Mom’s olive skin and good looks, wore a blinding white shirt and a gray suit. As he neared the conclusion of the eulogy, I thought, “Where is my part? What happened to the bit about Dad being open-minded and encouraging us to be our best no matter what that might be?” For a second my eyes met Rosa’s and her expression seemed to be an acknowledgment of my thoughts, but then she turned back to Michael.

Soon after that I remembered the time Dad stayed up all night to fix my leg, which brought on more tears. It also let me know that I would have my own memories of my father. Back in the spring, before I’d left for Europe with Tom, Dad came to Boston for a Volkswagen meeting. His recent kidney transplant was a success, we thought, and he was being inducted into something called the Vanguard Society. We met for dinner with Bridget.

When we came out of the Ritz Carlton, Bridget drove off, and Dad walked with me along Tremont Street. It was a moonlit night with irises in bloom. I’d never taken a walk alone with Dad, never told him what I wanted from life. But there I was telling him that I might move with Tom to DC. Dad didn’t ask whether we were moving in together. Instead, he stunned me by saying, “You’ve done so much here. Do you really want to give that up?” I knew he would not approve of my living with Tom, but I never would have guessed that his biggest concern was my career.

Now Michael was at the deacon’s podium summing up a different father’s life, a man he and Mom and some of my siblings remembered, but not the man who was my father. It wasn’t that Michael’s memories were false. His father was as real as mine, but he had cut out my memories of Dad.

It didn’t take long for me to start asking myself if I really knew my father at all. Had Dad only been humoring me in those last years of his life? By the end of a eulogy that everyone else would declare uplifting, I was drowning in despair. I was pummeled by memories of those events that Dad missed during my high school years, of that argument we’d had on the phone, and even of him slapping my face once during the time Mom was hospitalized after he left her. He hadn’t done that before or since. I tried to block these thoughts and to replace Michael’s father with my own, but I wasn’t sure I had enough of Dad in me to fight back.

The memorial events culminated in a gathering at Mom’s house. Disillusioned and worn out, I introduced my fiancé to scores of acquaintances. When someone asked about a wedding date, I found myself saying, “Next fall. We’ll be married by Thanksgiving.”

P
erhaps I was so distracted by Dad’s death, by Mom’s recovery, and by stolen dreams, that I failed to see the whole point of this wedding, which was that I was getting married. More importantly, I wasn’t ready to get married. On top of that, I believed in my heart that Tom was not ready either. I wanted him to take time to think through his decision, and to stop worrying about what our families wanted us to do.

Then there was Tom’s confession. Somewhere along the way, he told me that he and Ted had brawled after Tom returned to school following his first weekend in Newton with me. I’d never known Ted to get into a fight as an adult. As far as I knew, Ted was a pacifist. Now I had to wonder about my role in the brawl between Ted and Tom.

According to Tom, he had won the battle in Williamstown. As for Ted, he had his own way of dealing with this undercurrent of tension. A week before the ceremony, I met him at the airport. He had shaved his head. Only a shadow of his hair remained, black nubs with nothing left for him to twist anxiously at his neck. He was thinner than ever and looked a bit scary. That might not have been a problem except that I’d asked him to stand in for Dad to give me away.

Ted’s position on the wedding was driven home through his gift: he had made a painting of Tom and me, in shades of purple, red, and blue, as a medieval couple standing on a stone bridge in England, faces strained and searching in opposite directions, the man saying, “It’s time to drop our seeds,” and the woman looking as if she were preparing to jump in the river.

CHAPTER 23

Ophelia Gets Her Feet Wet

O
ur wedding let loose a store of rivalries and grudges, and then gave way to a damn good party. With Chip as best man, Richard on the violin, and Ted taking the place of my father, the “tomfools” managed to bring the occasion together. By the time we came back to Mom’s house, we had already lost the videotape that Michael had filmed of the ceremony and reception. The post-reception bash at Mom’s house was one for a family album, except that we didn’t own a family album. If not for the milestones that required a professional photographer—weddings, graduations, First Communions, class pictures—we would have almost no photographic documentation of our lives. As for home movies, we always relied on the other families on our vacation to do the filming. This was our family’s first wedding video, and it got mixed in with the rubble in the party room during the sixth game of the World Series.

That night, the Mets beat the Boston Red Sox in extra innings for an “absolutely bizarre finish,” according to an excited Vin Scully. Sporting events of such magnitude trumped even our wedding receptions. Liz had made the mistake of marrying on the same day as the Kentucky Derby. Dad spent most of her reception watching the race on a big screen set up at the far end of the Oak Room.

Now, after eight hours of wedding festivities, I was reluctant to leave for the opulent deco halls of the Netherland Plaza, where Tom and I would spend the first night of our honeymoon before leaving for Zihuatanejo in the morning. In a sense, even our honeymoon would be confiscated by sport, since Tom fancied himself a character in a Hemingway fishing story. Upon our return, he would whip out the photos to anyone we encountered, quickly passing over Mexican sunsets to get to the one of him standing beside a seven-foot sailfish with its glorious fan flapping in the wind.

The crowd at our wedding-gone-baseball party was split. Feverish New Yorkers took on Bostonians hankering to beat the curse of the Bambino. Ted and Richard often teased Chip because he cried over Mets games. Now Chip fought tears while Bridget’s husband cheered. Then Chip drank to a comeback while Bridget’s husband cursed under his breath. A run here, two there, and the score went back and forth for ten innings. In the end the New Yorkers were jubilant. Right after that, Ted and his friends took all three of the “babies” out on the town. In the middle of the night, Mom woke up and started pacing the halls, worrying herself into a near-manic state over her “babies,” which was understandable given that Frank had been out drinking with a friend when he died, and somewhat confusing since Frank’s death hadn’t stopped most of us from drinking. When Ted returned in the wee hours of the morning, Bridget reminded him that this was not a “flophouse.” She never had stopped being the second in command, and when it came to Mom or the “babies,” Bridget became the mama bear.

As for the film of the ceremony, two of the “babies,” Matthew and Tim, found the unmarked tape the next day, while they nursed hangovers during a run of Clint Eastwood movies. They put it to use. We might have lost my wedding tape, but we gained a copy of
The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly
.

F
or a few months there was peace in my marriage, but everything went haywire in June when I spotted the word “thalidomide” in the
Washington Post
. “A head and a torso” were the words used to describe a thalidomide-affected fetus in a story about how far we’d come in the twenty-five years since
Roe v. Wade
. I clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle an anguished cry. The reporter argued that abortion had spared our nation the burden of babies with deformities. He’d overlooked the basic premise for abortion: a woman’s
choice
to end a pregnancy. Not every woman would choose to abort a baby because of deformities, and it was unfair to people with disabilities to confuse the two issues.

Tom and I had recently moved to a third-floor walkup to save money. While Tom attended law school at Georgetown, I took classes at Howard. His tuition was paid with his inheritance and mine was funded by teaching grants and my job in rehab. The apartment had no air conditioning, which, during summer in Washington DC, was maddening on its own. At dusk on the night I read the article in the
Post
, I set up my typewriter in the dining room.

On a task such as this letter, Tom and I shined as a couple. My passion combined with his exceptional editing skills produced a letter not to be ignored. Even so, it yielded no response. At Tom’s suggestion, I revised it again and addressed my complaints to the ombudsman. The letter was forwarded to various sections of the paper and caught the attention of David Ignatius, who was the editor of the “Outlook” section
.

About a week later, I pulled a letter from our mailbox and read it in the vestibule of our apartment building. Mr. Ignatius was writing to request that I call him to discuss an article. Upstairs, afternoon sun poured through the west-facing picture window. I grabbed the phone. My fingers trembled as I dialed the number, my mouth so dry I could hardly pronounce my name.

“Are you a journalist?” he asked.

I was shocked that he would think so. After reading the article’s take on people affected by thalidomide, my old ambitions as a reporter had seemed not only remote but inconceivable. “Um, no,” I said, “although I was in a writing program as an undergraduate.” Quickly I regretted how sophomoric I must have sounded to such an accomplished writer.

“You wrote a compelling letter,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, fanning myself.

“I apologize if this is difficult, but I was wondering if your mother took thalidomide.”

If only I knew for sure. I tried to swallow. My throat knotted up. Finally, I said, “My mother says she never took it.” He didn’t respond. Maybe he wanted more?

“Well, that’s what she says,” I added.

“And what do you think?”

I thought of all the horror stories I’d read. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “I don’t know what to think. If she took it, I can see why she might not want to remember it.”

I heard him sigh on the other end. Would he want my story if I couldn’t say for sure that my mother had taken thalidomide? I considered what I’d read so far on the subject. “I don’t know if my mother took thalidomide but she did go to Germany when she was pregnant with me. Lots of people took the drug in Germany.” Then I thought of Mom. He might write an article that proved she had taken the drug, and that would upset her. “Or it could have been a fluke,” I said.

“Listen, I’d like you to write an article about all the good that your life has brought. That’s what impressed me about your letter.”

This invitation far exceeded my hopes. “You want
me
to write it?”

“Why not? It’s your life.”

Now I had something to worry about. The
Post
would want a resoundingly upbeat article. I’d never been a fan of romanticized articles about people with disabilities. To me, they assumed that readers couldn’t digest the reality of life with a disability, which was neither all good nor all bad. Most newspaper stories about someone with a disability took a happy-go-lucky tone. I could not name one that was written by a person with a disability.

“Two thousand words,” he said. “Are you up for it?”

“Uh ... Sure.”

“Can you have that in two weeks?”

“Two? Let’s see ... I could do that.”