Once Upon a Gypsy Moon (11 page)

The secret was that I had no father who was present in my life in any meaningful way. The secret was that my father had no job, no money, and was known to me mostly in the halfway houses where my mother and I would go to pick him up, straighten him out, and set him back on his feet with a few dollars in his pocket. The secret was that we lived in a one-bedroom apartment and not in a house that we had any prospect of owning. Keeping the secret as I was growing up meant that we had no significant friendships with families other than our own and that kids from school were never invited to my home for dinner. We were social ingénues, and I suppose it showed. Of course it showed.

Every fall brought
the ritual trip to the Jos. A. Bank men’s clothing store in Towson. My mother and I would go in search of a new navy blazer, a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and a tie. Bank’s was Baltimore’s answer to Brooks Brothers. It was the place where mostly private-school kids, growing weedlike year to year, went to be outfitted in the college preparatory style at reasonable cost. I shall never forget the day—I must have been about fifteen—when the salesman making small talk while measuring my pant legs asked, “So, what does your dad do?”

I froze. It was a natural question—particularly in this part of town, where the answer to that question still mattered to many. This was also not the first time I had felt awkward in having to deal with the subject. But here, of all places, I wanted the answer to be different.

This was a time when the sporting, clubby lifestyle that is the beating heart of companies like Jos. A. Bank and L.L.Bean and Brooks Brothers had not yet been co-opted by discount department stores and merchandized to the masses by Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch. If you didn’t know about these places or know someone who knew, you shopped at Stewart’s or Hutzler’s, perfectly content and none the wiser that your fashion choices were lighting up your family tree like a sign on the New Jersey Turnpike that said
ALL FULLER BRUSH SALESMEN EXIT HERE.

Wearing a navy blazer from Bank’s and a regimental tie, on the other hand, left open the possibility that you were having lunch with Her Majesty the Queen that day. The outfit said something unspoken but important about the person who wore it. It meant you knew. People who knew would see that you knew. It wasn’t clothing. It was a totem. That was why we were there. We wanted to be in the tribe, and the salesman’s question about my father was a demand that I demonstrate the secret tribal handshake.

How could I not have seen this coming? How could I have been caught so unprepared at my own game of subterfuge?

So I lied—sort of.

I told the man that my dad was a technical writer for Martin Marietta, the aircraft manufacturer that had a research facility in Baltimore. Dad had briefly held that job, I had been told, back in the fifties. He had long since moved on, been laid off, or been fired for not showing up—I never really knew. It was the last full-time job and the only steady white-collar job I was aware he ever had. Like all such stories in all alcoholic families, my dad’s career as a technical writer was burnished and preserved to give me something “normal” to hang on to. It was an expired ID badge that I could use to get in the front door, if the doorman didn’t look too closely. I hoped I would not be pressed for further details about my father’s work, because I had none.

The pause in the salesman’s reaction told me that my answer had not been fully satisfying, but it was enough of a diversion to move the conversation along. In the end, he did sell us the jacket and the pants.

For a long while, I hated myself for the answer I gave that day in Bank’s and for others just like it. I hated the way the question made me feel, and I felt diminished by my grasping duplicity. I wished I’d had the courage to tell the truth, but I also understood why I did not.

At one time I had resolved to say that I came from an Irish Catholic alcoholic family, which I thought might somehow blunt the stigma of alcoholism with an air of heroic tragedy, as if being alcoholic and Irish Catholic were something akin to being a Kennedy. The Hurleys were Irish and Catholic, it is true, which is nothing like being a Swedish Methodist or a Dutch Presbyterian. It is rather more like being a Hungarian Jew, for whom religion is as much a matter of lineage as doctrine. It mattered not that my father had long ago fled the restrictions of Catholicism for the easier virtues of the Episcopal Church. He and his two brothers all died certifiably of the drink as had scores of Irish before them, no matter what their religion.

But I was also the product of French Protestants on my mother’s side, who, I learned, could account for an equal number of drunkards of no lesser initiative. It seemed I was the genetic equivalent of a well-mixed drink—a rum punch of hidden, tragic possibilities.

The secret of my family and its power over me did eventually, and however slowly, begin to fade. A day finally came when I could look a stranger in the eye and say, “My dad was a drunk,” without thinking that I was revealing something embarrassing about myself instead of something honest about him. I was in my forties by the time I could just let that one rip. If someone was daring or presumptuous enough to ask such a question, I decided, they had coming whatever discomfort the answer might bring. Not everyone’s dad is well, after all, and if you take it upon yourself to go rummaging through people’s closets, you mustn’t be frightened when you encounter the odd skeleton.

Once I moved to the South, I discovered that skeletons in the family closet are regarded with an almost mischievous delight. Any true southerner would feel rightly deprived were there no old bones to be found lodged somewhere in his past. Southern Episcopalians especially, I have learned, are fairly rife with scandals going back generations. There is a kind of friendly competition among them as to whose spinster great-aunt was the bigger philanderer. I gave the my-dad-was-a-drunk answer once at a dinner party among such folk but failed to achieve my intended, retaliatory effect. I was gently corrected and politely informed that, in the South, one might often hear someone say his daddy was a drunk, followed invariably by the words “bless his heart.”

Though the tentacles of one’s upbringing may never fully release their grip, in my case they began at least to ease as I entered college. I gained a little of the confidence and much of the cockiness that most eighteen-year-old boys possess in overabundance. I discovered that I could cram and still pass the test. A pretty girl or two looked my way. Fraternity life gave me membership in a new kind of tribe that had nothing to do with my roots. My earlier encounter with Bill Crawford had also afforded me an opportunity I otherwise never would have had to look behind the veil into the inner sanctum of the Baltimore old-school elite, whose most sacred ritual is the game of lacrosse.

I never played with the natural fluidity of those who had come up in the Kelly Post leagues—carrying a stick almost since their first steps—but coming from strong peasant stock, I had the advantage that I could run till the barn fell down. By the time I was a freshman I had learned to handle a stick well enough to make the third string of my college team. Although I mostly warmed the bench, I had a share in the franchise. I basked in the pride of every win, and we won all the time. It’s no secret why: our starting goalie was a brick wall.

He came from Boys’ Latin.

My wedding and
college graduation occurred within a span of two weeks in 1981. I was twenty-three. Besides my father, whose degree from Columbia in 1935 was the apex of an otherwise tragic life and the last gasp of his father’s wealth during the Great Depression, at the time I was the only one on either side of my family for as many generations as anyone remembered who had graduated from college.

The significance of that day did not hit me until I saw my mother’s excitement at commencement. It was as if the stone had been rolled away. A score had been settled. My cap and gown were a badge of normalcy not just for me but for her. I looked just like every other mother’s son that day, and that was something new.

My bride-to-be came from the other side of the tracks on which I had so long fixed my gaze. A sorority president and the daughter of a rising corporate executive, she was only the latest of many college graduates, professionals, and business owners on both sides of her family. Anticipating that union with a looming sense of responsibility, I had spent the previous year cleaning up my act and retaking courses that I had bombed. I managed to revive my flagging GPA to an even 3.0 and gain admission to the midwestern law school that we would both attend.

Suddenly, with the wave of a priest’s hand in a wedding ceremony, I was given a seat at the table in mainstream society. What had seemed far beyond my reach in the parochial wards of my childhood was now firmly in my grasp. I belonged to someone and something larger than myself. The old schoolboy prejudices and divisions were long forgotten and seemed rather silly in hindsight. I was instantly a grown-up. The narrow prism through which I had viewed the world as a child had shattered. From a new, wider perspective, it seemed that the entire world wished me well, and that wish was coming true.

Three years later, with a law school diploma in hand and a passing score on the Texas bar exam, I had finally put the lie to the doubts of my childhood. I came to understand the power of the law as the great leveler of men. The only people whose opinions about my abilities ultimately mattered sat on juries, not in exclusive clubs or on admissions committees. No matter what his father did, and regardless of whether he went to Dartmouth or State U., drove a Volvo or a Chevrolet, or lived in a mansion or a shack, every lawyer whom I encountered on the other side of a courtroom would stand or fall on his own merit, under the equal application of the law. It was the ultimate game of one-on-one, and I was winning.

The arrival of children brought further, unexpected transformations. With towheaded, blue-eyed babes in my arms, the whole world smiled at me, thought well of me, cleared a path for me, and extended me every kindness. I received not only these gifts but also the chance to travel back in time. My children’s childhood was a do-over of my own. I got to be the father to them that I had never known.

All of this changed with startling abruptness one day, twenty-five years later.

Because so much
of the person I had become for three decades was the propagation of changes begun with my marriage, leaving my marriage was like being ripped out by the roots. Though the bloom had fallen from that rose, the garden path was well traveled, and old habits were deeply planted. The trauma inflicted by the winnowing blade in my life was everywhere apparent.

I quickly realized that while I was suddenly a free man, I was also a branded man. What had happened to my marriage was the nightmare of wives everywhere. I became a hobgoblin of my married friends’ darkest imagination. I was a traitor, a deserter, a quitter. People may be forgiven their mistakes and remarry when they are young, but a special contempt is reserved for men who leave a lifelong marriage when they are older.

The news of my divorce engendered sympathy initially, but when I began immediately to date other women, the sympathy of some turned to suspicion. Some no longer thought well of me, cleared a path for me, or extended me every kindness. Even some members of my own family turned their backs. My divorce was regarded as a kind of dread communicable disease. With children nearly grown and already hurtling down their separate paths, I was alone again. The old doubts returned. In the fading light of middle age, I was aiming for a rim I could no longer see clearly and missing it widely.

I also had a new secret. In an instant, I was once again that fifteen-year-old boy standing in the clothing store. The awkward question now was not about my father but about my wife. “So,” any woman would naturally ask of a man divorced after twenty-five years of marriage, “what happened?”

Slicker at forty-eight than I was at fifteen, I could summon a catalog of convincing answers to that question—all of them poetic, all of them tragically endearing, all of them exculpatory, and all of them false to a greater or lesser degree. People who go through divorce and reenter the dating world often have elaborate cover stories about the failure of their marriages that they tell prospective partners. I heard some doozies. Mostly, they are just pep talks people give themselves to avoid confronting an uncomfortable reality. They are almost always variations on a familiar theme: it wasn’t me; it was him (or her).

Just as it had taken me some time before I could tell the truth about my father, it was no easy task at first to tell the truth about my marriage. I remember when that moment finally came.

It had been more than a year since I had moved out. I was attending the first session of a support group with other newly divorced and separated people, mostly women, in a Baptist church classroom in Raleigh. One by one, we were asked to tell our stories. The only other man in our group had a story of heroic self-sacrifice that I couldn’t touch. Then, after listening to a toe-curling litany of what “the bastard” had done to several of the women, I knew I had to come clean. Nothing less than the unvarnished truth would do.

And so the boy who had learned to let go of his shame and say “My dad was a drunk” met the man who had to face up to his shame and say “I had an affair.”

It was an ugly weed, and I knew it. Still, the women in the group seemed less offended by what I had done than they were intrigued by my honesty. A few commented that if their ex-husbands had only been capable of the same candor, they would still be together. This was encouraging, but as questions ensued and I struggled to mulch around that weed with context and explanation, it was clear to everyone, including me, that it would never become a rose. A weed it remained. There was no denying it, and for the first time, I no longer tried.

I began, in that moment of long-overdue candor, the steep road back. I began at last to heal, to let go, to forgive myself, and finally to understand some things about marriage.