The Cost of Hope (20 page)

Dr. Flaherty’s answer surprises me.

Terence did want to run the show, Dr. Flaherty says. He did want to make the rules. Naturally, he wanted to stop feeling so bad. But in hours and hours of their conversations together, Dr. Flaherty says he came to realize that Terence also really wanted to be cured. And that Terence really believed he was going to be cured. In fact, says Dr. Flaherty, he believes that Terence may have believed in the cure even more than I did.

The proof, in Dr. Flaherty’s mind, is not the violence of Terence’s fight against the side effects. To the contrary, Dr. Flaherty says. It is the degree to which he put up with them. Even though they together reduced the doses several times, Dr. Flaherty says, there were many more times when they did not.

“The side effects of the therapy—in his case, that was all investment. That was all him willing to stake that with the idea that he was going to beat the odds. He was pretty free and open about talking about his side effects and was willing to complain about them when needed. But at the end of the day, when I’d say our choices are to maintain where you are or drop the dose and try to make this more tolerable, he’d say, no, let’s leave this right where it is. To suffer through side effects that will really limit your ability to do the things you love to do with the hope that that’s going to pan out to some better future that might not have been there for you—that’s a different way of investing your energy. He was willing to complain, but he wasn’t willing to stop or change or take it easy.”

I exhale. A weight lifts.

Terence never does stop doing what he loves. Even during his treatment, even on the hardest days, Terence’s life is full. He
teaches journalism at Drexel. I visit his classes. I watch him teach: Here are the facts, he tells his students. Write four paragraphs. Now write a headline. Now write another four paragraphs. Another headline.

In a navy suit and a red bow tie, he strides back and forth across the front of the room. Write a thirty-second radio script. Write a one-minute radio script. Time’s up. Switch papers. Start over. What’s on the front page of today’s
Philadelphia Inquirer
? Don’t know? Then why are you taking this class? Who is Ernie Pyle? Who is I. F. Stone? Don’t know? Look them up. Who is Martha Gellhorn? Don’t know? You should. Look her up. Write another four paragraphs. Now write eight. Hand them in. What is a gag order? What is prior restraint? Don’t know? Go find out.

At home, he studies Arabic.

Why Arabic? I have no idea, except that it is a language he does not know. He is fluent in Chinese and Japanese. I’ve heard him converse in French and Spanish. He can get by in German and he claims Russian—a claim I cannot substantiate, but one that his cable car buddy Dick Epstein, who later traveled with Terence through Russia in the 1960s, says is true. Arabic—well, that’s just enough of a challenge for him. He practices constantly, sitting in front of the History Channel. On the TV screen, the Allies fight back in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Terence sits in our sunny family room, drawing his pen rhythmically across the page. Strange curves and swirls appear. Within weeks his graceful hand is weaving out words, sentences, phrases. His teacher holds up his script to the class in admiration. Day after day I hear him repeating, over and over, the guttural sounds that are so foreign to English speakers.

Then there is his music. He takes up the violin. He practices scales on our grand piano. Every evening I hear him picking through the notes from an adult piano course he keeps on the music stand and sawing his bow through “Walking the Dog” and
“The Country Fiddler” from
Building Technique with Beautiful Music
.

The medicine buys him time with our children. Time with me. It buys him music and study and Sunday afternoons with his friends.

So what else does the medicine buy us, buy him? What else is he doing? What other thoughts and ideas fill his head in what he doesn’t yet know will be the last months of his life? Today, there is evidence all around me in the piles of projects he left behind. The stacks of newspapers waiting to be clipped and filed. The bins of 35-millimeter film with his undeveloped pictures—photographic studies of Philadelphia, shots of antique cars, odd bumper stickers. After he dies, I move them all to the basement. I move his instruments—in the bedroom alone there is a doublebell euphonium, a trumpet, two E-flat horns, a sousaphone, a trombone, and a washboard—into a corner. I can now walk around the bed without knocking something over. I vacuum the entire floor for the first time since we moved in five years earlier.

Three years after his death, however, his dresser remains untouched. I can see the stacks towering at least a foot above the surface. In the sedimentary layers, I can spot photos of his mother, his father, his stepfather. I see a harmonica, a Styrofoam head, union insignia, whole folded newspapers, flash cards, a model Packard, a sousaphone mouthpiece, a model cable car, a recorder, a cornet, a trumpet mute, a Chinese ceramic vase, and a palmetto-style fan with a photo of James Joyce on it.

I must face my fear of dismantling these layers. Once this belonging-sculpture is leveled and I root out the contents of this dresser, the last visual clues to his mind will be gone.

I also must face another of my secret fears. It’s a faint one, but real nonetheless. He fiercely guards his private space. I have never opened these drawers. Once I enter them, what will I find?
Will I find evidence after all these years that he really is a spy? More identities? Perhaps his three names—Laudeman, Rotunno, Foley—are not the whole story? Will I find a fourth name? A fifth? Will I find that, like his father, he has concealed another marriage that I don’t know about? Another family? Will I find baby pictures I don’t recognize? Long-preserved letters or legal documents?

I attack the layers slowly. As I work, I write down everything I find and sort things into piles. Keep. Throw away. Save for the children. Donate to Goodwill. I must be tough on myself. Nearly everything I find I want to keep.

Here is the catalog of the things that Terence filled his life with in his last six months:

One corner of one drawer has a tiny stash of socks and underwear and handkerchiefs. The three shallow upper drawers have been turned into filing spaces for the index cards that he always carries with him in his left-hand breast pocket. I find them there organized and categorized by subject, each stack rubber-banded and labeled:

To my relief—and disappointment?—there are no stray pay stubs from the CIA. No letters of commendation with Langley return addresses. No testimonials of service recognized by the grateful people of Cuba. Or the Soviet Union. Or China or North Korea for that matter. I find no unexplained photos. No baby pictures except of our own children. No letters from unknown lovers. No rent checks for condos in Florida. No evidence of requests from long-unacknowledged children for belated meetings.

Perhaps there is some evidence somewhere of some mysterious, unspoken, shadowy life that he once lived outside of my view. “No one ever knows one hundred percent of anyone,” he is fond of saying. If such an alternate existence existed—and for all his romantic mystery, I doubt there was one—he, like any clever spy, has erased all trace of it. All that is left is the shadow of an outsized personality for whom anything is, if not probable, at least possible.

I will never know.

What I do find, though, is plenty of evidence of the man I
do
know, a man who lives deeply inside his own family. There is Terry’s hair from his first cut. A crooked pottery mug made by Georgia. Photos and photos and photos. Our gap-toothed children. Our smiling children. Our sullen children turning from the camera. Our children in overalls. A white Easter hat. Birthday cards from Terry and Georgia from 1999. A sheet of crayoned coupons promising dozens of impossibly virtuous feats for Father’s Day.

One thing I find tickles me—something I have already seen a few years earlier. One evening over dinner, he gleefully told
Georgia and Terry and me about finding a doodle that a young woman in his journalism class had accidentally left behind. He showed us the paper, and we all laughed. Now, here, in the bottom of his dresser, three years after his death, I find the doodle again—only now it is carefully trimmed and framed.

It reads: “Terence Foley is hot.”

Yet if anything really surprises me, it is the extent of his sentimental attachment to our mutual past. I open a drawer to find a stash of yellowing newspapers. I flip through them to find copies of every news project I have ever directed. Atlanta. Oregon. Lexington. Philly. There is a trade magazine with my picture on the cover. A nude photo of me from 1987 or 1988, discreetly tucked away in a small box. Safely stashed between two layers of cardboard I find our campy wedding photo from China and I remember, just for a second, standing there as the photographer snapped the shot. And there, as well, carefully preserved, I find the business card I handed him on that long-ago day in Beijing, tucked in side by side with one of his own.