He shakes his head. “You know what house. Who was in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You told your uncle it was Mickey Thurston.”
“I told him I thought it was.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Certainty?”
“You were certain enough to call the cops.”
“There was a big reward. That kind of cash, what’s the harm in a shot in the dark?”
“No harm for you, but for the potentially innocent guy upstairs...”
“Everyone’s potentially innocent,” I say.
He chuckles, which induces another coughing fit. “Don’t make me laugh.”
“Sorry. Besides, they never found ol’ Mick.”
“That’s not the point. My point is, the reward made it okay for you to take a leap of faith, as long you didn’t have to absorb the risk if it turned out you were wrong.”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“I think you know.”
We look at each other over the coffee table, the clean slate of Mastermind’s pegboard between us. This time I can see the answer but my father cannot. Or maybe neither of us can. Maybe nobody can. The word regret comes from the Old French, fourteenth century, “to lament someone’s death; to ask the help of.” An impossible contradiction, asking for help from the last person on earth who can provide it. Right now I want invisible strings to yank my father up off the couch just so he can burst through the sliding glass door again, accompanied by his high-decibel cacophony, freed from the workday’s vaporous confines to prance around the apartment, loudly in charge again. I want to do the whole thing differently this time, without all the puzzles and deception. Nothing would slow the passage of time, but the time might be better spent.
Still awaiting his first move, I say, “I don’t know the answer.”
And my father laughs again. And coughs.
And says, “Anyone who says they do is full of shit.”
Anne Therese Macdonald
That Donnelly Crowd
from False Faces
I wanted peace of mind. I took the rattle and bang of cocaine. I wanted to be an English scholar. I traded stocks and bonds. I wanted the gentle rain of my Washington coast. I took the deadly smog of West LA. I wanted out. I stayed in. The year was 1983. President Reagan had our backs. We were young and rich. I needed to pay attention, watch my backside and know where I was headed. I needed God not to find me.
I tiptoed through the upmarket wedding gifts scattered about the floor, past the white-satin wedding gown hanging on the door. I stopped at the three-tiered wedding cake, destroyed its fluffy white texture by burying the bride deep inside, and quietly, at two in the morning, I sneaked to the parked Audi with my new tapestry suitcase, a suitcase more elegant than the wedding dress, more 1980s than my future husband, more with-it than my wedding, more cool and fashionable than my crowd. The wedding, meant to take place the next day, Christmas Eve, was off. The drugs were done. I swore to live only in hushed rains and sleep with gentle people. I wanted a life shielded by the veil of a not-so-perfect existence. I needed God not to find me.
I met Bridget Donnelly before I met Joe. She was a witch of a spinster who ran the only Dublin B&B open on Christmas Eve. She was a tall, thin woman in a straight black skirt and white blouse, a Dickensian crone in a long black dress and sweeping cape. I had hopped on the first overseas flight available. Once in Dublin, I hooked up with an American tour, a pretentious crowd of the retired and leisurely bored. We sat around a heavy oval table in flickering candlelight. Bridget’s hair was short and permed, her face small and round with a pointed nose and a receding chin, a chin in constant judgment of others. With bulging eyes of no apparent color — because no one ever cared to look at her eyes — Bridget Donnelly huddled in the corners of life. I hated Bridget Donnelly.
Her brother, Joe, walked in. The story of my life. My narrative. My history. Light as a breeze, he exuded a laughter that diminished every other man I had ever known, every golden penny I had ever earned, every rec-drug I could have afforded. A divorced man, an international computer specialist with an apartment in Germany, a house in London, an ex-wife in Sweden, a spinster sister in Dublin, an IRA brother buried in a rebel’s grave. How dangerously romantic. His dark auburn hair reflected strands of red in the firelight — his lightly freckled face, darting blue eyes, his tall, rough build.
Our Christmas tour went to midnight mass. I dawdled behind until the chemistry shot across the room, landed on Joe, and two beings meant to be more than a blink of the eye sauntered into the church. We talked through the service, through the tour’s after-mass breakfast, through the quiet slumber of the old people. At four in the morning, after extraneous, superfluous, and diversionary banter about Ireland, the Troubles, his life as an international computer specialist, how he was back in Ireland to purchase land for some factory, I steered the conversation on to me. I told him how I came to Dublin, my quick escape from my own wedding meant to take place in LA on Christmas Eve.
Joe put down his whiskey. “The thing I don’t understand, Colleen, is why wouldn’t you just marry him? Why would you run away?”
Until that moment, I had thought it quite amusing — leaving my man at the altar, sneaking out of LA, secret savings stashed. What would have been funny among my very trendy LA crowd didn’t seem so clever that early Christmas morning, in a Victorian B&B, during a dark and rainy night, on an economically troubled and insignificant island. His seriousness sobered me.
“It stopped being fun, I suppose.”
“You ought to think about what you’re running from. Life is serious, you know. You’ve got to pay attention.”
But I was too busy that Christmas morn to pay attention. I loved how he pronounced Colleen with the long o. My goal was to rein in this good-looking, sophisticated man. I needed to impress him with my worldliness, my experience, money, trading in stocks and bonds with commissions out my wazoo, with the fact that the major partner in my firm would soon be mayor of Los Angeles, so my crowd would not only be among the wealthiest young professionals around, but we’d be the most politically connected. Joe remained unimpressed.
Okay, I thought, a serious type. Begging to become his weak point, I searched every inlet and bay of my life for the serious spots. I pulled from my mind every grave section of my memory, things I had discarded, covered up, repressed. I told him of my childhood in Grays Harbor on the Washington coast, my duty-bound, dedicated people. I even wandered outside my safe zone and told him of the coastal storm that killed my father and brother. Yes, I used their tragedy, my tragedy, to impress him. I moved on. Intellectual activity? I told him of my graduate studies in English literature, how I ended my PhD pursuits only after I was fired as university journal editor for writing a scathing deconstruction of E. L. Doctorow’s major work.
“Why didn’t you stay in that field?”
“I had this great fear of one day hating it, or my love for it would end.”
“Won’t that happen with the stock-trading profession?”
“No. I hate stocks so God can’t take that from me. You see, God is out there lurking about, waiting for my mistakes. The minute I’m happy, he’ll find me, sweep down tragedy, take away my happiness, replace it with panic and depression or something of that sort. My goal in life is to keep God on edge.”
Joe thoughtfully took another drink. Humor and seriousness, opposite sides of the human psyche, worked best with Joe Donnelly. In a matter of minutes, he presented his gifts to me — the stillness, the smiles, the winks of intelligence, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of his being, the dedication. That morning, full of hope and desire, we lived out those feelings. The passion between us overwhelmed me. We became one person, one whole being meant from inception to eternity to be together. We made love past dawn.