It took him several circuits around the condo building parking lot before he remembered he was driving not his red BMW but a rented Ford. He got in and turned the ignition and sat behind the wheel for a minute or so, gauging his ability to drive. Not good, he decided. He needed, at the very least, a cup of coffee before attempting the drive back to Boston. He got out, crossed the parking lot, and walked along the highway until he reached a Dunkin’ Donuts. There was another one directly across the street, too.
A sign at the counter announced they wouldn’t accept fifty- and one-hundred-dollar bills “because of fraudulent activity.” He mostly had one-hundred-dollar bills, taken from one of the packets in his suitcase, and had to search his pockets, and every compartment in his wallet, before he eventually found a crumpled ten-dollar bill.
He bought two large coffees and downed one of them sitting at a sticky, crumb-strewn table. He felt his heart rate start to accelerate. He was, if not sober, at least more attentive, in a thick sort of way. The donuts smelled good, and he had a bad case of the munchies, so he returned to the cash register and bought a half dozen and carried the box with him along the road back to the condo parking lot, devouring two, one after another, pausing only long enough to swallow. When he got to the car, he realized he needed a little more time to sober up, or at least try to.
So he crossed the street-it took a couple of minutes to find a gap in the traffic-and sat on a wooden-slatted bench facing the ocean. He watched the waves churning, crashing into the narrow bar of sand. A seagull dive-bombed, then soared upward, cawing and shrieking triumphantly. A particularly big swell sent spray over the low concrete wall. He could feel the fine droplets of mist. After a while the surf’s white noise melted into the fizzy whoosh of the tires of the passing cars. A bicyclist came riding past, a big guy in a David Ortiz jersey and Red Sox cap.
And he thought about his father. He drank coffee and thought about Len’s aspirations, his broken dreams, which was news to Rick. There was another Leonard Hoffman, whom Rick didn’t know, had never known. A Leonard Hoffman who wanted to be something else besides what he ended up.
And then for a moment Rick was sixteen and bored out of his skull, trudging through the overpolished ceremonial halls of the Supreme Court on a family field trip to Washington, DC. His father’s idea, this family excursion, a way to put the pieces back together, to mend the torn fabric of their little family, six months after Ellen Hoffman had died of ovarian cancer. Mom had been the glue that kept the family together, Rick had come to realize. Then for five months it was her illness, then her death, and then everything seemed to fly apart. They each occupied their own separate sphere of solitude, barely talking to each other, knocking up against each other only when necessary. Rick was surly and unpleasant to be around, just by virtue of being a teenage boy. But his mother’s death had curdled something inside him, had given him permission to let the ugly fly.
It was also the last thing Rick wanted to do, spend a week of his spring break with his father and younger sister slogging through the monuments of our nation’s capital and admiring the cherry blossoms, when his prep school and neighborhood friends were staying at home sleeping late and watching TV and hanging out in Harvard Square.
The visit to the Supreme Court was the pièce de résistance of this sad little trip. Lenny hadn’t been able to get them into the courtroom itself, an actual argument session, a failing about which he seemed sort of annoyed and embarrassed. Apparently you had to know someone in Congress, or so he claimed. Anyway, he didn’t know anyone, so the family had to take what he called “the schmucks’ tour.”
Washington had been all of a piece with the Supreme Court-wide malls, wide avenues, wide marble hallways lined with statuary and plaques. History everywhere. Squirming fellow teenage hostages with their families reading plaques and listening to tour guides drone on. The Lincoln Memorial was crowded, and the Washington Monument was crowded and stupid. Only the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum was cool, because of the space suits and stuff.
Wendy, a seventh grader, had brought along her best friend, Peg. The two girls did everything together and giggled at Rick and the exhibits and exchanged private jokes. The two of them shared a room at their cheap hotel off Dupont Circle, and both were vegetarians, which complicated meal issues.
A docent had given a canned lecture about America’s Temple of Justice, which was in fact a Mausoleum of Tedium. From its marble walls and floors seeped chloroform. Even the gift shop, normally the one reliable fallback, had nothing Rick was remotely interested in buying. (Pewter baby mug! Supreme Court coffee mug! Why not Pez dispenser versions of the justices, he wondered. Or action figures, at least?)
They all stood around the John Marshall statue, a bronze figure of an arrogant guy in a bathrobe, or so it appeared, while Len went on at length about how important John Marshall was. Rick, burping up egg from the immense breakfast he’d eaten at the hotel, tried not to fall asleep standing up.
“The point,” his father said, “is you can be anything you want! This guy was born in a log cabin on the Virginia frontier, the oldest of fifteen kids. Point is, if you can conceive it and you can believe it, you can achieve it!”
Wendy and Peg lurked at a distance while Len talked. They giggled and rolled their eyes at Lenny’s earnestness. Len was so awkward at playing parent. He had no game. He didn’t even know how to hug the kids. Rick could feel his father’s self-consciousness: one hand or two, and do you do the back-clap thing? Len was like a skater who stumbles when he starts to overthink how he could stay up on his skates. And Rick found himself rooting for the old man: C’mon, Dad, you can do this. C’mon, Dad. Be a dad, Dad!
After Mom’s death, the guy was trying so hard to be a father, to reach out to his two kids, to be the center of things, to replace Mom now that she was gone. He’d schlepped his kids to DC to fill up some space he’d seen in their lives, the Mom space that he could never occupy. But dammit, he was going to try. This field trip to DC was all part of that campaign. Neither of his kids wanted to be here, and he knew that, but he wasn’t giving up yet.
An important-looking man in a gray suit came striding past and stopped. “Lenny? My God! Is that you?”
“David Rosenthal,” his father had said, stopping midsentence. “Are you arguing before the court?”
The man nodded. “Just finished. My heart’s still pounding.” A few other men in suits stood back, waiting. “So what are you up to these days? Since New Haven?”
Len flashed his rabbity smile. “Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” He looked strange, as if he was pleased to be recognized by this big-deal lawyer who had just emerged from the courtroom they hadn’t been able to get inside. But at the same time, he looked as if he wanted to drill a hole into the marble floor and disappear.
Wendy imitated Len’s aw-shucks mannerism with perfect vicious accuracy, mouthed the words Oh, a little of this, a little of that, but Rick refused to make eye contact with her. She wanted her older brother to roll eyes together with her, but he was having no part of her conspiracy of derision. He was caught by a feeling of almost parental protectiveness toward his father, though he knew it was topsy-turvy for a kid to feel that way, and, when he thought about it, that was probably more insulting to Len than his sister’s snark.
The important guy gave Len a strange look. Rick was too young to identify that look: pity mixed with contempt. His father looked sheepish and queasily embarrassed by something. Maybe by who he was, or who he wasn’t. Somehow Rick felt the embarrassment, too, mixed with a flash of irritation, and the fleeting moment of tenderness had evaporated.