While we waited for takeoff, the news came over the individual media players in the seat backs. I don’t speak Hebrew, but I understood enough. Hamas was taking credit for the bomb. The death toll had risen to forty-five. Pictures of the dead flashed onto the screen. One of them was of the woman I had tried to save with a strip of tire. One was of the precious five-year-old boy who’d had his legs blown off. And then there was Nissim.
I sucked in my breath, put my hands over my face, and shook as I tried to suppress my sobs. The woman in the window seat to my left asked me, “Dear, dear. Can I help you?”
I shook my head, and the tears came. I dug under the seat, went through my coat pockets, and found tissues. I clapped a wad of them to my face, but I couldn’t stem the flow. I tried to stand so that I could get to the bathroom, but the seat-belt sign was on. The man in the aisle seat gave me an angry look, so I collapsed back into my middle seat, bent over, and just cried into my hands.
I’d gotten a brief glimpse of the woman beside me. She looked to be in her fifties, had silver-streaked blond hair, and wore a muted flower-print top over beige pants, and she smelled nice. She put her arm around my shoulder in the most welcome of awkward hugs and kept it there as the plane sped up the runway. When we were airborne, I mopped my face some more, then said, “Thank you. You are very kind.”
“I’m Katharine Dunlop,” she said.
“Brigid Fitzgerald.”
“Are you American?” she asked.
“Yes. And you?”
“Yep. I’m going home to Boston.”
“Me too.”
“It’s a long flight,” said Dunlop. “I’m a good listener.”
I didn’t have to be asked again. I blurted, “My husband and baby died just last week.”
She said, “Oh, my God, Brigid. I’m so sorry.” She asked me what had happened, and I was ready, more than ready, to talk. I took Tre’s rattle from my handbag and held on to it with both hands. We hadn’t yet reached cruising altitude, and I was telling Katharine about my sublime marriage to Karl and about his and Tre’s sudden deaths.
This woman didn’t stop me. She didn’t pull back or look at me as if I were insane. I kept talking.
I skipped back in time to Kind Hands, and when she asked, “What made you go to South Sudan?” I told her that I’d always wanted to be a doctor.
I explained that I had been only nineteen when I had graduated from Harvard. I had planned to go to med school there, but when my mother died, I couldn’t stay in Cambridge any longer, and I got my MD at Johns Hopkins. I checked her expression to see if she was still with me.
True to her word, she was a good listener.
As we flew above the clouds, I told this stranger in the window seat about the bomb that had gone off in Jerusalem yesterday. That I had been right there.
“I’m lucky to be here, I know that. But I’m very depressed.”
She said, “Of course. One tragedy compounding another and another. For this to happen while you’re grieving-who has more right to depression than you?”
When the cart came up the aisle, I bought Katharine a drink. We talked about baseball over dinner, and we both slept for a full eight hours as the jet crossed a continent and an ocean.
When the plane was descending into Boston’s Logan Airport, Katharine gave me her card.
I put it in my baggy coat pocket without looking at it.
She smiled. “Call me anytime.”
I thanked her and hugged her good-bye, and after collecting my bags, I caught a cab and set out to see my father. I leaned back and took Katharine’s card from my pocket.
Katharine Dunlop, Psychiatrist, MD.
My new friend was a professional good listener. She was a shrink. Call me anytime, she had said.
I held the card in my hand throughout the drive home.
Chapter 65
I DIDN’T want to see my father, but I couldn’t move forward without going back.
I directed my cabbie to Harvard, where I had gone to college and my father had tortured his American-literature students from noon to two o’clock for the past thirty years.
I was glad for the long drive from the airport. I mentally rehearsed various approaches to speaking truth to my father and hadn’t yet hit on the one that might open a fruitful conversation.
We took the Mass Turnpike and the Ted Williams Tunnel, which dove under Boston Harbor and the Boston Main Channel, and made our way toward Cambridge Street in Allston. The whole route was deeply ingrained in my memory of growing up in this city, driving on this road at night, wondering how much longer before I could move out of Cambridge and how far I could go.
We entered Cambridge, and as we wound through the Harvard campus, we turned onto Quincy. There was Emerson Hall, on my right. I gathered my travel-worn bags, paid the driver, and entered the three-story redbrick building through the main entrance that had a biblical quote carved in marble overhead: WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?
I was mindful of this one particular man, anyway. I continued down the faintly echoing corridor to the end. The door to my father’s classroom was closed, of course, but I peeked through the window and saw that class was in session. The theater-style rows of blue seats were half-full and facing my formidable father, standing at the podium at the head of the room with a whiteboard behind him.
I couldn’t read the board from where I stood, but I knew that it was a list of the chapters in Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, the course outline for the first semester of my father’s freshman class. I’d seen it before.
I opened the door and stepped into the room with my old carpetbag in my left hand, my leather hobo bag over my right shoulder. My father, George Santayana Fitzgerald, aka G.S.F., turned his head a few degrees and wrinkled his brow.
The hood of my coat was down around my shoulders, and he still didn’t recognize me. And then suddenly he did.
I dipped my head in greeting and slipped into the back row and took a seat.
Too soon, Dr. Fitzgerald snapped out the assignment for the next day and reminded the students of an upcoming test.
“Every test is an opportunity to fail,” he said. When there were no questions, he said, “Get out.”
The room emptied quickly, the students grabbing a look at the bald woman in the back row as they streamed past.
My father stood across from and below me with a pointer in his hand. The look on his face was as cold as a blizzard in January. As if I had come here so that I could do him harm.
He spoke to me across the eighteen rows of seats.
“Well. You look bad, Brigid. Why did you shave your head and dress like a monk? What have you done now?”
“I want to stay with you for a week or so. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“The hot water is out. Your room is all file storage now.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I’ll call a plumber.”
“If you must,” said my father.
He left the classroom, and I followed him. He didn’t look behind him once as he walked through the parking lot, located the very old, baby-blue BMW that had belonged to my mother. Without being invited, I got into the front seat and sat with my hands in my lap as my father maneuvered the car out to Quincy.
“Have you been well?” I asked him.
“I had my gallbladder removed. I have arthritis. And my arteries are clogged. All that keeps me alive is pure meanness,” he said.
“Whatever works,” I said.
I knew that what worked for him was going to kill him, and that was a good reason to spend time with him while it was possible. I asked him about his medications, his exercise program, if he was writing his memoirs, as he had sworn he would do.