“Who are you? Barbara Walters?” he growled.
We were in our old neighborhood. The asphalt was still potholed. The shabby houses still needed paint, and the overhead lines sagged over the last nongentrified neighborhood in Cambridge. I remembered whipping around the potholes on my bike, staying out as long and as late as I could before going home to the angry house where I lived.
My father jerked the wheel into the driveway and drove the car up to the garage door and braked it a few inches before the hood went through the rotten wood.
I knew the signs.
My father needed his fix. And, as usual, I was getting in the way.
Chapter 66
ON THE inside, the old house where I had lived with my parents now looked a lot like the stacks in a college library or maybe a secondhand bookstore.
My father hadn’t been lying about my room. Books were piled on the single bed, and the walls were lined with banker’s boxes filled with papers. He was famous for flunking up to a third of his students, and it looked as though he had saved their records, possibly to amuse himself.
I found a pillow and a blanket in the hall closet and tossed them onto the sofa. My father was in the filthy kitchen making tea. For himself.
“Yes, I would like some tea,” I said. “I just flew in from Jerusalem. Eleven hours direct flight.”
He got a cup and saucer out of the cupboard and poured tea for me. “Anything else?” he said. He pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, and stared at me.
“My husband died. My baby, too. Your granddaughter.”
He reared back a little in his chair, then settled back down.
“I never had a granddaughter,” he said.
“I sent you a card.”
“Goody. But she wasn’t my granddaughter.”
“I should know,” I said. “I remember quite well that I gave birth to her.”
“How about the DNA test? Did you get that?”
“How’s your mind, Dad?”
“Still as sharp as ever. Want to test me?”
He grabbed a book off the toaster oven and dropped it on the table in front of me. Dante’s Inferno. He said, “Open it to any page. I’ll quote from it.”
“I trust you,” I said. That was a lie.
“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve hated me for most of your life, and I have no love for you, either. You can blame that on Dorothy.”
“My mother, your wife, was a decent and loving person. I don’t have to defend her. But isn’t it bad enough that you killed her? You have to insult her memory, too?”
“I didn’t kill her, Brigid. She killed herself.”
“You were there when she OD’d. Why didn’t you get her to the hospital? Were you so stoned yourself that you couldn’t use a phone?”
He was drumming his fingers, looking past me. He got up from the table and went into the next room, returning a minute later with a framed family photo of the three of us with my paternal grandparents, taken when I was ten. George and Dorothy looked pretty good. Maybe they hadn’t been using then.
My father cleared the table with his forearm, knocking tea out of cups and the book to the floor.
“Look at this picture.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”
“Look at you. Do you see any resemblance to the Fitzgeralds in your face or your ears or anything else?”
Silence crackled around me, and it went on for a long time.
“What are you saying?” I finally asked him.
“This should please you, Brigid. You’re not my flesh and blood. You’re not my daughter. I wrung the confession out of your mother when you were only six weeks old. But she told me.
“Still, I gave you my name. I put a roof over your head. I put food on your plate. I put up with your shitty attitude. I made sure you got into Harvard. And I kept this to myself all these years because I loved your slut of a mother.
“As for me killing her? She was the first junkie. She got me hooked, not the other way around.”
I wanted to say I don’t believe you, but I did believe him. Maybe it wasn’t entirely true, but it was true enough. My father picked Dante up off the floor. He rinsed out the teapot. There was a Red Sox pennant over the sink. My mother and I both loved our team.
I shouted over the sound of running water, “Who was my father?”
“No idea,” he said, closing the faucet. “That’s between your dead mother and her dead priest.”
I got up from the table and gathered my belongings. As I walked through the kitchen, my father had his works on the table and was tying tubing around his arm, pumping his fist.
He looked up with his first smile since I’d arrived and said, “Let this be a lesson to you. ‘You can’t go home again.’ Thomas Wolfe wrote that.”
I walked through the doorway to the side yard, and the door slammed behind me.
I just kept walking.
Chapter 67
I STUMBLED out onto Jackson Street in shock. It was as if I’d taken a gut shot and my body didn’t yet know that I was dead.
I passed the signs and touchstones of my childhood: the warnings about bad dogs, the rusted mailboxes, and a break in the sidewalk where my roller skates had caught, pitching me forward and skinning my knee to the bone.
In the black light of my titular father’s vicious revelation, I was skating on broken sidewalks up and down the length of my life.
Who was I now?
The bitterness of my “father” had been explained, but it was still inexcusable. I had been a little girl. I had looked up to him. He had pretended to be my father, but he had never loved me. My pathetic girlish attempts to win his approval were appalling to me now. He was worse than I had imagined.
But I truly didn’t understand my mother. She had praised me and loved me-but how could she let me grow up in the house of a man who hated me?
Was it because he had supplied her with the drugs that she needed? Was her husband her ultimate and fatal drug?
I’d been furious with him because I believed that he had first ruined her and then let her die. Now, I thought she was responsible for her addiction. And she hadn’t done her best for me.
I knew that the Christian response was to forgive them for their deceit, but I was too raw and, at the same time, too numb to simply let this betrayal go. Everything I thought I knew about myself had changed into a stream of questions. Who was I? Who was my father? What traits of his did I carry? Had my mother loved him? Had he even known I existed?
Did any of this even matter at this stage of my life?
I walked the streets of Cambridge like a zombie and without a plan in the world.
And yet, my feet knew some of the way.
When I looked around to get my bearings, I was standing across the street from St. Paul’s, the church where I used to go with my mother every Sunday.
I had loved everything about the redbrick church, with its rows of matching columns and the figure of St. Paul in the frieze above the central door. I teared up thinking of Father Callahan, the priest I had loved as young girl. He had kept my mother’s secret. Maybe that was why he had been so kind to the funny-looking redheaded girl sitting with her mother in the front pew.
I went inside the empty church, walked down the aisle and under the barrel-vaulted ceiling with the rounded arches, and took my old place at the end of a front pew. I felt uplifted and expanded when I was in this hallowed place, knowing that God knew and loved me. Coming here with my mother, sitting close to her while we sang and prayed on Sunday, had been the highlight of my week, every week.
I clasped my hands in prayer and let my thoughts go out to God. I had a new understanding of Him. Whether my visions were God-sent or everyone had the ability to communicate with God if they were open to Him, I couldn’t know.