The Copley Plaza was a dumpy-looking hotel with a large conference room on the second floor. It was packed with people, most of whom seemed to be less interested in the impromptu press conference going on at one end of the room than in all the free cold cuts and beer on the tables stacked in the opposite corner. There was a lot of smoke—cigarettes commingling with the sweet, unmistakable aroma of dope. There was a young guy onstage, going on about the need to maintain confrontation with “all the cogs in the military-industrial complex.” Around three reporters were listening to him.
“Oh God, not him,” James Saunders said.
I stopped scanning the room for my dad, and turned my attention to the stage. The speaker was in his early twenties, shoulder-length hair, a big walrus mustache, very slim, dressed in faded jeans and an unpressed blue button-down shirt that hinted at some preppy origins behind the hippie look. Margy would have said, “Now that’s what I call a cute radical.”
“Who’s that?” I asked Saunders.
“Tobias Judson.”
“I know that name from somewhere,” I said.
“Probably the newspapers. He was a big cheese during the Columbia University takeover. Mark Rudd’s left-hand man. I’m surprised they let him in, given his reputation for trouble. Very smart guy, but dangerous. Still, he doesn’t have to worry about much—his dad owns the biggest jewelers in Cleveland . . .”
I spotted my father in a far corner of the room. He was speaking to a woman around thirty, with waist-length chestnut hair and aviator-style glasses, dressed in a short skirt. They were close together, talking intensely, and at first I thought she was interviewing him.
But then I noticed that, halfway through their very involved conversation, she reached down and took his hand in hers. My dad didn’t pull his hand away. On the contrary, he squeezed hers and a little smile formed on his lips. Then he leaned over and whispered something in her ear. She smiled, let go of his hand, and walked away, mouthing something to him as she left. And though I’m not exactly a professional lip reader, I was pretty damn certain that she said, “Later . . .”
My father smiled at her, then glanced at his watch. Looking up again, he scanned the room, caught me in his sights, and waved. I waved back, hoping he didn’t notice the shock I was registering right now. In the few seconds I had before he reached me, I resolved to act as if I had seen nothing.
“Hannah!”
He gave me a big hug.
“You made it,” he said.
“You were great, Dad. As always.”
Tobias Judson had finished his onstage speech and was walking toward us. He nodded toward Dad, then quickly looked me up and down.
“Nice speech, Prof,” he said.
“You did well up there yourself,” Dad said.
“Yeah, I’m sure we both added to our FBI files today,” he said. Flashing me a smile, he asked, “Do I know you?”
“My daughter, Hannah,” Dad said.
Judson did a small double take, but recovered fast and said, “Welcome to the revolution, Hannah.”
Suddenly his hand shot up as he saw some woman across the room.
“Catch you whenever,” he said to us, then headed toward her.
My father and I ended up in a little Italian restaurant near the hotel. Dad was still very charged up after the rally. He ordered a bottle of red wine and drank most of it, railing against Nixon’s outrageous orders for “covert incursions into Cambodia,” and praising Tobias Judson as a real star of the Left—the next I. F. Stone, only even more charismatic.
“The thing about Izzy Stone is that, for all his brilliance, you always get the feeling that he’s shaking a finger in your face, whereas Toby has the same analytical sparkle, plus a genuine ability to seduce the listener. He’s quite the ladykiller.”
“One of the side effects of being a great public radical, I suppose.”
He arched his eyebrows . . . then noticed that I was studying him directly.
“The world loves a young Tom Paine,” he said.
“I’m sure the world loves a Tom Paine of any age,” I said.
He refilled our wineglasses and said, “And like all such attractions, it’s fleeting.”
He looked up and met my gaze. And asked, “Are you anxious about something, Hannah?”
Who the hell was she?
“I’m kind of worried about Mom,” I said.
I could see his shoulders relax.
“In what way?” he asked.
I explained about our phone call, how she seemed very preoccupied, if not downright weird. He nodded in agreement.
“Well, I’m afraid your mom had some bad news a few days ago—Milton Braudy decided not to take her new show.”
Oh God, that was bad news. Milton Braudy ran the gallery in Manhattan where Mom exhibited her paintings. He’d been showing her work for almost twenty years.
“She would have handled it very differently in the past,” Dad said. “Called Braudy an S.O.B., flown down to New York to confront him, and forced her way into another gallery. But now she just sits in her studio, refusing to do anything.”
“How long has she been like this?”
“Around a month.”
“I didn’t really hear it in her voice until yesterday.”
“It’s been building up for a while.”
“Are things all right between you guys?” I asked.
My father looked up at me—surprised, I think, by the directness of the question. I’d never before asked him anything about his marriage. There was a moment or two when I could see him wondering how to respond, how much truth I needed to know.
“Things are what they are,” he finally said.
“That’s a little enigmatic, Dad.”
“No—ambivalent. Ambivalence isn’t a bad thing.”
“In marriage?”
“In everything. The French have an expression: Tout le monde a un jardin secret.”
Everyone has a secret garden.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?” he asked.
I met his cool blue eyes. And I saw, for the first time, that my father had many different compartments to his life.
“Yeah, Dad . . . I think I get it.”
He drained his glass.
“Don’t worry about your mom. She’ll get through this . . . But do yourself a favor, don’t let on that you know about this.”
“Surely she should tell me herself.”
“That’s right. She should. And she won’t.”
And then he changed the subject, asking me all about my job, interested in the stories I told him about my students and working in Roxbury. When I said how much I liked teaching, he smiled and said, “It obviously runs in the family.”
Then he glanced at his watch.
“Am I keeping you from something?” I asked, trying to make the question seem as innocent as possible.
“No. It’s just, I did say I’d drop in on a meeting that Toby Judson and company are having at the hotel later on. This has been a good talk, Hannah.”
He called for the check. He paid it. We stood up and walked out into the muggy Boston night. He was a little tipsy from the wine, and he put his arm around me and gave me a big paternal squeeze.
“Want to hear a fantastic quote that I heard today?”
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“Toby Judson told it to me. It’s from Nietzsche, and it goes: There is no proof that the truth—when and if it is ever revealed—will be very interesting.”
I laughed and said, “That’s pretty damn—”
“Ambivalent?”
“You took the word right out of my mouth.”
He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
“You’re a great kid, Hannah.”
“You’re not too bad yourself.”
I was only moments away from the T stop at Copley Square, but I suddenly felt like walking . . . especially as there was a lot to think about. It was after midnight when I reached our front door.
The lights were on. Dan was home.
“You’re back early,” I said.
“They gave me time off for good behavior. How was dinner with your dad?”
“Interesting. In fact, so interesting that I walked all the way home from Back Bay, thinking about . . .”
I stopped myself.
“Yeah?” Dan asked.
“Being back at college in the fall, and . . .”
Another pause. Should I really say this?
“Go on . . .” Dan said.
“Whether we should get a place together when we get back to Vermont.”
Dan let this sink in for a moment. Then he reached into the icebox and pulled out two beers. He handed one to me.
“Good idea,” he said.
THREE
WELL, I’M NOT exactly shocked,” my mother said when I told her the news. “In fact, I had ten bucks riding with your dad on whether you’d move in with him as soon as you got back here.”
“I hope you spend the money well,” I said.
“Can I help it if you do predictable stuff? Anyway, even if I did object—on the grounds that you are cutting yourself off from the sort of ‘personal experiences,’ to be euphemistic about it, that you should be having at this stage of your life—would you listen to me?”
“No.”
“My point entirely.”
The only good thing about this maddening conversation was that it hinted that my mother was possibly emerging from the down period she had experienced after it all went wrong with her art dealer. Not, of course, that she would ever dream of telling me about this setback, or let on about what was eating her up. That would have meant confessing weakness—vulnerability!—in front of her daughter. Mom would have rather walked across a campfire than admit such things to me.
So she never mentioned her new work being rejected by Milton Braudy. Nor did she ever even intimate that the show wasn’t happening. She simply carried on as if nothing had happened. But when I returned alone from Boston at the end of August to begin apartment hunting (while Dan finished his final week at Mass General), it was clear to me that, despite her usual swagger and cynicism, she was still in a bad place. Two dark rings had shown up beneath her eyes. Her nails were chewed up, and I could detect a very slight tremor in her hands whenever she lit up a cigarette.
Then there was the situation between herself and Dad. Fighting was always a part of their domestic repertoire. Now things had suddenly gone very quiet between them. During the ten days I was at home, they seemed to barely acknowledge each other. Then late one evening, I finally did hear my parents talking. Only this time, the conversation was conducted in shrill hisses. I’d gone to bed early, and was jolted awake when I heard them going at each other downstairs. The fact that they were squabbling in angry whispers was, in itself, unnerving (my mom always having to scream her way through an argument). Like a little child, I crept out of bed, opened my door as silently as possible, and tiptoed to the top of the stairs. Though I was now in closer proximity, their dialogue was still only barely discernible, as it came out in angry undertones.
“So is she meeting you in Philly this weekend—?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Bullshit. I know exactly what’s—”
“I’ve had it with your accusations—”
“How old is she?”
“There is nobody—”
“Liar—”
“Don’t talk to me about lies when I know all about—”
“That was ten years ago, and I haven’t seen him since—”
“Yes, but you still rubbed my nose in it—”
“So is this your revenge now? Or does she just have some fucked-up Daddy complex—?”
I couldn’t take any more of this, so I snuck back into my room, crawled into bed, and tried to vanish into sleep. This proved impossible—my mind was trying to come to terms with what I’d just heard and how I wished that I hadn’t eavesdropped.
The next day I found an apartment. It was located around a quarter mile from campus, on a quiet, leafy street with lots of old Gothic frame houses. This one was a little run-down on the outside (its green clapboard needed repainting, its front porch had a couple of loose floorboards), but the apartment was huge. A big living room, a big bedroom, an eat-in kitchen, a bathroom with an old claw-foot tub. The asking rent was only $75 a month . . . whereas an apartment of this size in this neighborhood would usually have gone for around $135.
“But the reason it’s so cheap,” I told Dan on the phone that night, “is because it’s in grim condition.”
“I kind of figured that. Define grim?”
“Really awful peeling wallpaper, old carpets with cigarette burns and scuzzy stains. The bathroom looks like something out of The Addams Family, and the kitchen’s pretty basic.”
“You paint a pretty picture.”
“Yeah, but the good news is that the place has got fantastic potential. There are proper floorboards under the carpets, the wallpaper could be easily stripped away and the walls repainted, and there’s this amazing old bath . . .”
“Sounds great, but two days after I get back, I go straight into classes. And I’m just not going to have the time . . .”
“Leave it to me. Anyway, the really good news is that the landlord is so desperate to let the place, he’ll give us two months free rent if we fix it up.”
After signing the lease, I bought several gallons of cheap white paint, some brushes, and rented a sander. Then I spent the next eight days stripping wallpaper, replastering the many cracks in the walls, covering them with several coats of paint, and glossing all the woodwork. Then I pulled up the carpets and tackled the floorboards, finally staining them a natural color. It was satisfying work—and I loved the sense of accomplishment when I cleared away all the dustcloths and paint cans, and was able to look at the clean, airy apartment I had created.
“You told me it was a complete dump,” Dan said when he first saw it.
“It was.”
“Amazing . . .” he said, kissing me. “Thank you.”
“Glad you’re pleased.”
“It’s a home.”
Those were exactly the words that Margy used when she came to see the place a few days later. She’d just returned from New York, and had settled into her dorm room before running over to check out my first apartment. Since finishing the work, I had managed to root around assorted thrift and charity shops for some very basic furniture, all of which I stripped and stained. There were the usual boards-on-cinder-block bookshelves, and a couple of Chianti bottle lamps, but also a fantastic brass double bed which I picked up for only $50. There was also an old-fashioned New England rocking chair which only set me back $10, and which I had painted a dark green.
“Good God, it’s Better Homes and Gardens goes college,” Margy said.
“So you don’t approve?”
“Don’t approve? I’m envious as hell. I’m living in this student box, whereas you have got yourself a home. And who did all the interior decorating?”
“My handiwork, I’m afraid.”
“Dan must be thrilled.”
“Yeah, he likes it. But you know Dan. He’s not really into ‘stuff.’”
“Honey, you can give me that antimaterialist crap, but, believe me, you’ve got style. Your mom check it out yet?”
“She’s not in a great place right now.”
“That sounds like the sort of discussion best accompanied by some cheap red wine.”
And she pulled a bottle of Almaden Zinfandel out of her shoulder bag.
“Call it a housewarming gift.”
We opened the wine. I found two glasses.
“So tell me . . .” she said.
The whole story came out in a rush, starting with my mom’s strange interlude in July, the scene with my dad and that woman in Boston, and culminating with the revelations heard at the top of the stairs. When I finished, Margy threw back the rest of her wine and said
, “You know what my answer is: So what? And yeah, I know that’s easy for me to say, as he’s not my dad. But so what if he’s got a mistress tucked away somewhere? Just like you really shouldn’t get worked up about your mom cheating on your dad.”
“That bothered me less.”
“Of course it did, because you’re Daddy’s Little Girl. And him cheating on Mom was really like him cheating on you.”
“Where’d you learn that, Psych 101?”
“No, I learned all about this sort of shit when I was thirteen. I answered the phone one night in our apartment in New York. There was this drunk on the other end, asking me if he was speaking to my father’s daughter. When I said yes, the guy told me—and these were his exact words: ‘Well, I’d like you to know that your daddy is fucking my wife.’”
“Good God.”
“The guy later called my mom and told her the same thing. Turns out it wasn’t the first, second, or even third time Dad had done this. As my mom told me: ‘Your stupid asshole father can never be discreet. He always chooses women who make a fuss. I could have just about handled the infidelity. It’s having my nose rubbed in it that’s making me call it quits.’”
“She left him after that?”
“Tossed his ass right out of the door . . . metaphorically speaking. The evening after that phone call, I came home from school and there was my dad, packing. I broke down in front of him, and begged him not to go, as I certainly didn’t want him leaving me in Mom’s clutches. He held me until I calmed down, and then said, in his best tough-guy accent: ‘Sorry, kid, but I got caught with my pants down, and now I’m paying the price.’
“Half an hour later, he was out the door—and I never saw him again. Because he took off for a little postmarital breakup vacation in Palm Beach, and had a heart attack on the golf course a week later. So much for his Bogart cool. Mom throwing him out killed him.”
I had known that Margy’s dad had died young—until now I hadn’t known the circumstances.
“My point,” Margy said, “is that you’ve got to stop looking at your parents as parents and start seeing them as typically fucked-up adults . . . which is what we’re going to become eventually.”
“Speak for yourself.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 114