“He never thought he was gonna be a good father,” Claudia says. “He’d given up on it. Thought he wasn’t very good at it. And we actually showed him that not only was he good at it, we wanted him and we said, ‘You can do this, Dad.’ And once he realized ‘I can be good at this, and these kids want to learn from me,’ we had run out of time.”
Then John-Henry read a book about cryonics.
* * *
—
Ted’s house is full of secrets about his son, too, windows into a desperate but curious mind at work. In the long row of filing cabinets, a drawer holds a blue folder marked “Alcor.” It’s thick, jammed with newsletters, receipts, contracts, and John-Henry’s handwritten notes taken during a visit to the cryonics facility.
He filled six yellow legal-sized pages, jotting down the price for freezing just the head ($50,000) and the price for the entire body ($120,000), making charts and decision trees plotting the potential repercussions of cryonics. On a page, he drew a horizontal graph, with a line drawn down the middle, dividing the plan into actions he’d take before convincing his father and what he’d need to do after. In big letters, he wrote “Make Claudia co-petitioner” and circled it. She agreed. “I didn’t want John-Henry to lose his father,” she says. “He needed him so badly. He was still learning, he was still—he was still— What is it? Evolving? Becoming a man in his father’s eyes? He needed more time.”
The literature John-Henry took home from Alcor, one of the country’s two major cryonics companies, worked in his imagination; he purchased every book they offered, according to credit card receipts. The most important thing he read was the origin text of cryonics, a book by science fiction writer and professor Robert Ettinger titled The Prospect of Immortality. Ettinger wrote that the freezer always trumped the grave, and with nothing to lose, why not take a chance? Children who buried their parents were described as murderers. Ettinger also made many other wild and foolish predictions about what science would bring to the world in his lifetime, so the book, like the Bible, is believable to those who want to believe. On page 15, Ettinger seemed to be speaking directly to John-Henry: “The tired old man, then, will close his eyes, and he can think of his impending temporary death as another period under anesthesia at the hospital. Centuries may pass, but to him there will be only a moment of sleep without dreams.”
Around the long kitchen table, John-Henry began to make his case.
Ted did not want to be frozen at first. His will, which he wrote near the end of the fishing act of his life, made his wishes very clear. He should be cremated, his ashes “sprinkled at sea off the coast of Florida where the water is very deep.”
Four years passed between John-Henry’s purchasing the books and requesting membership documents from Alcor. Ted’s health declined, more every day. John-Henry kept saying cryonics provided a chance for them all to be together again one day.
“What does Dad think?” Claudia asked.
“He thinks it’s kooky,” John-Henry says. “But he is interested. I can tell.”
They spent hours around the dining table, and every so often John-Henry would bring it up. Sometimes Ted would curse and walk away. Other times he’d listen.
These private discussions would eventually become public, fitting into an existing narrative. John-Henry Williams, a 6-foot-5 ringer for his handsome father, had long lived in the zeitgeist as a bumbling son who took and took without ever standing on his own. In the definitive biography of Ted Williams, by Ben Bradlee Jr., John-Henry is shown as a terrible businessman and a cheat, someone who lied so often—inviting his dad to a college graduation where he didn’t actually graduate, claiming to make his college baseball team when he never tried out—that he lied about Ted’s wanting to be frozen too. This depiction of her brother by an author she cooperated with haunts Claudia, who believes her dad knew better, and she feels like the only one left to defend John-Henry.
After Ted died, friends told reporters that Williams disagreed with his son’s obsession. The stories and biographies quote staff members and associates who say Ted continued to want his remains scattered in the Atlantic, and in the end, Bradlee seemed to conclude that Ted did not want to be frozen. Abel goes into the study and comes back with the book. He opens it on the kitchen counter, the pages full of his notes, some passages marked with a check if he feels they’re accurate, other quotes highlighted and some with sharp, angry pen strokes when he’s aggrieved, the margins littered with “not true” and “bullshit” and “lie.” Bradlee spent a decade reporting, and while Claudia and Eric say he got many things about Ted’s military and baseball careers right, they say he allowed unreliable people to give opinions couched as facts when discussing the inner workings of the Williams clan, which has forever been a complicated tribe in which truths are perceptions and history keeps repeating itself: Bobby-Jo died five years ago, of advanced liver disease, killed by the same bad habits as her mother.
The clean cryonics narrative of Bradlee’s book doesn’t match the messiness of that long family dispute. Claudia has spent considerable time looking for documents that would prove she was in the hospital for the signing of the informal contract. Bradlee’s book strongly suggests, without ever saying so directly, that she was lying about being there. She says she visited the hospital so many times that all those trips ran together, but she remains steadfast: Ted signed a piece of paper. The argument remains frustrating for everyone: Claudia can’t prove they followed her father’s wishes, and Bradlee can’t prove they didn’t. Nobody quoted is without an agenda, whether fueled by anger, misunderstanding, jealousy, or love. Nobody is unaffected. Nobody is clean. It’s a mess, all of it. Ted Williams left behind so many unanswered questions that two of his children went to the extreme edges of science to find more time for them to be answered, while his third child went to equal extremes to stop them. At the end, jealous and estranged, Bobby-Jo raged, leaving bizarre voicemails on Abel’s answering machine: “This is Barbara Joyce Ferrell. I live right behind you. Prepare thyself, sir.”
Bobby-Jo lashed out, and Claudia hid, and John-Henry got as close as he could. He pushed and explained his idea, working cryonics into those dinner-table evenings. One night, Ted looked at Claudia and asked, “Are you in on this too?”
“Who knows what the future will bring?” she said, and John-Henry argued some more. Ted, exhausted and struggling to keep his eyes open, sort of laughed; then his son helped him to the recliner where he slept. Months passed, and after trying every other option available to buy time, only surgery would help Ted. First, he needed a heart catheterization, and doctors worried he might not survive even that preliminary procedure. Most people his age wouldn’t risk a series of operations. In her book, Claudia writes what her father told the doctor. “Doc, if you can give me any extra time with these guys, let’s do it,” he said. “I’ve had a great life, and what the hell, if I die, maybe I’ll die on the table. I’d like to have some more time with my two kids.”
The doctor nodded and scheduled the surgery. Claudia began to cry, and Ted’s voice cracked when he tried to comfort her, as she’d taught him to do.
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
According to Claudia, that’s when John-Henry returned to the Williams family favorite: the nonbinding, casually written contract. She says Ted sighed, agreed to go along with their wishes, and signed a piece of paper agreeing to be frozen. He knew he might not live through his procedure, and at the end of his life, he’d finally put aside his own wishes for theirs. For comedians and baseball fans and biographers, cryonics was a joke or a disgrace, but inside the Williams family, it was a profound act of love, a conscious attempt to undo the cycle of pain both felt and caused.
“If it means that much to you kids,” he said, “fine.”
* * *
—
She and Eric fell in love during the horrible siege after they froze her father, who died of cardiac arrest a
lmost two years after signing the note. She was trapped in his house by television trucks and reporters shouting questions. Claudia, then 30 and an elite athlete, paced the halls like a wild animal. Days passed without her manic exercise routine, which she used to exhaust herself into a kind of peace. Finally Eric realized she needed to escape, so he put her in the back seat of his car, covered her with blankets, and snuck her past the cameras. They drove to a nearby park, where she could run until she felt tired enough to stop thinking.
That was 13 years ago, and while people still remember something about Ted’s head being frozen, the daily onslaught is over. Claudia and Eric are moving back into Ted’s old house, not wanting to sell it and not wealthy enough to maintain two homes. It’s empty now, under renovation, sitting low and wide on a hill, beneath the grove of live oak trees. Claudia and Eric pull into the drive, the gate with the red No. 9 closing behind them.
Her mood founders when she stands in the towering great room, cold and unfurnished now, except for row upon row of almost empty bookshelves rising toward the ceiling. The only thing left is a frayed set of Ted’s beloved Encyclopedia Britannica, which he bought after retiring, spending hours scouring them for the knowledge he felt ashamed not to have. When he was an old man, Harvard begged him to come and receive an honorary degree. He refused, over and over again, never feeling as if he belonged in a place with such educated people. “I don’t think [Ted] at the end of his life felt like he accomplished anything,” Abel says. “Ted had that constant insecurity.”
The house is empty inside, dangling wires and pencil marks on the walls indicating where a range will go. Ted’s white Sub-Zero fridge with the wood-paneled front is unplugged in the corner. The kitchen brings back so many memories. The wires and the hoses and the sawdust on the floor amplify how much those memories have faded. The dining table used to be there, by the window. Training for triathlons after she came home from Europe, every weekend Claudia would ride her bike here from Tampa.
“Daddy would sit right here,” she says, laughing. “He would see me coming up the road. He’d be waiting for me right here. When I walked into the house, there’d be a hot dog on the table.”
She didn’t like hot dogs, but she loved to see her father smile, so she ate them every time.
“He thought I needed salt,” she says, then switches to her flawless Ted Williams impersonation, a chin-jutting bass drum: “Yup, isn’t that GOOD? That’s a good hot dog, isn’t it? OL’ TED WILLIAMS, HUH? YOU WANNA ’NOTHER ONE?”
Her spirit lightens when she does his voice, everything lit from the inside. They spent hours at that table, talking, playing the games he never got to play as a kid—As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives—and debating religion and the nature of life and death.
“Those late nights when it was clear he didn’t have much time left . . . ,” she says, trailing off, the light gone.
* * *
—
She has lost her father to old age and her brother to leukemia. Every year, she plants a tree in their memory, and leaving her dad’s house one day, she sees that one of John-Henry’s trees is dying. Reminders of grief surround her, and now her mother is fading too. One afternoon, she gets a frantic phone call and rushes to her mom’s bedside less than a mile away. The live-in caretaker is crying. Claudia, a nurse, listens to the plodding thumps of a tired heart. She checks her mom’s blood pressure: 86/60 and dropping.
“Mom, you want to go to the hospital?” Claudia asks.
“No,” Dolores Williams says.
“Even if it means saving your life?”
“No.”
Her mom stabilizes, and Claudia heads home. The rain pounds the roof of her car. Soon she will face herself alone, as her father faced the world stripped of the soothing focus of baseball and fishing. Tears roll down her cheeks. She sighs hard; rattling almost, jagged on the edges, a noise so full of pain that people who hear it feel compelled to protect her.
“Our time is running out,” she says.
She feels lonely. She’s a young woman living among retirees with only a few friends. Everyone she has ever loved except for Eric is gone or almost gone, and she’s sure she’ll outlive Eric.
“Who’s gonna take care of me?” she sobs.
There is a possibility.
Before John-Henry died, he froze some of his sperm, and as executor, she controls it. As she parks her car and goes into the house, she’s deciding whether to share an idea that has been gaining momentum and fervor.
“The legacy deserves to go on,” she says finally, crying harder than before.
John-Henry had asked her to keep the family alive. “You have to have a child,” he told her.
The idea is strange, yet mechanically quite simple: She’d need a surrogate mother and a name. Back at home, all of it piles up, hurt stacked upon hurt, so what started as sadness about her mom became fear and desperation over the family coming to an end with her, and she’s just dissolving in her high-ceilinged kitchen, coming apart. This is the vision greeting Eric when he walks in from work: his wife, her face red and puffy, sobbing so hard she’s struggling to breathe. When she sees him, she stretches out her arms. Eric rushes toward her.
“Mom’s having a bad day,” she tells him. “She’s tired. It makes me angry, of course. She’s the only thing I have left.”
She asks him again about creating and raising Ted Williams’s grandchild.
“That’s still something, right, on the table that you and I might do?” she asks, hopeful. “We might do that?”
Normally he’s not keen on the idea.
“Yes,” he says.
“We might?” she says, sounding vulnerable and shaky, like she’s grasping for something beyond not only her reach but even her ability to name it. She’s searching, searching for a father, for a purpose, for a child, searching for the chance to complete what her dad started in the last decade of his life. That’s the hope and the promise of whatever life remains in John-Henry’s sperm. Doctors told her there’s enough genetic material for one chance at insemination, and as long as it remains frozen, some part of her brother, and her father, remains alive with it. She also has considered using her egg and Abel’s sperm to create a child, going back and forth between the ideas. She’s searching for a way to break the Williams cycle—either by letting it die with her or by being the first good parent in generations—and she’s searching for something much more elusive too.
She never saw her father’s body, and nothing forced her to really accept his disappearance from her life. Every culture has deeply symbolic rituals for burying and mourning the dead. With Ted’s remains in stasis—they didn’t hold a memorial service, not even a small, private one—she hasn’t moved past grief into acceptance and peace. With time, she’s come to regret not having a funeral. She’s searching for how to say goodbye, or maybe a way to move on, which often feels like the same thing.
* * *
—
Before Claudia drove me back to the airport, Abel quietly asked me to keep in touch because she didn’t meet many new people and really struggled with goodbyes. I left wondering what kind of life awaited her. Maybe she’d just find ways to exhaust herself and find obsessions to occupy her mind, day after day, year after year, never breaking free of her father and never feeling as if she had honored his memory either. But something happened in the months after our first visit.
It started with her book, Ted Williams, My Father.
She stepped out of the shadows and did readings. The Red Sox hosted her in Boston, and a big crowd showed up, and people cried when she shared her memories, her joys, and her pain. One at a time, they said she’d shown them a side of Ted Williams they’d never known. She did an interview in the Fenway stands, sitting in the red seat marking the longest home run ever hit in the ballpark, off the bat of her dad. She got lost in thought, staring down at the tiny home p
late, feeling a strange connection. She walked past the hotel where he lived, long ago turned to luxury condos. His presence seemed real. The people most affected by her book were the fans who idolized her dad, now going through the same struggles of aging and illness he had.
She got a letter from Jimmie Foxx’s daughter.
“You are our voice,” it said.
Seeing the joy she brought to the elderly, long her favorite group of people, reminded her of an old man she treated as a student nurse. He was difficult, so she tried talking to him about baseball.
“I love the Red Sox,” he said.
“Me too,” she replied.
“I was there at Fenway Park when Ted Williams hit his last home run,” he said. “It was a bright, sunny day, and I was there.”
“I was told it was a cold and overcast day,” she said, then did something she never does. She told him she was Ted Williams’s daughter. He beamed, and the next day, everything about him seemed different, and not just because he wore Red Sox gear from head to toe. He smiled and seemed lighter. It’s the same look her father got when she’d care for him in the last years of his life. Those memories, and the reaction of the elderly readers, finally pointed her toward her long-sought purpose.
As part of her application and interview process at Duke—still a long shot, but her dad taught her to try to be the greatest—she said she wanted to specialize in gerontology. “It wasn’t until I cared for my elderly father as his health declined,” she wrote on her application, “that I discovered my true calling.”
Now she just needed to get into a graduate program, do years of studying, and open her own nurse practitioner’s office. Every patient who walked through the door would get treated like Ted Williams. She didn’t want to waste another moment. She felt time rushing away.
The last two weeks before finding out, she swam miles in the pool and pounded out sets in the gym. Finally an email from Duke arrived, asking her to log on to its website for the school’s decision.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 31