The Good Father

by Noah Hawley

  Danny was given to showing up late for class, wearing mismatched clothes, his longish hair unkempt, his sweater pockmarked with holes. This only enhanced his status with the mousy co-eds of Vassar, lending him a certain Beat poet appeal. In the cafeteria he ate mostly cereal, often without milk, picking it piece by piece from the bowl with his fingers while he read (first books about Jesse James and Billy the Kid, then futuristic tomes on the coming robot wars, then works of philosophy—Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard—books that would end up dog-eared, their spines broken in a pile by the side of the his bed).

  Given his taste in literature you would imagine him to be a serious, academically ambitious young man, except for the fact that he never finished a single book. An idea would strike him, a curiosity—I should learn Japanese—and for two weeks or a month he would pursue it at the cost of his other studies. Then, just as quickly, the mood would pass, and a new idea would present itself—I should learn how to fence—and he would move on, leaving books half read, thoughts unfinished.

  In this way, he realized, he was like his mother, a woman given to intense periods of manic interest, followed by long stretches of epic boredom. It wasn’t a quality he liked in himself. The realization actually depressed him, giving him a few days of deep anxiety, a few days spent in bed, turned away from the clock. He did a lot of thinking in those slow, unbroken days. His mind felt fragmented. He worried that he was destined to be a hobbyist, a dreamer incapable of finishing anything. The fact that the college seemed to encourage this kind of “experimentation” made him doubt its motives as an institution of higher learning. Where was the structure? The rigid demand for attendance, for grades? He had grown up with little in the way of rules, and though it had seemed when he was applying to schools that what he needed was more of the same, what he came to realize in those three sloth-filled days was that without guidance he was becoming lost.

  And then, without warning, this idea—the idea of becoming lost—took hold in him. It became his new obsession. Maybe this was the answer. To lose himself—not in a halfhearted way, like a set of car keys or a wallet, but more fundamentally, more profoundly. To become lost, literally, with no recognizable landmarks, no familiar faces to comfort him. It was a romantic idea, one relatively common for men of his age—though he didn’t know it at the time.

  He would lose himself completely, and in this way he would find himself. His true self. Once and for all.

  After the motel, he continued west, driving just over four hours to Chicago. He had friends at DePaul University, a pair of brothers he had gone to high school with. Craig and Stephen Foreman. They were living in a house on West Haddock Place, near the Chicago River. It is the river that on St. Patrick’s Day is dyed green. In 1887, in anticipation of the World’s Fair, the course of the river was reversed in a heroic feat of civil engineering, mainly to keep sewage from flowing into the lake. Today it runs away from Lake Michigan into the Missouri River.

  Danny spent the night drinking at the Elephant and Castle with the Foreman brothers. He bought more than two hundred dollars’ worth of drinks using his Visa card. Both Craig and Stephen said Danny was in a great mood that night, elated, giddy. They say around eleven fifteen he met a girl at the bar and went home with her. A Secret Service interview of the bartender revealed that the girl’s name was Samantha Houston. She was twenty-two years old, a nursing student at the University of Chicago.

  Danny spent twelve days in Chicago. Of those, he spent four nights with Samantha and eight at the Foreman house. On March 17 he watched the Bulls play the Grizzlies at the United Center, sitting three rows back from courtside with Stephen and Craig, whose father had given them season tickets. I have watched the game on video. There is a shot deep in the second period in which Danny’s face is visible. The Grizzlies have taken a time-out, and the camera cuts to the crowd, and there, caught in mid-laugh, is my son. He has a cup of beer in one hand, and he is bending over, his eyes crinkling in that way they do. The shot lasts 3.1 seconds. I have watched it more than a hundred times. My son looked happy, weightless. What if he’d stayed in Chicago? He could have transferred to DePaul. It is a lesser school. We would have been mad, but we would have understood. He could have moved in with the Foremans and dated Samantha. They could have married and had children. His thoughts would have become Chicago thoughts, his clothes Chicago clothes—hats and mittens, coats with big shoulders.

  Instead he got up on the morning of March 28 and climbed into his Honda. The weather had turned warmer, spring creeping through the northern cold. After sitting idle for nine days Danny’s car wouldn’t start, and Craig had to jump-start it, stringing cables from the engine block of his Tundra.

  Hauling his battered footlocker, Daniel Allen headed west on Route 80 toward Iowa City.

  It was the wind that woke me. I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It was three fifteen in the morning. My heart was beating fast. The room was silent. I had been dreaming of Danny. Fran lay beside me, sleeping. She had thrown off the covers. There was a pillow between her knees. Her naked hip was smooth and warm. How many nights had I fallen asleep with my head on her lap? The dark was a living thing, filled with her easy breathing. I checked the alarm panel on the wall. We’d installed it after Danny’s arrest. There had been threatening phone calls, letters. Strange cars would drive by at all hours. But the warning light was green. We were safe for now.

  I got out of bed. Momentarily dizzy, I put a hand on the wall to steady myself. It was September, three months after Jay Seagram had been killed in Los Angeles, three months after I’d sat on Danny’s hospital bed and touched my son’s face. Danny was being held in an unknown location. I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but was told the information was considered Top Secret Classified. The Justice Department had filed charges against Danny last week. They were prosecuting him for first-degree murder and twenty-two acts of terrorism. His first public hearing was Thursday in Los Angeles Federal Court. We would fly out tomorrow. Fran wanted to bring the twins. Murray said we’d be able to visit Danny before the hearing and she wanted them to see him.

  What would he look like? A bearded stick figure? John Walker Lindh after thirty days in an Afghani dungeon?

  Careful not to wake Fran, I went out into the hall. The children were asleep in their rooms. I watched their chests rise and fall, wanting to lie down beside them, to hold them and never let go. Instead I put my hand on the railing and slowly went downstairs. My fiftieth birthday had come and gone in the chaos of the assassination’s aftermath. Fran had wanted to throw me a party, but I told her not to be absurd. Fifty years old. I had always been a fit man, strong, agile. I kept in shape, practiced my fine motor skills daily. But I had started to notice changes in the months since I sat with Danny in his hospital room. I was now a man with gray pubic hair. The skin around my jawline was starting to sag. It was perfectly natural for a man of my age, but I couldn’t help but see it as a sign of defeat. As if some deep part of me had given up.

  As we age, our muscles lose strength and flexibility. Our metabolic rate slows, making it hard to keep off weight. At night when I couldn’t sleep, I would lie there picturing my motor nerves deteriorating. With every second that passed I was losing reaction time. My hand-eye coordination was starting to go, as was my balance. It was subtle now, but within ten years I might need help threading a needle.

  I went into the kitchen, leaving the lights off, navigating by feel and memory. I opened the fridge and considered drinking some milk. My bones were losing calcium moment by moment. Every day I took vitamin supplements. I drank more dairy now than I had when I was a boy. It was a stopgap, a postponement. But then these are the things we do to put off the inevitable.

  Gone were the days when I could put on a pair of jogging shorts and run through the neighborhood. In the weeks since the attack we had faced a constant barrage of press attention. We had been heckled, our mailbox destroyed. My car had been defaced with spray paint. Our phone number was u
nlisted, but still they called—the heavy breathers, the growlers, with their hate speech and muttered death threats. With the pretrial hearings about to start, the camera crews had doubled. They wanted to know how we felt. How were we holding up? Had we talked to our son? There was a twenty-four-hour news cycle to feed. The networks liked to play up the human-interest angle. If I peered through the curtains I was sure I would see at least one camera truck, its engine idling, bored reporters crammed inside waiting for something unexpected to occur.

  Ten years after two high-school students gunned down thirty-three of their classmates at Columbine High School, Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the killers, broke her silence. She wrote, “Through all of this, I felt extreme humiliation. For months I refused to use my last name in public. I avoided eye contact when I walked. Dylan was a product of my life’s work, but his final actions implied that he had never been taught the fundamentals of right and wrong.”

  Looking back, she wrote, “Had I been too strict? Not strict enough?” She said that every time she saw a child in a supermarket, she thought “about how my son’s schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives. Dylan changed everything I believed about my self, about God, about family, and about love.”

  In the kitchen, I listened to the sound of the clock as it ticked off the seconds of another sleepless night. In the months since the assassination, new details had emerged—witness statements, still photos, video. I now had a clearer picture of what had happened in Royce Hall in the moments before and after the assassination. Still, there was nothing that irrevocably proved my son was the shooter. It had been dark in the theater, with spotlights shining on Seagram. The photos I had seen were murky at best. The video was clear when focused on the stage, but became grainy and hard to make out once the cameras panned to the crowd.

  Ballistics results had proven that the gun my son was caught holding had been the murder weapon, but two witnesses (Alice Hader, thirty-four, and Benjamin Sayid, nineteen [The New York Times, page 13, June 23, 20__]) spoke of a struggle, of a man in a white shirt wrestling with another man in the moments after the gun went off. The other man wasn’t described, nor did he come forward to offer his own statement.

  Danny had been wearing a white shirt when he was arrested.

  Who was the other man?

  Six days after the shooting, Time magazine printed the photo that Murray’s contact at the FBI had told him about. Though blurry, it clearly showed Danny holding a pistol. He is frozen in mid-recoil as a Secret Service agent grabs his wrist with both hands. They are partially hidden by the crowd. The expression on the agent’s face is one of outrage, captured possibly in mid-yell. Danny has a look of fear and pain on his face, which isn’t surprising. He had just been shot in the leg.

  Every day I scoured the papers for more details. Who was the mystery man with whom my son fought? Was he the shooter? If not, if he was just an innocent bystander, why wasn’t he coming forward?

  I still did not believe my son was a murderer, but I had to admit that I had lost touch with him, that somehow after leaving home he had become isolated, troubled. And in the weeks since his arrest I found my mind returning again and again to his childhood. What had I, his father, done to make him who he was? What could I have done differently?

  I sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of tea, listening to the night sounds of the house. The forced-air system came on. The refrigerator motor idled. My knees cracked when I stood up to rinse out my mug. This is what happens when you age. Your body, which has felt for years like a safe and comfortable home, begins to turn against you. You lose the ability to maintain your core temperature. In the last six months I began to notice that I was always cold. I had become a wearer of sweaters. At home the children complained because I kept the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. I was turning into my grandfather.

  The first weeks after Danny’s arrest had been a blur of busywork. Fran and I had answered questions from every law enforcement agency imaginable. We had held press conferences and issued statements. We had told the world that we saw Senator Seagram’s assassination as an abomination. That we grieved for his family. But, we’d said, we loved our son. And we believed he was innocent. We were positive that a jury of his peers would find him innocent, and we could only hope that Seagram’s real killer was caught quickly and punished for what he’d done.

  Overnight we became public figures. I turned down interview requests from every major network magazine show without hesitation. Fran supported me. We would not turn this family into a circus. There were two more children to protect, children who couldn’t go to school without being pestered by reporters. So Fran took them out of school and started teaching them from home. Now they took classes with names like “Books We Have on Our Shelves” and “Math My Mom Can Do.”

  Fran had yet to complain about the strain our family was under, though there were times I heard her crying in the bathroom. Mostly late at night. But she kept the door closed, and I wanted to respect her privacy, so I didn’t knock or ask if she was okay.

  Every day, as usual, I rose and took the train into the city. I needed my work now more than ever. I did my early rounds and often late rounds, too. I listened to breath sounds and read X-rays. But I found myself distracted. My mind wasn’t making the connections it used to. I found myself spending more time at the hospital talking to patients about their families. I wanted to hear happy stories, to see wallet photos: my son the doctor, my son the lawyer. I wanted to experience the positive, happy children who grew up to be heroes.

  My patients, for the most part, were unaware of my other identity, as the father of a now world-famous criminal. They complained of spinal pain and heart murmurs without ever realizing to whom they were speaking. They complained of the tragedies of their lives without ever imagining what stories I might tell. When a patient recognized me, I tried to change the subject, to steer the conversation away from my son. It wasn’t hard to do. Illness makes narcissists of us all. When we are suffering, in pain, afraid, we turn inward. Faced with our own mortality we cease to care about the daily dramas of the world.

  The doctors were another matter. Colleagues of mine, men and women I had known for years, stopped talking to me. They took the stairs to avoid riding the elevator with the father of the accused. When I first returned to work, the chief of medicine stopped by my office. He wore a serious expression.

  “Look,” he said, “you and I both know, whatever your son did—if he’s innocent, guilty, whatever—it doesn’t change your standing at this hospital. But at the same time, I’d appreciate it if you’d try to keep a low profile for the next few months.”

  I had been drafted earlier in the year to give a talk at the hospital’s annual fund-raiser. But after Seagram’s death, my name was quietly taken off the program, and I was encouraged to stay home. Part of me was furious. I had given more than ten years of my life to the hospital, had saved the lives of some of the world’s most important men and women, only to find myself shunned. But another part of me was grateful. Grateful to stay home, grateful to skip the knowing glances, the awkward silences, the exaggerated small talk.

  On the subway one morning a woman, a stranger, grabbed my arm. When I turned to face her she hissed at me. “Shame,” she said. “Shame.”

  A nurse at the hospital burst into tears when I spoke to her in the break room. She recoiled when I tried to console her. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  A surgeon I had played squash with several times approached me at a restaurant. He had been civil to me when we saw each other at the hospital. But now he had been drinking. He came up to the table where I had just been seated with the few friends Fran and I had left who would be seen with us in public.

  “You should know,” he said, “that nobody at the hospital can look at you without seeing what he did. I hope you’re happy.”

  For good measure, he added “cocksucker,” then stumbled off to the men’s room.

  My friends tried to console me
after he left. To tell me that he was drunk and stupid, and not to listen to him. I told them it was fine. I said, “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.” And then I stopped going out to eat.

  Reporters called, their numbers blocked, and tried to get quotes. They asked provocative questions trying to get a rise.

  “How does it feel to know that so many people hate your son?”

  “If they execute him, will you go to the prison to watch?”

  I stopped answering the phone. Its ring became a sound to fear, a mechanical scream that set my pulse racing.

  I had talked to Danny only twice in the last three months, both times by telephone. As we spoke a mechanized voice kept reminding us that the call was being recorded for security purposes.

  “I can’t tell you where I am,” said Danny, “but I will say it’s hot.”

  “It’s August,” I said. “It’s hot everywhere.”

  “I think I want to come home,” he said.

  “You think? You’re in prison. You’re supposed to want to come home. Are you okay?”

  “They keep the lights on all the time. I have to sleep with my hands over my face.”

  “That’s illegal,” I said. “They can’t do that.”

  Danny didn’t say anything for a minute, then: “My lawyer says I should think about pleading not guilty on account of insanity.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think this call is being recorded for security purposes.”

  After we hung up I sat in the kitchen and watched my teacup spin around in the microwave. I no more accepted my son’s guilt now than I had that day, but doubt crept in from time to time. The photograph of Danny holding the gun was a compelling argument for guilt, but I knew that just because something looked like a cancer, it didn’t mean it was. I tried to quiet my anxiety with work. My son was good. He was kind. And if a person like this was capable of a crime like that, then I knew nothing about human beings.