Down City

by Leah Carroll

  “Dad,” I say, after finishing the Orwell. “At the end, when he’s crying and saying he loves Big Brother? Oh my God. It was so good. It was so sad.” Dad nods from the leather chair in the living room. He has a giant telephoto lens trained on Taylor, who looks up at both of us drooling and smiling.

  “Taylor-Ann!” I say, “Show us your buddies!” Taylor proudly displays her collection of pacifiers—two in each hand. Dad snaps pictures of her. I hold up an issue of Shutterbug magazine with a giant thirty-five-millimeter camera on the cover and point at the image.

  “Taylor, who’s this?”

  She focuses on the magazine cover and crawls over to me. “Dada!” she says, punching the image of the camera with her moistened buddy, leaving a smudge. “It’s Dada!” Dad and I both clap wildly and Taylor giggles, shoving two of the pacifiers into her mouth.

  I spend hours in my bedroom in front of the mirror trying on outfits for school. I like small vintage dresses and ripped fishnet stockings layered over colored tights. I scour the Salvation Army for the perfect old-lady cardigans. I use Manic Panic to dye my hair every few weeks. My favorite thing is to walk through the corridors and hear people whisper (seniors even) about my clothes and hair. I delight in making a spectacle of myself—writing song lyrics on my arms and jeans and talking in a loud British accent. Derek and I hang out at the Dairy Mart up the street from our house and ask older teenagers to buy us cigarettes. At school, I prefer brooding in the girls’ room, reading poetry by the Beats, and smoking Camel Lights to going to class. I have detention almost every day.

  At home, nobody seems to really notice my bad behavior at school. I want Dad to know what a rebel I was but I can never seem to get his attention.

  RECENTLY THE PROVIDENCE Journal had been bought out by Belo Corp., a big national conglomerate that owns papers and news stations across the country. Dad starts to get more night shifts. He leaves for work around five at night and comes home at two or three in the morning. He’s always slept for hours on end, but now we almost never see him awake during the day.

  One night when I can’t sleep, which is often, I get out of bed and make myself a cup of chamomile tea. I curl up into my position on the living room sofa drinking my tea and reading Interview with the Vampire. Dad’s car pulls into the driveway. When he walks into the living room, he slumps into the chair across from me.

  It’s the smell of him that makes me look up. He smells like something rotting. Beneath the Polo cologne, and the Italian grinder bits all over his suit, and even under the scent of alcohol, there’s something else. Something not right. He smells sick in the way hospitals smell sick, or… I can’t quite explain it. He has immediately fallen asleep in the chair, his suit jacket slung over the back, his jaw slack. Something has truly changed in him. He has given up trying to impress us. He doesn’t talk anymore about “getting better.” He doesn’t sit with us while we watch movies and crack jokes that we tell to our friends the next day. When he’s home he puts the TV on mute and sleeps, all the time, day or night. We live in the same tiny house but I rarely see him.

  YEARS BEFORE ON Sunday, September 15, 1987, the unconscious and bleeding body of Michael P. Metcalf, chairman, chief executive officer, and publisher of the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin lay sprawled alongside his bicycle on the road near his summer home in Westport, Massachusetts. One week later, he died from serious head injuries sustained in the apparent freak accident. There were no witnesses to the incident and while the Bristol County medical examiner’s autopsy report showed “nothing startling,” murmurs of foul play rippled through the state of Rhode Island, pooling at the feet of the usual suspects: the corrupt courts and state officials, and the powerful Patriarca crime family.

  His death marked the beginning of the end of an era for the Providence Journal and coincided generally with a decline in print journalism nationwide. The Metcalfs had made their fortune in mills and helped endow the esteemed Rhode Island School of Design, but it was with their ownership of the Providence Journal that they became a Rhode Island dynasty. On the paper’s centennial in 1929, then-publisher Stephen Metcalf declared the paper would last another century if “the emblems of independence and honesty still fly at the masthead, and if no man or group of men permit themselves to sully her honor or integrity for their own personal ends.”

  With Michael Metcalf at the helm, it seemed the Journal would continue not only as a beacon of courageous, locally focused journalism but also as a trusted institution employing hundreds of loyal Rhode Islanders. Indeed, the day of his mysterious accident was an auspicious one for Metcalf: It was the first day the paper would be printed at the new production facility—a gleaming, state-of-the-art project of which he was particularly proud—and the building where my father worked for many years. Having found no paper in his mailbox to inspect, Metcalf biked off down the road to purchase one. What happened next is the stuff of conjecture but one thing is clear: He would never see the Providence Journal again.

  At its height, the newspaper had seven local bureaus, an astonishing number for a state that can be traversed by car in under an hour. Joel Rawson, who began his career at the Journal as a copy editor, rose through the ranks to become editor in chief due in large part to a series of fascinating long-form stories that were often a year or more in the making. The paper implemented intensive writing workshops and “Story of the Week” contests. In 1986, then-editor Charles Hauser was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term and the paper was fined a hundred thousand dollars for publishing a story about Raymond L. S. Patriarca, based on FBI documents being held under a temporary restraining order. Metcalf stood by the story and his editor, stating that his was a decision “that was made by the newspaper in good faith and in the reasonable belief that the First Amendment justified the publication.” It was not the first or last time the Metcalfs butted heads with the mafia and the courts.

  It was precisely this type of stubborn rectitude that set the Journal apart from other Rhode Island institutions. Criminal exploits and entrenched governmental corruption are hallmarks of this tiny state that bears certain monolithic qualities. Overwhelmingly Catholic, unabashedly corrupt, and with a flair for extravagant provincialism, the state nonetheless came to accept the Providence Journal as a kind of moral steward. With a hyperfocus on local journalism, its wealthy Protestant owners—exemplified by Michael Metcalf—demanded honesty and honored public service, paid fair wages, and rewarded loyalty. The Journal’s almost priggish commitment to integrity saw returns in the form of prestige, with four Pulitzer Prizes, and financial success. While still under private ownership the paper operated at a healthy profit, which Metcalf used to invest in forward-thinking technologies such as cell towers and the purchase of television stations.

  The Journal today is a shadow of its formal self. The Evening Bulletin edition was cut decades ago. The story of the paper’s demise is familiar to most people who have followed the decline of print journalism in the era of the Internet. In 1996, Metcalf’s successor took the company public. The initial Providence Journal Company valuation was one hundred million dollars. Just six months later, the majority shareholders elected to sell the company to media conglomerate Belo Corp., based in Dallas, Texas, for a billion and a half dollars. Like most large-scale ventures, Belo was concerned less with the paper itself than with its many assets, including those television stations purchased by Michael Metcalf. On the day of the sale, Elise Metcalf Mauran and Pauline C. Metcalf spoke for the Metcalf family with a full-page ad in the paper that read, “We mourn the sale of the Providence Journal Company to A. H. Belo… we are saddened by the loss of independence of the newspaper and what that has meant for well over 100 years to the citizens of Providence and the State of Rhode Island.”

  IN 2009, I contact the journalist, Dean Starkman, who’d been part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering corruption in Rhode Island. He’d also exposed Peter Gilbert’s deal with the state. He was a young reporter at the time
and he remembers well a line from the grand jury testimony that he quotes in one of his articles, and that shocked me when I first read it: Gerald Mastracchio choking the life out of my mother and saying, “Come on you rat, give me the death rattle.” To him that utterance encapsulates the evil of these men. He can’t understand, as an outsider, Rhode Islanders’ fascination with organized criminals; he’d wanted to show them for the brutal thugs they were. To him, the Journal was one of the only non-corrupt organizations in the state.

  For men like my dad, the Journal was their whole life. He was exceptionally proud of his job.

  As an adult, I write about my conversation with Dean Starkman and about how his stories help me finally approach the truth about my mother. A day after my article is published in the New York Times I receive this email:

  Ms. Carroll, it was actually the description of your father’s death, not your mother’s, that sent a chill down my spine. I was the Chief Financial Officer responsible for negotiating the sale of the Providence Journal. Just after announcing the deal I was kicked out of the house, the 31-year-old father of two babies, for being a drunk. I didn’t see my kids that Christmas of 1996 and, as a result, decided to try to get sober rather than commit suicide. I have been clean for the 13 years since and, like you, have become a writer obsessed with telling the truth no matter how painful. If my actions as CFO at the Journal in any way contributed to your hardship I am deeply and sincerely sorry.

  Thomas Matlack

  I’m stunned by the message. I wonder what my dad would have made of it. Because in a way, through no malice on his part, Matlack’s actions did contribute to my dad’s death. The Journal was the one place my dad completely belonged, completely fit, and the sale changed all that. Reading the email, I feel it again, the same feeling I’d had in college going through the Journal’s online archives: that “lonely impulse of delight.”

  TEN

  My freshman year I fail algebra and have to attend summer school in the neighboring town of Bristol to make up the class. I pay attention and quickly work my way through the sections of the course that had mystified me throughout the school year. Suddenly, actually doing the formulas instead of writing song lyrics, the math makes sense. On the night before my final exam in summer school, Dad calls down to the basement from the top of the stairs. I’m surprised to hear his voice.

  “Want to go see a movie?” he asks.

  I look at the clock. It’s after eight. I have to be up for summer school the next day at seven.

  “Sure,” I say.

  In the car Dad taps the dashboard in tune with the music on the radio. “You’re going to love this movie,” he tells me. “It’s fucking amazing.” In the lobby of the movie theater, the air-conditioning pumping over us. Dad buys two tickets for Pulp Fiction. I’ve never seen anything like it. On the way home we talk about it nonstop. That night in my room I do an impression of Mia Wallace in my mirror and I’m too excited to get to sleep until almost four in the morning. At seven, Dad knocks on my door to wake me up for school. I drag myself out of bed to take the final test. When it’s over, I walk over to Dad’s waiting car. “Did you pass?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I got an A in the class.”

  “Good job, kiddo.” He slides on a pair of Oakley wraparound sunglasses and pulls the car out of the high school parking lot. It’s the best grade I’ve gotten on anything all year.

  On nights when Ann-Marie has to go out, I take care of Taylor. By now Taylor talks a bit and walks. She moves around in wildly unstable steps, hurling herself forward with the force of her own momentum. She watches The Lion King on repeat and has a VHS collection of songs from Disney cartoons. We sit on the living room carpet and sing along to them together.

  I put her in her high chair and make an elaborate process of picking what her dinner will be from the jars of baby food lined up in the kitchen cabinet by the refrigerator. What goes better with turkey—mashed peas or mashed green beans? And for dessert—do we want plums or applesauce? Taylor is a happy, giggly baby. She drools constantly, leaving a dark half-moon on the neckline of all her clothes, and loves to poke and kiss Shilo, who lets herself be pinched and slapped by Taylor’s clumsy baby hands. It’s fascinating to see her go from amorphous infant lump to a real person who expresses her desires for things by pushing an oversize cardboard picture book into your lap, or beckoning through the bars of her crib at the pacifiers just out of her reach.

  Most often on the nights I watch Taylor, Dad is gone or asleep in his room, unaware of what’s happening in the rest of the house. But some nights, like one intolerably hot August evening, as I put Taylor in the bathtub and try to cool her heat-rash-stricken body with a damp washcloth and she cries and cries, Dad calls from the bedroom.

  I look down at Taylor, naked and miserable in her padded chair in the bathtub. I pretend not to have heard him. “Ssssh,” I whisper to Taylor and hand her a pacifier. She throws it over the side of the tub and continues to cry.

  “Leah,” calls Dad.

  “What?”

  “Bring her in here.”

  I wrap a thin towel loosely around Taylor and lift her out of the tub, carrying her to her room. We sit in the rocking chair in front of the open window. A box fan whirs loudly by our side.

  “Did you hear me?” Dad yells again. “You can bring her in here.”

  “She’s better now,” I yell back even though Taylor is still crying.

  “Jesus Christ,” says Dad. “What do you think I’m going to do to her?”

  I sit silent, not moving from the rocking chair. Eventually Taylor drifts off to sleep and Dad is quiet in his room. I don’t know what he’d do to her, but I do know that she’s the most precious thing to me in the world. And I know Dad has turned some kind of corner.

  FOR MY BIRTHDAY that year, Dad takes me to Thayer Street to get my nose pierced. I sat in a dentist’s chair while the piercer lines up his silver needles on a paper napkin. I pick out a small steel hoop decorated with a tiny ball. Dad insists on taking pictures during the whole process and I’m mortified until the piercer, tattoos flexing beneath his white T-shirt, admires Dad’s camera and asks to look at it. I sit, so excited about getting my nose pierced that I can barely breathe, while Dad and the man bond over the superiority of Canon lenses. By the time they’ve begun listing the litany of reasons that Morrissey is a whiny asshole, I think I might cry from anticipation. Dad looks over at me, pulls the camera to his eye, and says, “Well, it’s probably time to put a hole in her face.” He moves around me snapping away as the man slides a needle into my cartilage.

  “It was fun, Dad!” I say when it’s all over. I admire my nose ring in the car mirror. “Like it hurt but it was a good kind of hurt, you know?”

  “Good Lord,” says Dad. “Just promise me you won’t get any tattoos.” Dad always says that people are surprised he doesn’t smoke or have tattoos. My Aunt Rita explained to me once that growing up, their mom made sure they had the nicest clothes and the shiniest shoes. She taught them how to present themselves to the world. Being a Vietnam vet and a man who hangs out in bars, his intense dislike of tattoos and cigarettes does seem a bit out of character, but if you really know him, if you know the line he walks between who he is and who he wants to be, it makes perfect sense.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, watching the way my nose ring looks when I talk, or look slightly to the left. I’m definitely the coolest person in high school, I think.

  MY SOPHOMORE YEAR I have a boyfriend. He has a blue Ford hatchback, in which we drive around Barrington looking for stuff to do. It’s not long before I figure out I don’t like Dave very much—not just as a boyfriend, but as a person in general. He steals blank checks from his mother, who is disabled by multiple sclerosis, and shows me how he makes them out to Cash. Of course I don’t object when the stolen money keeps us in cigarettes, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, and Bickford’s meals.

  It isn’t the theft itself that bothers me. It’s more the methodically shitty way in which he c
onducts his schemes. He is, I realize, no good, and not in the hippie-burnout way that people assume. Rather, he’s the kind of just-smart-enough criminal who will likely spend a lot of time in prison for petty crimes as an adult.

  As much as I’m pretty much continuously disgusted and annoyed by him, we stay together for my entire sophomore year. I like the freedom of his car. He begs to come over late at night after Dad and Ann-Marie have gone to bed, and I acquiesce, apathetically French-kissing him for a few minutes at a time. I wonder if I’ll ever have a boyfriend that I like.

  THAT WINTER, AS Belo restructures, my father is laid off. The Journal pays him a generous severance and gives him access to his 401(k), but it’s as if a lifeline has been severed. Before there’d been an excuse to get out of bed, at least for the hours he had to be at work. Now there isn’t. I can’t imagine my dad not working at the Journal. What will he do? When he gets out of bed to take pictures or do whatever it is he does on his own, he puts on his natty suits and shoes and overcoats. Then he comes home and falls heavily into bed, still wearing his expensive clothes as he tosses and turns in front of the muted TV.

  One morning he offers to drive Derek and me to school. Once we’re in the car it’s clear something is very wrong. Inside the Mitsubishi it smells like something died. The drive from our house to school is less than three-quarters of a mile but Dad pulls the car over to vomit on the way. Derek opens his rear door and just gets out, heading down the sidewalk to school. I unbuckle my seat belt and tell Dad I’ll walk the rest of the way as well.

  “I’m fine,” he wipes his mouth with his hand.