by Leah Carroll
There were so many items to linger over. So many familiar details that, when couched in the clinical language of the autopsy, took on a sinister sheen of wonder. My dad’s blue eyes I’d always wished for in place of my own brown ones. The gray hair that stayed so thick and silver, even as the rest of his body descended into the stink and bloat of drinking. The secret and private areas of his body laid out beneath a cold, clinical glare: his nostrils, his anus, his neck veins.
The one Timberland boot triggered a memory of seeing his body at the funeral home. The funeral director handing me those very boots in a plastic bag and saying, “I’m sorry we can’t give you the pants…”
With this memory, I realized, because of those boots—because there were two of them in the bag—that when I saw my dad’s body in the funeral home, he had already been autopsied. If I’d pulled away the sheet tucked beneath his chin I would have seen the Y-shaped incision.
The seventy-two inches mentioned at the beginning of the report struck me as well. For all my dad’s mythmaking, for all his tall tales and broken promises, there were certain facts about him of which I was sure. My dad was six feet and two inches tall. Of that I had no doubt. The medical examiner was insisting to me here, in measured pace and language taken from a template, that I was wrong. He was only six feet tall, it said. Your father is two inches shorter than you believed, the report said to me.
SITTING IN THE bar, I asked Billy Temple if it was okay to record our conversation. With his thick white hair, and impeccably groomed beard and mustache, he was a commanding presence.
“How did you two meet?” I asked.
Billy considered the question, took a drink from his glass.
“We were both in Blake’s Tavern one night,” he said. “I had on a baseball hat with my platoon number on it. Kevin came over to me and we got to talking about Vietnam. I was in the navy. I never once was on a boat that whole war, though. Your dad, I don’t know if you know, he drove a minesweeper—a suicide truck they called it.”
Billy stopped for a minute and shook his empty glass at the bartender, signaling for another. “Your dad and I—” He stopped again, a hitch in his throat. The bartender placed a new glass of Grand Marnier on a cocktail napkin in front of him and swept the empty away in one swift movement. Billy swallowed. “Your dad and I, we were the same kind of guy.” He wiped at a tear and lifted his glass. “People are gonna look over here and think you and me are breaking up,” he said. “Your dad was my best friend.”
BLAKE’S TAVERN SITS at the corner of Mathewson and Fountain Streets, two blocks from what was once the Sportsman’s Inn, the strip club and hotel where my dad died. It’s now a boutique hotel called the Dean, and what was, while I was growing up, the blighted downcity of Providence seems more lively—there are more restaurants and nightclubs and reasons for people to be walking around. Still, in some ways the downcity section is an eerily vacant reminder of the industries that once supported the state and have since vanished. The crumbling facades of costume jewelry manufacturers and textile factories bear witness to an industrial past that once supported generations of Italian and Irish immigrants.
When Billy and my dad were regulars at Blake’s it was owned by a former police lieutenant and populated by Providence’s finest. The establishment, even then, was a relic within a relic. The walls were hung with pictures of the patrons and framed Irish blessings. The regulars clustered proprietarily around the left end of the large bar. After my dad died, someone nailed a small brass plaque to the wooden beam at one corner. It read: KEVIN CARROLL 1950–1998. I didn’t know what to make of this. It looked to me like a grave marker, but to the regulars, the plaque was an elegy.
My dad’s favorite story to tell about Blake’s was the night that two hood rats came in scoping the bar for purses carelessly slung over stools. The owner approached the kids and ordered them to leave. One of them pulled a large knife and waved it menacingly at the former police lieutenant. Without missing a beat, he withdrew his large revolver from its holster and said, “Get the fuck out of my bar.”
This was my dad’s favorite part of the story. “It was like Crocodile Dundee!” he would say and laugh. “Like, you call that a knife? Now, this is a knife!”
THE AUTOPSY REPORT concludes:
It is my opinion that Kevin S. Carroll, a 48 year old white male, died as a result of cardiomegaly and steatosis of the liver associated with a clinical history of chronic ethanol use. Reportedly, the decedent had a longstanding history of heavy ethanol use and checked into a motel in an intoxicated state. When checked upon the following day, he was fully dressed with injuries to the right side of his head, consistent with a terminal collapse in a secure motel room. There was no evidence of bleeding throughout the room, supporting the fact that these injuries to the scalp were terminal events. At autopsy, he had an enlarged greasy liver with steatohepatitis, consistent with acute and chronic ethanol use, as well as an enlarged heart with microscopic findings consistent with hypertensive cardiovascular disease. An additional significant contributing condition to his death included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Cause of Death: Cardiomegaly and Steatosis of the Liver Associated with Clinical History of Chronic Ethanol Use. Other Significant Findings: Laceration to Scalp of Right Side of Head Due to Terminal Collapse and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Manner of Death: Natural.
I ASKED BILLY Temple if he knew about the note my dad had left me. Outside, the sun shone brilliantly over the water, and the light shifted in the bar. The bar began to come alive; people talking louder, their heads closer together. In the dining room there was the din of silverware against plates, and conversations began to rise in volume. A man in the entrance called out the names of parties to seat.
I nursed my glass of wine. Billy was on his third Grand Marnier. He said, “Your dad tried to give me that note. He told me that if anything ever happened to him I was supposed to give it to you. I told him I didn’t want any part of it.”
He stopped then to look at me. “What did the note say?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, because for quite a stretch in the bar, I’d been dry-eyed, but the note always reduced me to tears. I paraphrased for him, trying to keep my voice level. I didn’t tell him, didn’t need to tell him, that when the police detective gave it to me it felt like my heart turned completely inside out. It felt like I was hearing my dad speak again. It felt like I felt right then, sitting next to Billy Temple at the bar and hearing him tell stories.
Billy nodded slowly. “I said to him, ‘I’m not gonna have anything to do with this. If you want to kill yourself, fine, but I’m not helping.’ It got to the point where we were in the hallway at Blake’s there and we were fighting, kind of pushing each other around. Your dad gave the note to Scotty, the bartender—do you remember him?” I nodded yes and Billy went on.
“Somehow we got outside. It was real cold, and you know how your dad dressed. Suit and tie all the time. But his shoes were untied, and his ankles, I could see they were all swollen. I said, ‘Kev, when was the last time you went to a doctor, you asshole?’”
Billy laughed a little and pushed away his empty drink. “And I’m sorry to say—” He stopped, reached for the empty glass, looked at it and put it down again. “I’m sorry to say that our last words to each other were, your dad says to me, ‘Fuck you, Billy Temple,’ and I said, ‘Fuck you right back, Kevin Carroll.’”
I wiped away tears, sniffed into a cocktail napkin. The bartender deposited a new drink in front of us and Billy picked it up. My phone had been ringing in my purse and I did my best to ignore it. Billy Temple began to look uncomfortable, as if he suspected that if he didn’t say something, I might stay there all night with him.
“You got dropped off,” he said. “You have a ride home, right?”
I blushed and dug the phone out of my bag.
“I do,” I said, looking at my phone for the time. “I didn’t realize how late it was getting. I have to go anyw
ay.” I pressed the SEND button to dial my ride.
Suddenly things were weird between Billy and me, in the way that things can get weird in a bar, after a certain number of drinks, after a certain hour of the day. He said, “If you want some dinner or something… Do you want something to eat? Are you hungry?”
“Oh, no, no,” I said, all brisk business dialing my phone. My cousin, now grown, picked up the phone. “Can you come get me?” I asked my cousin when she picked up.
“I’m outside now,” she said. She was driving my aunt’s giant SUV and she was blond, tan, eighteen, and charming beyond belief. I heard her loud music playing in the background.
“She’s here,” I told Billy and packed up my stuff.
“I’ll walk outside with you,” Billy said. “Time for a smoke.”
“My dad hated smoking so much.”
Billy laughed and retrieved a pack of Winstons from his pocket. “I know.”
My cousin was parked by the entrance. Outside, I turned to Billy, unsure of what to do. I held out my hand for him to shake and he pulled me toward him in an embrace. I hugged him back tightly, thinking of the hug I never gave my dad. I thought about that hug all the time.
“Thank you,” I said, opening the door to the SUV and sliding in.
My cousin clicked her cell phone shut and looked at Billy Temple. “Oh,” she said. “He looks so nice.” He stood outside, lighting his cigarette. He looked upward as he exhaled the smoke.
“One second,” I said and jumped suddenly out of the car, walking back toward Billy. “I don’t really smoke,” I said, “but could I have one of those?”
Billy smiled and took a cigarette from his pack, handing it to me. “But right about now you could use one, right?” He pulled me back in quick, kissed me on the top of the head, and then turned away. It seemed impossible to move from the spot, but I got back in the car, dazed, holding my unlit cigarette.
“We can go now,” I said.
I looked at my reflection in the passenger-side mirror. As a child I’d had long wavy hair and my dad brushed it a hundred stokes at a time. Sometimes I cried and he would tell me, “It hurts to be beautiful.”
AT BILLY’S FUNERAL, I’m astounded by how stunning the summer day is—so different from my father’s frigid December Mass and January burial—and by how much the ache of my dad’s absence still thumps around inside my body. I want to be a better person than this. I want not to enjoy the sensation of the sun on my bare arms and not to think about my own father when someone else’s had died so recently, but I can’t help it.
AT MY PARENTS’ wedding in 1977, my dad wore a white ruffled tuxedo shirt with no tie, collar unfastened to show off a Tom Selleck-esque tuft of chest hair. My mom’s gown was ivory with long lace sleeves. She wore a fingertip-length cap veil over her short haircut and two delicate strands of pearls around her neck. They stood beneath a huppah to say their vows and when my dad smashed the ceremonial glass with his foot everyone yelled out, “Mazel tov!”
The breaking of the glass, despite the cheers and mazel tov’ing that accompanies it, is actually, as I, a Jew by birthright alone, understand it, meant to be a solemn event. It signifies the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem more than two thousand years ago. It’s about tempering the joy of the occasion with a reminder about the fragility of life and love.
I MET MY husband, Nick, in 2010 at a Vietnamese restaurant in Brooklyn. We were introduced by mutual friends and by coincidence he was from Rhode Island, as well. We played the familiar game—what high school, whose cousin—and within minutes we knew countless people in common. I was going through a bad spell, still smarting from a breakup that was now over a year old; I was working in a windowless office and drinking too much. When the group of us, including my future husband, sat down to order our meals, I requested a round of tequila shots for the table, which seemed to confuse most of the people there.
A few weeks later, I was with a friend and we ran into Nick at a bar. He was as drunk as almost anyone I’d ever seen and trying, without much success, to eat an empanada. He stroked my friend’s long, wavy hair and got her phone number. When they broke up, Nick and I fell in love. It was, in its way, the story of every romance.
We were dating four months when I helped Nick check himself into alcohol detox and then watched with amazement as he got and stayed sober. I curbed my drinking as well. There was no more coming home from work to slowly work my way through a bottle of wine. Now I came home, picked up my dog, and walked over to Nick’s apartment where we ate a ridiculous amount of sweets and both of us got better and better.
Once, while we were visiting family in Rhode Island, I asked Nick if we could visit my mother’s grave. It was something I hadn’t done in years, though I’d spent so much time researching her death.
I explained to Nick that at a Jewish cemetery we left a rock, not flowers. Just a token to show we’d been there. That we’d been thinking of them. Looking at the inscription on her grave, JOAN CARROLL 1954–1984, WIFE, MOTHER, DAUGHTER, SISTER, FRIEND, I suddenly realized how much had been taken from her. I was thirty-two at the time—I’d outlived her already by two years and still felt like I’d not done a quarter of what I hoped to do with my life.
I’d been researching her, I’d been wondering about her, I’d been imagining who she would have been if she lived. But I never really thought about who she was as a person, as a woman who existed entirely outside of my existence. In some ways, I’d become complicit in her disappearance. I’d allowed her to become a specter: the doomed mother. I’d painted a portrait of her out of cigarette smoke and newspaper clippings. I’d let her be defined by the men and sex and drugs that made up the final moments of her life. Standing there, I felt ashamed. She was Joan Goldman Carroll, who struggled, who was loved, whose life was stolen. She was a woman, in the world, fearless, hopeful, careless, everything we all are.
When it was time to leave, Nick had two rocks to leave at her grave. One from me and one from him. We were thinking about her. We remembered her. I promised her that.
NICK AND I were married in Newport, Rhode Island, in front of about one hundred people. His brother became an Internet minister to marry us. My sister stood next to him and read from Justice Kennedy’s majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges requiring all states to recognize same-sex marriage. Ann-Marie, who had been there for me since I was six, sat along with her four brothers and her mother, my Grandma Ann. My Aunt Sandy cried and gripped me hard, told me how much she loved me and how proud of me she was. Reba and Alex, still so much in my life, gave a joint toast. In lieu of tossing my bouquet of yellow roses, I gave it to my grandmother, my sweet, sweet grandmother, now suffering from Alzheimer’s, who accepted it with her hand clutching her heart. It rained, and everyone told us that was good luck. I felt like if I didn’t keep dancing I would drop from exhaustion so I did, for hours, barely getting a chance to speak to anyone, sweaty and focused.
Afterward, in our hotel suite, I drew a hot bath in the luxurious soaking tub, unhooked my wedding dress, letting it fall to the floor, and climbed in. I dunked my head under the water and when I came up there were a dozen tiny fake lashes floating around me.
We had walked down the aisle to Beethoven’s Ninth, fourth movement, which I’ve still not seen in person, and in addition to my bouquet I carried the Hebrew Bible my mother had carried down the aisle when she married my dad. My husband smashed the glass on the first try, to raucous applause.
Sometimes Nick will send me a link about a TV show, or new movie, or concert tour with a note about how it seems like something my dad would have liked. He understands him in a way that nobody who ever knew him alive possibly could. The fact that he cannot only understand but grow to really appreciate such a mercurial person from description alone makes me think two things—that I married the right man, and that my mom and dad live on in everything I am.
When I ask people about my parents, one of the things I look for is repetition. I’ve noticed that ever
y person has essentially the same thing to say about my parents’ marriage: “They just got each other.” “They were soul mates, but they did their own thing and they met up at the end of the day.” “They accepted each other but they did their own thing.” “They just fit.” And this too: My mom told my dad that I was all she needed, and if he wanted another baby, he could go to the baby store and buy one himself because it wasn’t happening.
THE DAY AFTER our wedding, my aunt tells me that my grandmother had refused to let go of the bouquet of roses I’d given to her. She had to be cajoled into letting them go so my aunt could put them in a vase. My grandmother doesn’t remember who I am, exactly, but she understands something else, something more important. She doesn’t remember what happened to my mom. But I do. I remember. I remember you, Mom. And Dad, you were not that bad a guy. I promise never to forget.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEAH CARROLL lives in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Emerson College, and received an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida. She is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would have been impossible to write without the support of my family. Thank you Ann-Marie Carroll Cutlip, Sandra Goldman, Hayley Rettenmyer, Ruth Goldman, Taylor Carroll, the Solingers, the Goldmans, the Aloisios, and the Catuccis.
I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such wonderful friends and I don’t know what I would do without you. Thank you Rebecca Friedman, Alexandra Griffin, Colleen Lawrie, Lee Pinkas, Urcella Di Pietro, David Ramsey, Sean Bottai, Julie Cohen, Rachel Riederer, Mike Spies, Melissa Kirsch, Elizabeth Mann, and everyone else who puts up with me even though I’m chronically late, totally unreliable, and usually hungry.