Oh, all right, it just ruins our lives. It teaches us a lesson, anyway, what life would be like if women really were, as Shaw kept requesting, more like a man. Life would be bad. Take my word for it. Your ordinary man doesn’t have the resources to protect against a beautiful woman who sees sex as sport and men as both rivals and teammates.
Now I remember few details of our time together. There was sex, but that wasn’t all of it. She was too restless, too physical to just repeat one activity over and over. Every night after I got off work—I didn’t know if she worked, hell, I didn’t even know her last name; it was that lost free era where you could love a woman till your foundations shattered and never ask such trivial questions—she was waiting to take me on some adventure, show me some night vista of the city I thought I knew, discover some exotic spot for secret trysts. We did a day and night on the Trail, near the Cunningham Falls, and I fell asleep holding her and listening to the roar of a mountain lion over the patter of the rain on our tent. I remember those flashes, but little else, and nothing of our conversation. I think, hard as it is to believe, we talked hardly at all. I gave that up, that skill of mine with words, to descend into her world of experience. That might be why I lost myself, because I gave myself up.
And maybe, if we’d talked, I would have known to leave.
I did, I remember to my eternal shame, give her the first few chapters of my novel, the book of my heart that no one, not my dad, not even Ellen, knew existed. All journalists, you know, secretly have the first few chapters of a novel. We think that we can be another Sam Clemens, a great newspaperman who could also write the great American novel. It is a useful corrective for us, to learn that telling stories is something very different than reporting them.
It was the novel that drove her away.
I have to laugh, remembering that now. I came home and there was the novel on my bed, with a yellow note paper-clipped to it. “Not my sort of story. Too slow. Good luck with it. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
H.L. Mencken couldn’t have written a more brutal rejection letter.
Then she disappeared as effectively as she appeared.
There’s no one who can do misery like an Irishman, and I did it right— a weekend of deep melancholy punctuated by jottings of broken poetry, three nights of whisky and comrades who’d also been destroyed by love once upon a time, and finally, when I sobered up, the phone at my desk singing a siren song.
I waited until after deadline, when everyone in the news room slid out the door bound for bed or bar. All alone then, I called Ellen. She sounded startled to hear my voice. Nervous. She would never be impolite, but I could hear something abrupt in the way she asked, “What was it you wanted?”
I sensed I had to get to the point quickly. She would find some excuse and hang up if I tried the small talk route. “I want to see you. Again. Soon.”
There was a quick intake of breath. “Tom . . . ”
“I can drive up tonight. Be there by morning. I have to be back by three for work, but—” But that sounded suitably impetuous and romantic—driving through the mountain night to get a glimpse of her, only to turn around and drive back.
“Let me call you back.”
This wasn’t the answer I expected. I started to worry. If she got away . . . “When?”
“A few minutes. I’m—I’m in the middle of something.”
Would she really call me back? I didn’t know. She wouldn’t lie, but maybe she’d find a way to forget. “I’ll call you back instead. Ten minutes.”
Ten minutes later, I had her back on the line. “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Tom.” She was speaking carefully. “You were right back in May. We’ve run our course. No need to drag out the ending. It was just a college thing.”
She was reading this out loud. Jesus. She’d taken the ten minutes and written herself a script. I knew what that meant. She wrote things down when she meant to inscribe them in marble. Her to-do list was sacrosanct. If one night some dream inspired her to scrawl “Climb Everest” on a bedside pad, in the morning she’d be strapping on the crampons and picking up the ice axe. She believed in the certitude of ink on paper more than any reporter I’d ever known.
She meant to break up with me. Or not let me un-break up with her. I got scared. “Ellen, sweetheart, this isn’t some college . . . thing. This is a life.”
She didn’t have an answer to that in her script. “What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
“I mean—” and I let it take over, that timeless rhythm, the voices of Yeats and Tom Moore and all the nameless bards who wrote the sweet sad songs I’d sing when I’d had a couple pints and Dad brought out his fiddle, the poets who always said the right words in the right key to make girls want to do what they oughtn’t to do, “I mean, this is killing me, losing you. I can’t do it. Can’t live like this. Can’t live without my Ellen. Can’t stand waking up and knowing I won’t see you today, or hold you tonight. There’s no joy here, no music, no laughter, and now I know why—because I lost you, and it was the stupidest thing I could ever do, and—and I know I’m no good for you, and you’ve every right to hang up on me right now. But I’m dying here without you.”
“Tom,” she whispered, “I—I can’t.” And it was then I knew I meant it, all of it, that something in me needed her just that much, needed the Ellen who had never hurt me, who didn’t even know how to hurt me, the Ellen who could heal all those broken bones in my soul just by loving me again.
“Yes, you can. Marry me, and I’ll show you.”
I don’t know where that came from, except that I’d always sensed she was enough her mother’s daughter that she wanted to do the conventional thing when it came to the long-term. She’d long refused to move in with me, claiming that it would kill the romance even if it improved our finances, but I figured it was the echo of her mother’s voice— Why should a man buy the cow when he gets the milk for free?
I knew only one way to blot out that skeptical voice. “Ellen, I love you. I can’t live without you. Please say you’ll be my wife.”
I got nothing but silence in reply. I cursed myself, thinking how badly I’d handled it. I should have waited for moonlight, and a diamond ring, and—if I could wait that long, I wouldn’t have to propose. “Ellen.” I didn’t care if I sounded desperate. “Say yes.”
And then she laughed. It was a shaky laugh, but I heard the joy in there. She said, “Okay. Yes. I had other plans for this year, but—”
But she’d throw away her to-do list for me. Change her mind, change her plans, change her life. I didn’t deserve her. I’d make it up to her. I’d marry her.
And it worked out just fine—a quick wedding in our college chapel, a quick baby girl, a quick European assignment. Before I knew it, we had a real life. And my ripped heart scarred over, and my broken soul mended, and I had just decided tentatively to trust in the benevolence of the universe—a baby making a healthy transition to toddlerhood does that to a man—when I came home one day to our little cottage on the banks of the canal in Bruges and found—
Anyway, I lied.
What no one seems to understand is, it was the simplest thing in the world to do, to keep this secret. I made only one decision, once, and that was not to tell—not to lie, but not to tell. Enacting that decision took no energy at all. I never had to make another decision, or take another action. There was no active deception, no scramble to confabulate—until that evening in Bruges. And then again, when the boy Brian came into our home and demanded the truth.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After that confrontation in the Wakefield library, I couldn’t stay in this town a minute longer—couldn’t take Ellen’s rejection. So I shoved my bag into the jeep and climbed in. A mile down the road, I pulled over and called back to the Super-8, making a reservation to return two nights hence. Typical of me—acting on impulse, chasing a lead, but planning ahead.
The plan. The plan. The plan was to get out of town so I wouldn’t sit around in
that damned motel room, waiting for Ellen to call. Also to get back just after she started worrying about where I was.
This trip to the boy’s birthplace was a manufactured excuse, but I intended to make the most of it. If there would be secrets in the hospital records, I wanted to know how accessible they’d be.
I had some experience at coaxing employees to betray the confidences of their bosses. “Whistle-blowing,” we’d call it, to make it sound more ethical. Downright socially responsible, even. And I’d learned early on that the further the employee was from the boss, the more willing they were to blow whistles. So I took my time driving up to Pennsylvania, took my time finding the hospital. I wanted the nightshift, those disaffected workers who traded in a normal life for an extra buck-fifty an hour.
As I waited for dark, I entertained the notion of telling Ellen the truth. It was always an option. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see this working out well no matter what, but when I sorted out the scenarios, the worst-case one was Ellen learning the truth. It would shatter us— but more important, it would shatter her.
But I didn’t know how I was going to pull this off. I wasn’t used to being so incompetent. I’d already screwed it up when I didn’t immediately come up with a plausible explanation for the boy. If I’d had time to prepare, I might have been able to make the one-night-stand story stick. But I was taken by surprise, and the lie must have shown on my face.
Too late now. Nothing to do but stem the damage.
This was a small-town community hospital, and they didn’t bother with any of that big-city security. I walked right past the reception desk and down the hall to the building directory, and located Records. I found my way down the echoing steel backstairs to the basement, and the old yellow cinderblock room that housed patient records.
The clerk playing Free Cell on the computer was a woman, fortunately, and startled to get a visitor this late. I put on the “I’m so harmless” smile and asked for help.
American women like an accent. And an Irish accent, that’s usually a winner, the Irish being on the safe side of the exotic spectrum. So I channeled my father’s real voice—not the Hollywood-Dublin brogue that he used for the tourist trade, but the real O’Connor, the light leavening of Irish—and told the clerk a story about a son and a scrapbook and an imminent departure for college, and she grinned and printed out the pages and stuck them into a nice clean manila envelope.
I didn’t even want the damned thing. I just wanted to know how easy it would be to procure it. Too easy, that’s how.
But I could hardly toss it in the trashcan in the waiting room. I took it with me out to the car, dropped it on the passenger seat, and drove to a hotel by the highway. I watched CNN international news for an hour, noting with some bitterness all the stories that could have been mine if I hadn’t sold my soul to academia. Finally I opened the envelope and glanced through the pages.
They were scans of the original records, fuzzy and gray but readable.
I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to learn who brought her to the hospital— or if she came alone. I didn’t want to know how long her labor was, or whether she went for natural childbirth. I didn’t want to know whether she’d had the baby in the room with her or left him in the nursery.
Instead I looked for . . . evidence. Of whatever. There was a notation that she’d paid two thousand dollars in cash upon admittance. No comment on the oddness of that. Perhaps it wasn’t so odd here in the hills, where people kept their life savings in the most liquid form— cash hidden somewhere safe.
She’d signed the admittance form Ellen Wakefield, making an effort to imitate Ellen’s signature.
I slid the pages back into the envelope, and went to the back of the jeep, jamming the envelope under the tire iron. I was feeling sick. I’d gotten these records. The boy could too. Ellen could get it without ever resorting to a direct lie— this was supposedly her medical record, after all. And it would take her only a couple minutes to puzzle it out—
But they weren’t here in this Pennsylvania hill town, not my wife, not my . . . son. And maybe they’d never think to come.
There was no reason, given prior experience, to imagine I’d be that lucky.
I had another day to waste, and nowhere to go. So I stayed in the hotel room until just before checkout. Atlantic had emailed me the copy edits for a short piece I’d done on the origins of the radical right in France, and I spent a relatively pleasant half hour at the laptop writing up my arguments for retaining the three commas the butcher aka copy editor had removed. One thing I cherish about print journalism is the punctuation debates. No one in broadcast news gives a damn about commas. (And don’t get me started on Brian William’s antipathy towards true sentence predicates: “Another battle shaping up in the South Carolina primary. Three well-funded candidates appealing to disparate factions of the party.”)
Finally I turned the room key in and headed north. Time to kill, might as well.
I reached Williamsport around dinnertime, and stopped at an old Victorian mansion turned restaurant for a steak. The town was pretty in that It’s a Wonderful Life stage-set sort of way— wide streets and big old robber-baron mansions in one part of town, and little brick and frame bungalows across the tracks. The Little League stadium was an absurdly large monument to pushy parenthood. Not enough for kids to play stickball in the street—no, they had to be organized and coached and trained into teams and leagues and tournament champions. (Okay, so my plans for my daughter’s soccer scholarship started back when she first smashed a ball at the age of two-and-a-half . . . but seeing an institution devoted to such ambition made me question my motivation.)
There was a game going on under the overcast evening sky, two teams of fourth- or fifth-graders dwarfed by the big field, their parents scattered in the stands. I got out of my car and walked to the fence, watching the pitcher wind up. She was a little girl with a ponytail sticking out of the back of her cap and a fierce look on her face. Sarah always looked like that before she laid into a penalty kick, her little face scrunched up in a scowl.
In the distant hills, there was a rumble of thunder, and the coach in the dugout looked up. “Game called!” the umpire shouted. The parents rose like good soldiers and started packing up their picnic baskets and folding their blankets. A few of the kids protested, but trooped off after their coach, heading home to beat the storm.
I went back to the car and sat in the driver’s seat, my legs out the open door, my feet planted on the gravel parking lot. I waited until all the cars pulled away and the first big drops of rain came down, splashing on my knees. Then I opened the envelope again and withdrew a single sheet— the scan of the boy’s tiny footprints. In the corner was an indistinct copy of a photo— the birth photo, the black mark of a paperclip visible at the top.
Ellen said he looked like me.
I didn’t see it. But then, Sarah looked like Ellen, and Ellen never saw it. She’d say, “No, Sarah looks like Laura,” which pleased Sarah no end, to be compared to her famous aunt. Laura and Ellen looked like sisters, of course, but still Ellen couldn’t see herself in Sarah.
I stared down at the picture. This baby looked like a baby. He also looked a bit like my little brother Patrick when he was a baby.
Okay. Patrick and I had always looked alike. Perforce, this baby looked like me.
There was none of her there I could see, and that was a relief.
I shoved it all back into the envelope and started up the car.
It took a moment to connect the laptop to my cell phone and start up the browser, but soon I had the boy’s address and a helpful little map. He lived over on the robber-baron side of town, but in a new development, in a big brick house on a small lot, squeezed in between two equally imposing demi-mansions. Through the rain-drenched windshield, I could see a Mercedes in the driveway. A husky boy in shorts and no shirt was out in the rain, hauling in the porch furniture. From the disgruntled look on his face, I imagined he was cursing
the absent brother who wasn’t there to help.
He wasn’t poor then, this Brian. His father was probably an attorney or an accountant, his mother some similar profession, nice stable people in a nice stable town.
He should count himself lucky. Sarah had never lived in a brand-new house in a brand-new development with a pool and tennis courts.
I put the car back in gear and drove to a liquor store, got a fifth of Bushmills, and took a room in some anonymous motel off the highway. I could not envision how this could turn out to be anything but a disaster. Even once I’d finished a quarter of the bottle, I couldn’t come up with any plan. What did I know? That the medical records were available to anyone with a clever line. That the boy was persistent and unpleasant. That Ellen was regarding my withholding of information as a flat-out lifelong lie. That Sarah’s life was going to change, one way or another, along with her belief in me . . .
I could make separate peace with Brian. Swear him to silence, then tell him the truth. But he wouldn’t be able to keep that promise. He was nineteen. He wanted more than a name. He wanted an identity. He was longing for life meaning just as I was, my eighteenth summer, when I decided I was Irish, goddamnit, and went back to Kerry to live with my mother and brother and . . . well, be Irish. A month in the poorest nation in Western Europe, a month with no McDonalds, only two radio stations (one all religious music, the other Gaelic-language), two TV stations with no MTV, and a mother who expected me to kneel and say the rosary every night, taught me that my identity was that of an urban American teenager. I came home to DC and promptly filed for US citizenship.
Somehow I thought that lesson would be lost on this kid.
So maybe I could confess all to all. Shut the kid up, shut everyone up. But that looked to be even worse a disaster. The truth would hurt Ellen more than the lie did.
The year She Fell Page 23