Of course I so wanted to believe the first scenario – the devoted couple for over sixty years. Of course I knew that this was the stuff of fantasy – that no relationship of such calendric magnitude could have been one long love song from the outset. But how we so want to buy into that fairy tale and how we always wonder if conjugal happiness is just outside our reach.
I checked my watch: 1:18. I was now three minutes late – and Beacon Street was . . . where, exactly? I asked someone for directions. He pointed me towards the State House on a raised piece of land just above the Common, and told me to turn left when I reached it.
‘Beacon Street is the first big one you come to,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it. And I’m sure whoever is waiting for you will wait for you.’
I couldn’t help but smile – but I was still late, and I really didn’t want to have Richard thinking: So she’s the sort of woman who plays games by keeping a guy waiting.
But would he really think that? And why was I thinking that?
I reached the Beacon Street Hotel at 1:27, twelve minutes late. The bistro was on the street level. It looked stylish, chic. Richard was already there, seated in a booth in a far corner. I could see he was dressed in his idea of casual: a blue button-down shirt, a zip-up navy blue jacket, khakis. I suddenly felt silly about my Parisian boho look. He was hunched over his BlackBerry, tapping out a message with ferocious concentration. From the expression on his face, he was clearly disconcerted by something.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said as I reached the booth. Instantly Richard stood up, trying to put a smile on his face. ‘I misjudged the travel time and—’
‘No need to apologize,’ he said, motioning me to sit down. ‘In fact it’s me who should be apologizing. I might have to cut this lunch short.’
‘Oh,’ I said, trying to mask my disappointment. ‘Has something come up?’
I could see his lips tightening. He hit the off button on his BlackBerry and shoved it away from him, as if it was the harbinger of bad things.
‘Yeah, something kind of—’
But he cut himself off, forcing himself to look cheery.
‘Not worth ruining lunch over. I don’t know about you, but I could truly use a bloody mary.’
‘I wouldn’t say no to one.’
‘I wouldn’t say no to two.’
He motioned to the waiter – and put in the order for the drinks.
When the waiter was gone I could see that Richard had already reached for the napkin on the table and was twisting it between his hands – something I repeatedly did whenever I was feeling unsettled.
‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Am I that obvious?’
‘You’re that distressed.’
‘Distressed, discomposed, disconcerted . . .’
‘Vexed. And now I know you too are a walking thesaurus.’
A small, sad smile from Richard.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I really didn’t want to even talk about . . .’
I reached over and lightly touched his arm. It was a gesture that couldn’t have lasted for more than a moment. But from the way he took a deep intake of breath when my fingers landed on his jacket . . . well, I couldn’t help but wonder when anyone had last touched him in such a reassuring way.
‘Tell me, Richard.’
He lowered his gaze from me, staring down at the varnished wood tabletop between us. Then, without looking back up in my direction, he said:
‘I lied to you about something.’
‘OK,’ I said, trying to maintain a neutral tone, and stopping myself from feeling distressed, discomposed, disconcerted. After all, this was a man I had spent all of two and a half hours with before now. A passing acquaintance. Nothing more. So why was he admitting that he’d already fabricated something?
‘My son, Billy,’ he finally said, still keeping his gaze downward.
‘Has something happened to him?’
He nodded.
‘Something serious?’ I asked.
He nodded again. Then:
‘When I told you he was living at home I wasn’t telling you the truth. Billy’s been in the psychiatric wing of the state prison for just under two years. I just found out they’ve put him in solitary confinement because he tried to stab a fellow inmate last night. It’s the third time he’s been in solitary in the past eighteen months. And as the prison psychiatrist just told me: “I can’t see him being let out of solitary for the foreseeable future.”’
Silence. I placed my hand again on Richard’s arm.
‘I don’t know what to say except, that is truly terrible.’
‘That it is,’ he said. ‘The end of hope.’
‘Don’t say that. There’s always hope.’
Now he looked up at me directly.
‘Do you really believe that?’
It was my turn to look away.
‘No,’ I finally said.
Two
‘HE WAS DIAGNOSED as bipolar when he was nineteen.’
The bloody marys had just arrived. Though Richard had been, after the initial revelation, reluctant to say anything more about his son (‘I don’t want to bore you with my troubles’), I gently insisted that he tell me all. A sip of his drink. Another long, tense stare at the tabletop, during which I could see him weighing up whether he could spill this story. I squeezed his arm tighter. He covered my hand with his for a moment, then reached for his drink and (in doing so) pulled his arm gently away. A second long sip, and I could see the slightest of twitches as the vodka worked its way into his system. Then:
‘We knew, from an early age, that Billy was not a normal kid. Withdrawn. Always keeping to himself. Secretive – or, at least, that’s how I saw it. Then there were the moments when everything came right with him – when, out of nowhere, he would suddenly become hyper-animated and wildly outgoing. A little too outgoing, if you ask my opinion. But after the episodes of sullenness, of being so shut off, so solipsistic . . .’
Lovely word, I thought. As if reading my thoughts, Richard raised his eyebrows for a moment after he uttered it. I smiled back. Richard continued on:
‘We were both so happy when he had these periods of apparent high spirits. Especially as he spent so much of his adolescence keeping to himself. At the local high school in Bath, he was always regarded as the class weirdo. The school psychologist ran tests on him and felt that he had some “issues”. And he sent him to a therapist for a while, though Muriel – that’s my wife – was against it all.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Muriel is very much someone who believes that “mind stuff” – as she calls it – is a sign of weakness. I guess that kind of comes with her childhood territory. She was raised down in Dorchester, where her dad was the ultimate in tough-guy Irish American cops. A drinker, of course – and someone who regularly used his wife as a punchbag. Eventually Muriel’s mom could take no more. As she herself was raised in Lewiston, back she and Muriel and her two brothers went to the family home when Muriel was just twelve. She never saw her father again. He decided that, by following their mother back to Maine, all the children had rejected him. So he shut them out of his life until the bottle finally killed his liver five years later . . . and that’s all far too much detail, isn’t it?’
‘It’s interesting detail,’ I said.
‘You’re not saying that to be nice, are you?’
‘I’m saying that because I want to hear the story. Your story. How did you meet Muriel?’
‘My dad hired her as his secretary.’
‘When was that?’
‘Late 1981. She’d been to secretarial school in Portland and had been married briefly to a cop . . .’
‘History repeats itself.’
‘Especially Freudian history. But that’s another story, me and Muriel.’
‘Just the one child?’
‘She’d had around three miscarriages before Billy. So we both considered him our great gift, our recompense f
or all the grief that the three failed pregnancies had caused. But when Billy finally arrived, Muriel was thirty-six, which is not an old age now for a first-time mother, but in those days was regarded as pretty darn late. From the outset, though Muriel did all the right things when it came to looking after Billy, I always had the sense that she hadn’t ever bonded really with the boy, that there was a part of her that always sensed he was so different from the start.’
‘Did he hit all the usual developmental marks?’
‘Absolutely. And when he had some of those early aptitude tests he was shown to be off-the-scales bright. Especially when it came to math. That was always his great saving grace throughout school – the fact that, when it came to all things mathematical, he was a wizard. I remember getting a call from his tenth grade calculus teacher – I think his name was Mr Pawling – asking me to come in, and him telling me that Billy had the most gifted theoretical mind he’d encountered in twenty-five years of teaching, and would I agree to extra tutoring after school, and enrollment that summer in an intensive math camp that was held at MIT, of all places. Muriel felt it was all too much – ‘What’s he going to do at a math camp except become more withdrawn?’ was how she saw things. But I argued that his was a great gift that we needed to encourage, and that math really could be a way out of the isolation and loneliness that had categorized his life so far. The way I figured it, once he got to that math camp at MIT he’d be with like-minded kids – what Billy himself called “us numbers geeks”, and of which there were none at Bath High School. Muriel also complained about the cost of it all – almost three thousand dollars, which was a stretch for us back then, despite the good times. Still, I prevailed. Billy went to MIT Math Camp. For the first two weeks he seemed so incredibly happy. Loved the professors. Loved his fellow math whizzes. I even dropped in on him after ten days. I had never seen him so focussed, so at ease with himself and his surroundings. And this professor who was teaching Lambda Calculus – I had to look up what that meant – took me aside and told me that he was going to put a word in with the admissions department about getting Billy fast-tracked for entry into MIT the following autumn.
‘I drove back to Bath elated. My son the math genius. My son the future math professor at MIT or Harvard or Chicago. My son the Nobel Laureate. And yes, I know this was all the stuff of pipe dreams. But what this professor was saying to me really made it seem like Billy could do it all.
‘And then, five days later, we got a phone call from MIT. Billy had tried to set fire to the sheets and mattress in his dorm room. Fortunately there was a fast-thinking proctor down the hall. He smelled smoke. He got a fire extinguisher and put the flames out. But Billy had caused several thousand dollars’ worth of damage. When he admitted that he’d started the fire himself he was expelled on the spot.
‘Of course I was devastated by what had happened. What devastated me more was the fact that, when I came to pick Billy up, he wouldn’t talk about what happened.
‘“Guess I just wanted to screw up,”’ was all he said.
‘When he repeated that statement to his mother she wanted him committed to the nearest insane asylum. Then again they hadn’t been getting along for years. Billy knew that his mother considered him nothing less than strange and different. Muriel has never been comfortable with anything or anyone outside of her comfort zone. She hates to travel. She’s only been out of Maine twice in the last five years – and that was owing to family funerals in Massachusetts. And she can’t really cope with her brilliantly gifted, but truly eccentric son. I’ve tried repeatedly to talk with her about all that – and tried to get her to show some empathy towards the boy. But when Muriel has decided that somebody is bad news, that’s that.’
He broke off the sentence, reaching again for the bloody mary. I too took a long sip of my drink, my mind now endeavoring to work out the complex contours of Richard’s marriage. From the way he was reporting things, Muriel sounded cold, judgmental, emotionally detached. But was I thinking that because I could see the immense distress that her husband was embroiled in right now?
‘We all have our private griefs, don’t we?’ he said. ‘And I certainly didn’t want to go upending our lunch with—’
‘Do not apologize. What has happened to your son is so evidently huge and terrible . . .’
‘What has happened to my son?’ he said, his voice just above a whisper. ‘You make it sound as if all this was visited upon him. Whereas the truth is . . . he visited it all upon himself.’
‘But you said he was bipolar. And if you are bipolar—’
‘I know, I know. And you’re right. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Muriel threw that line from Luke at me when I tried to explain away Billy’s behavior after getting expelled from the MIT Math Camp. “Making excuses for him as usual. You should march him down to the nearest Marine Corps recruiting office and get him signed up. Three months of basic training at Parris Island will knock all that craziness out of him.”
‘Now I know that all makes Muriel sound rather extreme. But the truth is, when I brought Billy home from MIT and he refused to talk with her, I woke around three in the morning to find Muriel sitting in a chair by the window in our bedroom, crying uncontrollably. When I tried to comfort her she told me that she blamed herself for so much that had befallen Billy. “I know I’ve been a bad mother. I know I’ve never given him the love he needs.” And it was wonderful hearing that. Because she had articulated a certain truth that I was always afraid of discussing with her.’
But why were you afraid? I stopped myself from posing that question. Because I knew just how much of a long, difficult marriage is often based around sidestepping so many painfully evident truths, and how we all are afraid of opening up the sort of conversations that can lead us into the darker, distressed recesses of the lives we have created for ourselves.
‘I’ve always hated myself for not confronting her about the antipathy that she felt towards our son. And the way she was incapable of showing any nurturing affection.’
‘Towards him and towards you?’ I asked.
I could see Richard tense, and silently cursed myself for overstepping a mark.
‘Sorry, sorry, that was an inappropriate question,’ I said.
He took another sip of his drink.
‘Actually, it was a perfectly appropriate question. And one which I think you already know the answer to.’
Silence. I broke it.
‘So after the MIT Math Camp . . . did he get help?’
‘Naturally I got the school therapist immediately involved. She was a very nice woman, if something of a lightweight who talked all this touchy-feely stuff, but was very out of her depth when it came to dealing with the clinical reasons why Billy had done something so destructive, so calamitous. She did send him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed depression and put him on Valium. A reasonable year followed. He saw the psychiatrist once a week. The medication seemed to be working. Billy finished his senior year in high school. He scored high on his SATs – including a 750 in math. The incident at MIT was in the past. I paid the four thousand dollars in damages. They never pressed charges, so there was no record against Billy. Several colleges were seriously interested in him – including Chicago and Cornell. Another great triumph happened when CalTech came through with a complete four-year scholarship. CalTech! Billy was thrilled. I was thrilled. Even his mother was truly chuffed that her boy got into one of the world’s great science and math schools. The thing was, Billy was going out with a girl from his class. Mary Tracey. Lovely young woman. Quite the chemistry whizz. And she seemed to really understand our quirky son. She’d even gotten accepted on full scholarship to Stanford. It all looked so good.
‘Then, around three weeks before his high school graduation, he disappeared. Vanished completely. The local and state police were involved. His photo was in all the papers and on all Maine news bulletins. The fact that he had taken Muriel’s car and stolen her ATM card – he knew
her PIN number because she’d asked him to get money out on occasion – well, naturally, this was serious stuff. The bank informed us that he’d only made one withdrawal of three hundred dollars on the day of his disappearance. We didn’t stop the card because, as the police advised us, they’d be able to easily track his whereabouts. But after that first withdrawal, nothing. No sign of him anywhere. The trail had gone cold. And I couldn’t help but fear the worst: that he’d taken his own life.
‘But then, eight days after he’d disappeared – eight days during which I had maybe slept three hours a night – we got a phone call at around four in the morning from our local police captain, Dwight Petrie. Bath’s a small town. Dwight and I had gone to high school together. His father had been in the police force. My dad had insured their family house and cars. Dwight came to me for all that when he got married and started a family. He was the only friend I confided in about the business at MIT. He was one of the few people I could trust to keep a secret. The fact is, the MIT business was kept pretty hush-hush. Billy’s disappearance, on the other hand, was big local news – and somehow word got out about Billy’s MIT business. I’m pretty damn certain it was a parent of one of Billy’s classmates. Her son was also at the same math camp, but he’d been passed over by CalTech and everywhere for scholarship. This woman – her name was Margaret Mallon – went around telling everybody that it was absurd that “that little freak Billy Copeland gets all the scholarships” and her boy got nothing. It was Dwight Petrie who told me she’d been overheard saying that. Being a police captain, Dwight never repeats anything incriminating unless he’s received it from impeccable sources. Next thing we know that too got into the newspapers. And the world being so linked now by Google and Yahoo, naturally someone in the admissions office at CalTech flagged it. The college guidance counselor at Bath High then got a call from the director of admissions at CalTech, demanding to know why the school had concealed Billy’s expulsion. The Bath college guidance counselor told him this was the first he had heard of it. Which meant that Muriel and I were asked to come into the principal’s office and were essentially carpeted for concealing this “felony”, as the principal put it. I tried to explain that, since the matter wasn’t reported to the police and it was all privately settled between ourselves and MIT, we didn’t feel it essential to “share” this information with the school. I knew this sounded lame – and that we were essentially guilty of a cover-up.’
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