Nothing Lost

by John Gregory Dunne

  I never knew my mother. She worked for a while in Europe, and then she disappeared for nearly forty years until Jack—dear, dear Jack—found her quite by accident in Detroit, and although he patiently dug into her past, and pieced together my identity and that of my adoptive parents, he refused to engage in any public or private discussion about these discoveries or about my mother’s subsequent gruesomely unpleasant death (she was crushed under the wheels of an eighteen-wheel refrigerator rig), which may have been suicide or, equally possible, the result of a final descent into madness. Daddy—my adoptive father, Brendan Kean—knew my real father even before Jacob King met my real mother. Brendan Kean was a former homicide prosecutor in Queens turned criminal defense attorney in private practice, and in 1947, in Department 50, the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Centre Street, he defended Jacob King on a charge of first-degree murder, a murder he almost certainly committed, and won him an acquittal. The not-guilty verdict was a significant reason why Jacob King left New York for California, where he took up with my mother, so it might be argued that Brendan Kean played a crucial, if unintentional, role in charting the destiny of my parents, and I suppose mine too.

  Daddy always insisted that he did not know the identity of my birth parents (I hate that phrase; it is so clinical and professional, so absent the tears and feelings that scald relationships), but he was no less dogged than Jack. Given Daddy’s background as both prosecutor and defense counsel in the city’s five boroughs, and the concomitant network of allegiances he had built up in the criminal and civil bar, it is not a leap to suppose that he made discreet inquiries, probate searches in the records of the Manhattan Surrogate Court, and educated guesses that supplied enough circumstantial evidence for him to intuit who my natural parents were, at the very least to an indisputable level of probability. The measure of Brendan Kean, and of his ability to keep his own counsel, is that he never imparted any of this information, or speculation, to me.

  He and my mother, Moira Twomey Kean, were childless, but I suspect it was Daddy’s successful representation of Jacob King, coupled with his professional ability to sidestep unnecessary and perhaps troubling legal and moral questions, that ultimately led Blue Tyler’s advisors and the ex-officio executors of Jacob King’s affairs (some, perhaps even most, it is safe to surmise, on the shady side of the law), acting in concert, to offer Brendan and Moira Kean the opportunity to adopt the six-pound-thirteen-ounce daughter they named Teresa. Daddy, in his seventies, was still vigorously practicing when he died in a small plane crash on the way to his summer house on that stretch of the Jersey shore called the Irish Riviera; at Manhattan Federal Court, on the Wednesday morning he was killed, he had an insider trading case dismissed for official misconduct, and decided to fly down to Mantoloking and spend the rest of the week celebrating with my mother. She now lives in a retirement community in northern Virginia, drifting in and out of Alzheimer’s. I regularly send her gifts—fruit baskets, expensive chocolates, Pratesi robes, even electronic gadgets I know she cannot possibly master, like an eight-band shortwave radio or a five-inch color television that she can perch on her lap—to paper over my guilt for not going to see her more regularly, since more often than not she does not recognize me. Yet occasionally she flashes like a lightbulb before its filament burns out, and I receive a note in her spidery arthritic hand. Dear Teresa Kean is always the salutation on these communiqués, as if she corresponded with more than one Teresa.

  Here is an example:

  Dear Teresa Kean,

  God bless you for sending the toy television set. It is so cute. I watched a show yesterday about a lawyer, and I thought about your dear father and my dear husband Brendan. I don’t know if you knew he was a lawyer, but he was, Brendan Kean, Attorney-at-Law. Mrs. Eisenhower in the next room is 85 years of age, and since she came here five years ago, she has always had a TV, a color model. I do not know why she calls herself Eisenhower, because I know for a fact that she was not married to the general. She has such airs, like she was. In all those five years, she never invited me once into her room to look at her color TV. Yesterday her color TV fell to the floor and broke. It made a terrible noise, and it made her very sad. She knocked on my door and she asked if she could come into my room and look at the toy TV you sent me, and I said, Fuck you.

  Your loving mother,

  Moira Twomey Kean

  My father was Queens born and bred, having worked his way up the social ladder from the top floor of an underheated three-family house in Ozone Park, with grottoes to the Immaculate Heart on every balcony, to a community in Forest Hills Gardens with lawns and a twenty-four-hour private security patrol in unmarked cars, and every summer the house in Mantoloking. His father, my grandfather, was a bus driver for the Transit Authority and on election days stuffed ballot boxes for the Queens Democratic Party, purely as a precaution, according to Daddy, and not because they needed to be stuffed. He died when my father was ten. Daddy called Manhattan “the city” and the subway “the train,” and every morning he took the E-train from Continental Avenue to his law office and the courthouses downtown, returning from the Chambers Street station on the E-train back to Forest Hills every evening. Playing hockey in the seventh grade at St. Cyril’s in Ozone Park, he had his features rearranged by a hockey puck that flattened his nose and gave him the look of a man who in a fight would come after you with a beer bottle in his hand. Belligerence came naturally to him and revealed itself in the most unexpected way. He hated the pageantry of police funerals, to which he had often been summoned when he was a prosecutor, hated even more the skirl of bagpipes that attended the deceased and had the same effect on him as fingernails scraping down a blackboard. It’s just a photo op so the mayor and the commissioner can throw their arms around the grieving widow and get their pictures in the News, he would tell me. Christ, just once I’d like some cop widow to say, Blow it out your ass, Mr. Mayor, I don’t want you or your bagpipes here when I plant Sean, he got on top of me six times in eleven years, that’s the five girls and Sean, Jr., who’s slow.

  Daddy went to mass every Sunday at St. Pius V in Forest Hills, and smoked outside, winter and summer, one unfiltered Camel after another, never entering the church, waiting there until the service was over and my mother appeared clutching the Sunday announcements. He was thirty years into his marriage before he learned that Moira Kean believed in God no more than he. “You never asked,” my mother said when he wondered why she had never told him. And he never had. It was the kind of mistake he never would make in the courtroom, and perhaps indicated the state of their marriage. And yet as far as I know, he was faithful to her, I would guess out of some residual parochial-school training. (That she might have been unfaithful to him was beyond my powers of invention.) I knew there were women within the legal system who were attracted to him, but outside of a smile and an Irish joke, he would never return the signals he must have received.

  I was divorced twice before I was twenty-six. My first wedding took place the week before I graduated from Smith, three months pregnant; the marriage lasted until I miscarried. The name of the impregnator was Chipper, which says more than needs to be said about that liaison. My second husband was Furlong Budd Doheny, called Budd—the Furlongs, the Budds, and the Dohenys on his side of the marriage bed all vying for which was the richest entity. Budd Doheny’s only real skills were sailing, skiing, and screwing, and with his access to the multiple family fortunes, he was never out of season and rarely out of bed. Sex with him was, more often than I care to remember, a group production, with many of its moments captured on film, both still and video, all of which he carefully catalogued. Budd’s powers of invention seldom waned— he was the only person I was ever aware of who used vanilla extract as a sex aid—I will leave it to your imagination where he applied it on his person—but in time the appeal of esoteric erotica paled (to this day I detest the taste of vanilla and the smell of vanilla beans), and we went our separate ways more or less amicably, in large part because in the
divorce I made no claim on the vast resources of the Furlongs, the Budds, or the Dohenys. A few years and several wives later, Budd Doheny drowned in a one-man-one-boat ocean race, the victim of rogue waves and 60-knot winds somewhere in the rolling Tasman deep between Auckland and Hobart (his bodily remains were lashed to his splintered mainmast when the wreckage of his capsized boat was finally discovered after the freakish winds calmed). My mourning for him was perfunctory, but I confess to wondering occasionally, as middle age and the decorum attendant to it make their inroads, about the disposition of his catalogue of film and photographic erotica, or at least that part of it in which I might appear.

  After my second divorce, I applied to Yale Law School, and when I graduated, I passed the bar and went to work with my father (although I chose to live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and not in Queens). Criminal law suited me, as it suited him. I was good at it, and in and out of court he was both mentor and unruffled presence at my side. The first thing he taught me was never try to convince myself that a client was innocent, it only messes you up and makes you a bad lawyer. If a client turns out to be innocent, that’s a bonus: just don’t count on it, he probably did something worse: a courtroom’s not a cathedral and you’re not the coadjutor bishop. He was comfortable with the criminal attorney’s code. When the facts are against you, he said, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; when both are against you, attack the other side. Murder and the more egregious violations of the penal code did not usually attract high-powered attorneys. The reason is simple: There is not that much money in it. Outside of mystery novels, criminal defendants are rarely propertied; they tend to live on the frayed margins of society, and often do not speak the language of the courts where their cases are heard. However often they invoke the right of every defendant to have an attorney, good lawyers, as opposed to the incompetents and the shysters, tend to avoid this redlined legal zip code unless, like my father, they enjoy the game. The odds are against them. In the interest of what they call “justice,” D.A.’s really do think that defense lawyers should calibrate the vigor of their argument to the larger societal need of putting perps behind bars. Whatever their public position, prosecutors seem to regard the presumption of innocence as a kind of devil worship, and reasonable doubt as justice not served. I never asked, but I would have bet that even my father worked that side of the street when he was in the Queens D.A.’s office. The law is situational, he liked to say.

  The second thing Daddy taught me was that defense attorneys do not win cases so much as prosecutors lose them. What a good defense attorney does is exploit error, because running beneath prosecutorial error is a filigree of reasonable doubt. Innocence need not be proven; guilt does. For eight years we prospered, but when he died, Kean & Kean and the prospect of continuing as a solo practitioner lost its attractiveness. At the first opportunity, I dissolved the firm and moved to Washington as an advocate for an organization lobbying on behalf of victims’ rights. It was called, with a noticeable absence of imagination, Justice for All, and in time I became its president and public spokesperson on chat shows and at seminars, luncheons, conferences, and every kind of public forum. Jack said my involvement was not without irony, considering Jacob King’s propensity for making victims. He said that during the twelve hours I knew him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAX

  It seemed a kind of exorcism, a way to distance herself from her DNA. Her sense of privacy was so acute that I can’t imagine that she ever planned for anyone to see it. Certainly not me, who professed to be her friend. I showed this bit to Stanley (remember Stanley Poindexter, M.D., my psychiatrist companion, partner, or what have you, each term worse than the next), and Stanley said it was a kind of computer therapy, a way to own up to one’s life without having to face a therapist’s questions. Like all shrinks, Stanley thinks he has an answer for every eventuality, which is horseshit, of course. Was there any more, he wanted to know, and I said no, although I don’t think he believed me, rightly enough. What was there was not mine to share, and so I told him there was just the usual sediment one finds in every computer: a telephone directory, an appointment calendar, e-mails, search engines, news sites, The New York Times, Navigator, penal and civil codes in all fifty states, the judiciary and elected officials in those same fifty states, a militia website (interesting!), websites for the FBI, the CIA, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other agencies, the U.S. Constitution, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare (I would guess for a handy quote), a dozen daily newspapers, too many magazines, the Internet Movie Database, MovieLink—Search by Theater, music sites, shopping (the e-mail addresses and 800 numbers of the usual stores—Saks, Armani: You name it, she had it, including her personal shoppers), et cetera and so forth.

  Her word processing files were not much more interesting. Speeches (a commencement address at Smith, a luncheon talk to the American Bar Association, essentially one canned talk configured to fit the audience at hand), case files, trial transcripts, a file (actually dossiers) on people she would guest with on talk shows, seminars, and panel discussions— their quirks, C.V.’s, legislation they had sponsored or supported, personal and political antipathies (her folder on Poppy McClure had the cream cheese story; she was Brian Lamb’s guest the next night, it turned out, and the show staff whispered the details to her, or as much as they thought they knew or could make up, including the firing of the leggy P.A.), guest lists for parties and official events, travel plans, household repairs and renovations (including letters threatening contractors with legal action, scary and very well done, quoting the appropriate district statutes and clauses in the construction contracts), and recipes.

  Recipes.

  Nothing wrong with that. Except. The entrance to her RECIPES folder was blocked by a password. Nothing else on the computer was, not the e-mails, the case files, or her mini-dossiers. Why? She did not wish to share her recipes for navarin or albóndigas or chartreuse of pheasant?

  I don’t think so.

  That was the old prosecutor in me. What could be blander than RECIPES? A folder one would normally slide right by.

  Breaking the password was not especially difficult. It never is. I went to her entry in Who’s Who. Lawyer. Advocate. Born Forest Hills, Queens, N.Y. (no DOB, I noticed); d. Brendan and Moira Kean (Twomey); B.A. Smith College, 1980; m. Roger Chipworth, May 25, 1980 (div.), m. Furlong B. Doheny, April 17, 1982 (dec.).

  NORTHAMPTON did it.

  Of course I already knew, by the time I got into Teresa’s computer, most of the personal information buried in RECIPES. It had been massaged and distorted through the great American publicity machine, turning Teresa into what I knew was her worst nightmare, a fifteen-minute celebrity.

  I think I knew her better than anyone (except perhaps Marty Buick), and I suppose I always loved her, not enough to make me go straight, but in the way a queer can love a woman, by understanding and appreciating without all the collateral damage of sex. What I didn’t know, until I cracked the password into RECIPES, was how she felt about the step-by-step chain of events that led her inexorably into my life. So forgive me if I take the liberty of casting the links of that chain of events in Teresa’s voice.

  It begins at the White House.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Teresa’s voice: I remember every moment of my time with Jack.

  We met at the president’s annual black-tie dinner for the justices of the Supreme Court. I was sitting at the attorney general’s table. I can’t say that Margaret Dudley and I were friends, but she was an imposing woman with whom, in my capacity as president of Justice for All, I had often appeared on the Sunday shows, and at her urging I had testified before both the House and the Senate judiciary committees on behalf of a victims’ rights bill the administration was sponsoring, a bill that was constitutionally suspect but which, in an election year, of course passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and was signed into law. White House dinners were usually a trial, with bad
food geographically allocated and elaborately explained on individual menus written in a calligrapher’s script—Chesapeake Bay Crab Mousse, Bow Tie Louisiana Gruyère Twists, Medallion of Veal in Napa Valley Champagne, Gnocchi à la Chicago, Turban of California Carrots with Oregon Yellow Squash, Pennsylvania Nasturtium Flower Salad, Ohio Brie Cheese with Mississippi Almonds, Vermont Caramel, Petits Fours Sec, a Washington State Merlot, a New York State Zinfandel, and an Arizona Grappa. The guest list was the usual assortment of campaign contributors and congressional pirates seeking favors and who, in turn, when said favors (a dam or a submarine base) were granted, would, as a quid pro quo, provide favors by way of votes or campaign contributions, or so the president hoped. At my table, besides the attorney general, there was the governor of Massachusetts, a pontificating CEO, an airhead from the Senate Judiciary Committee, assorted spouses and consorts, and John Broderick. He was seated across the table from me, and I overheard him tell the wife of a black appellate judge from Missouri that it was the first time he had been at the White House since his brother worked there as an advisor to former President Frederick Finn. I of course knew who he was. His late father was a famously blunt and famously randy billionaire with the manners, it was said, of a tire iron; his brother, the presidential advisor, a Benedictine priest who was assassinated by a crazed schizophrenic in San Francisco along with John Broderick’s first wife, Leah, a noted radical criminal attorney. His second wife was an immensely rich collector of husbands, his third wife was killed in an automobile accident, he had written a number of movies and two books, and in spite of considerable pressure he had never revealed what he had learned about Blue Tyler and Jacob King. He had a disconcerting stare that I found focused on me whenever I looked up during dinner.