Everyone laughed. I know, objectively, that it wasn’t true—Howard Stern laughed. Jay Leno laughed. Not everyone. But it felt that way. I wondered, later, if any of those people, the DJs and the late-night joke writers, ever thought to ask whether the person they were mocking had kids, and how those kids might have felt, hearing the jokes.
As hard as it had been to start the conversation, as little as I enjoyed using the phrases “my father” and “scrotum” in the same sentence, I felt like I had to tell Adam what the situation was and try to explain how far down my father’s life had spiraled. Before we got married, I had to try to make him understand the truth of where I had come from, but in spite of my best efforts I wasn’t sure he ever really got it. So he’s difficult, Adam would say, and I’d say, No, it’s a little worse than that.
• • •
Good in Bed came out in May 2001. Three days after its release, I was driving myself home from a bookstore event when my publicist called. “I got a phone call from someone who said he was a friend of your father’s. He asked you to call him right away.”
By then, it had been a year since the Father’s Day phone call. This couldn’t be good. I called my mother first. “Are you driving? Pull over,” she said. Then she told me that she and my dad had been in court again, and he had finally run into the wrong judge, a woman who looked at his bank statement, then looked at him, resplendent in his suit and his gold pinkie ring, and said, “You have enough money to fulfill your obligations,” and sent him to jail for violating the court’s orders to pay my mom.
“So he’s in jail?” I asked. I couldn’t quite believe it. There was still a father who lived in my head, and he was handsome and thoughtful and kind. He wasn’t the man who’d yelled at me, who’d slammed himself into my bedroom door, who’d called me fat and said no man would love me. He was the man in suits and ties, whose beard tickled my cheeks when he kissed me, the man who read to me at night. When I gave my mother the name of the person who’d called Simon & Schuster, she said he was a fellow physician, either a friend or someone who’d been treating my father or both, and that my dad was probably looking for money. I didn’t call, and I spent my book tour holding my breath, waiting for someone—some reporter or blogger—to find out this piece of my story. No one did—no one would write about it until years later, when the Inquirer put it in a profile—but it left me feeling like my first book’s publication, all that joy, was just another occasion my father had ruined.
• • •
After Adam and I got engaged and had set our date, I was determined to get our wedding announcement into the New York Times. If they printed the news of my nuptials, my father would see it or someone would show him, and he would know that I was successful—that I’d published a book, that a man loved me and wanted to be with me forever.
I wanted him to know how wrong he’d been, that I wasn’t a secretary, wasn’t a failure, wasn’t unlovable—but I was terrified of him finding out any details about the wedding. I thought he might try to show up and do or say something to embarrass me, that he would ruin it the way he’d ruined high school graduation and college graduation and a hundred days in between. On our wedding night we had an off-duty policeman in the crowd, watching for him. Something old, something new, I joked, as I gave the man a picture of my dad. Something borrowed, someone in blue.
My father didn’t come to Philadelphia. The announcement ran in the Times the next morning. It said that I was a daughter of Frances Frumin Weiner. It didn’t mention his name. My father is not in my life, I told the paper’s fact-checker when he called, who was kind when he asked me about it, and didn’t push, just inquired whether I was “the” daughter or “a” daughter. Did my father notice? Was he hurt? Was it what he’d expected from me?
• • •
A year and a half later, married and pregnant, I was back in Connecticut, giving a reading at a local bookstore. “There’s someone very special here to see you!” one of the staffers trilled as she led me from the offices in the back to the stage, and I wondered if it was a high school teacher or an old boyfriend. The first thing I saw was my mother at the back of the room, holding her tote bag with both hands, pressing it against her chest, looking pale and dismayed. In the front row, in a white suit, was a man with horn-rimmed glasses and a gray beard that fell to the middle of his chest. Next to him was a woman in her thirties, with tanned skin and dark hair, wearing cutoffs and a denim shirt tied at her midriff. She was dressed like she was ready to mow a lawn or go line dancing at a strip club, and she kept fidgeting in her seat, bouncing up and down, like she couldn’t hold still. She looked like an overgrown six-year-old. He looked deranged.
Numb and scared, I stumbled through my reading, hearing my voice like it was coming out of speakers, not my mouth, and then I made myself look into the audience. “Any questions?”
My father’s hand shot into the air. Without waiting to be called on, he jumped to his feet and, in a creaky, gravelly voice, launched into a screed about the nature of art. Didn’t I agree that great art came from pain and suffering? Wouldn’t I say that every artist owed a debt—of gratitude, at least, but possibly extending into the realm of the financial—to the people or person who had caused them to suffer and had, essentially, turned them into a painter or sculptor or poet or novelist?
I forced my frozen lips into a semblance of a smile. “Ladies and gentlemen, my dad,” I said. An uncomfortable murmur ran through the crowd—by then, some people had read Good in Bed, and knew about the awful father in that book, not-so-loosely based on my life. I was shooting Fran desperate, do-something looks, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to help. I couldn’t believe that the bookstore was letting this happen. Did the manager think this was some kind of stunt or part of the show? “And, for the record, I don’t think children are topiaries that you get to shape and clip and prune and cut . . .” I swallowed hard. I wanted to grab my book, turn around, and run. Except that wasn’t true. I wanted to throw the book, as hard as I could, right in his face, and then run. I didn’t want him hurting my baby, my still mostly theoretical baby. I wanted to hurt him before he had a chance, hurt him so that he’d know to stay away from me, from us.
Again, I made myself smile. “Anyone else?”
The cutoff lady bounced in her seat, waving her arm in the air. I ignored her. Someone asked me where I got my ideas. Someone else asked how I’d found my agent. I ignored my father’s hand in the air, ignored the woman beside him, wondered how many questions I’d have to get through before I could leave.
Then I had to sign books. My father and the woman stood at the end of the line, hanging back, clearly hoping to corner me. And do what? Ask more questions? Tell me that he’d hurt me on purpose, that he’d achieved what he’d set out to do, because look at me now? Would he ask for money again? Would he hand me a bill?
I don’t remember how I got out of there or what else he said to me before I left. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of Fran’s car, listening to my mother talk about how she hadn’t known what to do, or how to explain to the bookstore people what was going on, or if she should have called the cops. “He keeps guns in his car,” she said, and I laced my fingers across my belly and thought, He will never see this child. I will keep this baby safe.
In Los Angeles, with Phoebe in my arm, the second of my babies he would never see, the phone against my ear, I listened to the detective explain that an autopsy would be conducted to determine how my father had died, how that was standard procedure “in deaths of this nature.” She gave me the name of the girlfriend in whose apartment he’d been found. Her name was familiar. I remembered she was a middle-aged woman who’d shown up, years later, at a different reading in Connecticut, sitting in the front row with an odd, zealous glow in her eyes. Raising her hand and waving it until I’d called on her, she’d talked about how much In Her Shoes, with its message of forgiveness, had meant to her. Didn’t I think forgiveness was so beautiful? Shouldn’t we all forgive the p
eople who had wronged us? Later, she sent me a long e-mail. She said that she knew that my father and I had “fallen out of touch.” She said that she was his friend, and that she knew that he loved me, and how he needed my help and support—which, given that she hadn’t reached out to my siblings, I suspected meant money. I didn’t answer. I deleted her e-mail and tried to forget it. By then, all I wanted was for him to stay away.
In my hotel bedroom, I held Phoebe against my shoulder, patting her back until she burped. “Your grandfather died,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure I’d ever thought of my father as their grandfather, whether I’d ever used that word in connection to him before.
Then I left the bedroom and began to open the living-room shades. “Are you awake?” I called to Molly, a lump on the pullout couch. Before she could answer, I blurted, “Dad died.”
Molly rolled over, opening one eye. “You are the worst,” she said. “You have, like, the worst bedside manner ever. ‘Dad died,’ ” she repeated, deepening her voice to sound somber, the way I must have. “Well done, Jenny.”
We called Jake and Joe, and they came over—unshaven, wearing sunglasses, with Starbucks cups in a cardboard carrier. Molly grabbed a latte and began making fun of me—“Jenny has a terrible bedside manner. ‘Oh, are you awake? Dad died.’ ” It was funny and awful. It was all funny and awful until it was just awful, but on that first day, I remember the four of us laughing all the time, even if the laughter had an unpleasantly shrill edge, and the jokes weren’t all that funny.
I e-mailed my assistant, still asleep down the hall, and told her what had happened, and asked her to let the ABC people know when she woke up. I called my agent, who said, over and over, how sorry she was and asked, over and over, what she could do. I asked if she could start looking at flights to Connecticut for all of us. Then, on little squares of hotel stationery, I started making a list of what I’d have to do next.
I remembered—all four of us did—that our dad wanted to be buried in a veterans’ cemetery. The veterans’ hospital just over the Connecticut border in Holyoke, Massachusetts, had hedges out front that had been trimmed to spell the words SOLDIERS’ HOME. We would drive by it, on our way to or from skiing, or to Mount Tom and its famous alpine slide, and my dad would say, “That’s where I’m going to wind up.” But how did you go about getting someone buried there? Had my father made, what, a reservation?
I called Fran. She gave me my dad’s social security number, and then said to be sure that whoever I spoke to knew that she—not his second ex-wife, but his first—was entitled to the Social Security survivor benefits. “You make sure when you call the VA you tell them that I’m the widow.”
God bless Google, and the website it led me to, that spelled out the steps. Call the Department of Veteran Affairs. Call the police back to find out where the body was and when it might be released. Call the funeral home close to the veterans’ cemetery in Middletown, the closest one to where he’d died.
That last call didn’t go well. The woman who answered the phone was all sweet, sugary sympathy at first. Also, she kept calling my father “Dad.” “When did Dad die? Where is Dad now?” When I explained that Dad had died in his girlfriend’s apartment’s bathroom that morning, and that Dad was currently being held at the state medical examiner’s office, pending an autopsy, her voice got chilly. “We’re probably not equipped to handle a situation like this.”
I called another funeral home, a Jewish one in West Hartford. The man who answered talked in low-pitched, speedy bursts, like he’d been told to sell a certain number of coffins by the end of the day. Yes, his home would accept the body when it was released; yes, they’d do the traditional rituals. There would be someone to sit with the body the night before the service. The VA would pay for soldiers to play “Taps,” and a flag and a headstone. We had to pay for the plot, and the funeral home’s service, and the coffin.
I scribbled down notes, trying to ask the right questions and answer the ones he asked me. Would the family bring mementos for the casket? Who will get the flag that will drape the coffin? Who will get the shell casings, from after the twenty-one-gun salute?
I could figure all of that out, but the conversation came unpleasantly to a halt when he asked how many copies of the death certificate I’d need.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How many do people usually ask for?”
“He was a doctor, right? So he’ll have a business to close. Creditors to notify. He probably had bank accounts, investments . . .” This poor guy thought that this was a normal story; that he was burying a doctor with adult children, a responsible, professional citizen. I didn’t want to explain that he was burying a mentally ill, probably unemployed, completely unreliable, scary man who’d been in jail and in the newspapers, and had not lived a happy life and probably no longer had a 401(k).
We agreed on fifteen copies.
“At most Jewish funerals, Psalm Twenty-Three is traditional. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ ”
Green pastures, I thought. Quiet water. I could get behind that.
“It asks for forgiveness and compassion for a soul that’s about to ascend.”
“That sounds fine.”
“So he had, what, four kids?”
“Five. And four grandchildren, except he never met them.”
The director permitted the tiniest pause.
“You could say, that he shared life. That he nurtured life.”
And that he helped people, I said. Because he was a doctor, and, at one point, it was true.
We discussed the sound system, who would speak, and how many ex-wives would attend. He reminded me to bring a check the day of the funeral and then asked where he could fax the obituary form.
“No obituary,” I said. I could hear from his indrawn breath that he was surprised, but I didn’t know what I’d write, or if an obituary might occasion someone at a local paper to do a quick Internet search on my father’s name and add gossip or news coverage or unwanted guests to our woes.
The last thing needed in order to arrange for a veteran’s funeral was something called an unredacted DD-2 form. My mom had no idea where it was.
I wrote out a request for the Veteran Affairs form, explaining that my father is—had been—Jewish, and that we wanted to do the funeral as quickly as possible. “I am his daughter and next of kin,” I wrote, and my sister took it down to the front desk, for a clerk to fax.
I nursed Phoebe. I answered the phone. Before leaving for meetings on the ABC lot, I gave Molly my American Express card. “If anyone asks for a deposit, use this,” I said. “If I have to pay for this, I want to get the points.”
That afternoon I accepted condolences, feeling like a fraud. I hadn’t seen him in a while, I told the writers and executives I was meeting, trying to keep the conversations short. Everyone was kind, sometimes offering their own stories of estrangement and mental illness, their own tales of sad endings.
Back in the hotel room after dinner, my siblings and I decided to call the girlfriend. I was in the bedroom, on one extension; Molly and my brothers were in the living room, on speakerphone. Carol was in Connecticut, sounding hysterical, miserable, manicky. She said over and over, “There was a body in my bathroom this morning.” She rambled through the story of what had happened, how she’d fallen asleep the night before with my father still awake, on the couch, and how when she’d woken up he’d been facedown on the bathroom floor.
“So what was going on?” I asked. “When you e-mailed me, you said he hadn’t been well.”
She sighed, then started to talk about how my dad had brittle diabetes and was treating himself because he thought he was a better doctor than any doctor he could see. “He was in poor health. He wasn’t working.” She said he’d closed his medical office the year before and was no longer treating patients, but had been looking for jobs, at spaces to rent, trying to get back on his feet.
Strange and stranger. Why had he been off his feet, exactly? People liv
ed with diabetes. My grandparents had all developed it, late in their lives. You took your medicine or your insulin, you exercised and watched your diet, and you went on . . . and sixty-six, my father’s age, seemed young to be retired, especially considering how, in every court transcript I’d read, he’d complained about how he’d be working forever, about how he was like a hamster on a wheel, and how he’d never be able to stop.
“Were you a couple?” my sister asked, not even trying to hide her skepticism. Carol sounded huffy as she said, “I gave your father a home, and he gave me a great deal of love.” That was a line that got a lot of play with my siblings that week. “He gave me a great deal of love.”
“Can I have the salt?”
“No, but you can have a great deal of love.”
That was Tuesday. I made the arrangements, paid for the tickets; went online and found little black dresses for Lucy and Phoebe to wear, and on Thursday, we all flew back home.
• • •
“Everyone, use the bathroom before we go,” I instructed my siblings before we climbed into my minivan and drove to see where my father had died.
Carol lived in a sprawling apartment complex, three concrete buildings set around a vast parking lot that looked like prisons and were full of families getting Section 8 subsidies. There was an empty fountain ringed with plastic plants in her building’s lobby, and a kid in a football helmet sitting on its edge, rocking and drooling.
The apartment wasn’t awful, but it was seriously overcrowded, as if the contents of a home, the furniture and knickknacks and lamps, had been crammed into small rooms with low ceilings, green wall-to-wall carpeting, and dingy white walls. All of the furniture was too big and there was too much of it, which left armchairs pushed right up against tables, and framed pictures and papers and magazines spread thickly on every free surface. In a bookshelf I saw copies of my books and DVDs of some of the movies my brother had produced. On top of the TV was a framed picture of my father at the beach, kneeling down so that he was eye level with a little boy I didn’t recognize, a barefoot toddler in a bathing suit, with a diaper sagging toward his chubby knees. Carol didn’t know who the boy was, but she said that she’d always liked that picture, and I could see why. The little boy looked solemn and trusting; my father looked patient and kind, as if he had nothing better to do than to stay hunkered in the sand, listening to whatever the boy had to say. I wondered whether this was the son my father had had with his second wife.
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