Hungry Heart

by Jennifer Weiner

  The apartment looked clean, but the air was thick with a strange, unfamiliar chemical scent. There were magnifying glasses on the table. Carol said my father’s eyesight had degenerated; that he couldn’t drive anymore and could barely read.

  For years, I’d been afraid of him. I’d been angry about how he’d left us, the bills he’d never paid, scared of what he’d say or do to me or my family or my children if he ever showed up at our door. Now I just felt sad and sorry for him, for dying in such a shabby place, with so little to show for his life—so few possessions, so few relationships, so few people left who’d loved him.

  I was the former reporter, but it was Molly, sharp-eyed and staccato-voiced, who took the lead, drilling Carol with question after question. “How long had you known my dad?” she asked. “How did you meet each other?”

  Carol put her best spin on a shady situation. My father, it emerged, had been her son’s therapist. Then he’d started treating Carol. Then they’d “developed feelings” for each other. “And when I saw how he was struggling, I offered him a home.”

  “Tell me about how he was struggling,” Molly said.

  Carol launched into her story about brittle diabetes and poor health and how he’d been depressed ever since he’d been in jail, in 2001.

  “Did he . . . I mean, do you think . . .”

  Before I could figure out how to ask the question—did he kill himself?—Carol was shaking her head. “He told me repeatedly. Repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, that he would never harm himself. Last week, he answered a want ad. He was looking for an office to rent. He was very excited . . .” Her voice trailed off. “You know, his father was fifty-three when he died. Your dad thought that every day past his father’s age that he got was a gift.”

  My sister was not impressed with this analysis. “What was really going on here?” Molly asked. “Was it drugs?”

  I heard Carol pull in a breath. I was holding my own breath, my body braced, some part of me waiting for her answer, some part of me knowing it already.

  Finally, Carol sighed. “Your father was working with addicts, in state hospitals and in his private practice. He was curious about crack—about the hold it had on people, about what it was that they couldn’t resist. So he tried it.”

  Bullshit, I thought. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I was so angry. I could feel fury surging inside of me, pushing itself toward my fingertips and toes with each heartbeat. That’s not why people use drugs, because they’re curious. You try sweetbreads or spinning class because you’re curious. You take crack because you’re weak, because you’re running away from your problems, because you can’t handle the pain in your life and you don’t care who you hurt.

  “Your father struggled. He fought very hard. But he became addicted to heroin and crack.”

  I felt like a cape of ice was falling, from my neck to my shoulders to my legs, trapping me, freezing me. The words rattled around in my head, like Ping-Pong balls in the lottery drawing’s hopper. Heroin. Crack. My father? My father, who’d read to me from the Aeneid and Shakespeare, who’d made French toast for breakfast, who’d once made me feel so special, so smart, so loved? It was like imagining a dog smoking a cigarette; an upside-down house—something didn’t fit. I couldn’t make it fit.

  The apartment felt like it was squeezing in on me, like the walls of the trash compactor in Star Wars. Alcohol wouldn’t have surprised me. In hindsight, I could see that he’d probably been drunk at that reading, and I’d seen him drunk before—weeping and slurring insults at my mom the afternoon of my college graduation, passed out naked on my dorm-room futon that night . . . but I don’t think I would ever have guessed he was using street drugs.

  When I made myself listen to the conversation again, it was like I’d tuned in to an episode of Cops. Carol was explaining how she’d cleverly gotten rid of my dad’s cell phone before the ambulance had shown up—“his phone had all of his dealers’ numbers.” Dealers. My father had dealers. Then I remembered her saying that his eyesight had deteriorated, that he had given up his car. Was he so addicted that he needed drugs every day? Did dealers make house calls? Or did Carol drive him to meet these people? Did she pay them, too? And with whose money?

  I started to shiver. “You should know that your father thought of all of you, at least fleetingly, once a day.” At least fleetingly. I knew that would soon join And I gave him a great deal of love in the Weiner kids’ lexicon.

  Carol’s language was very passive, very careful, very George Bush saying “mistakes were made.” She didn’t blame my dad for leaving us. She blamed my mom for being vindictive, relentless in her pursuit of all that money he owed her. She blamed the woman who’d slashed him—“All the shame,” she said, “was very hard for him.” She blamed his second wife, for getting pregnant when she knew my dad didn’t really want another child.

  On the last day of his life, Carol said, they’d gone swimming and visited a gym my dad wanted to join. He’d been reading newspaper ads, looking for office space. She told us these things, I think, because she did not want us to think that he’d killed himself. She wanted us to think that he’d died accidentally, not because he didn’t want to be alive anymore. She said that she’d told the police that she had been planning to leave him over his drug use. I can’t remember if she told us that she was lying, so that she wouldn’t be suspected of doing anything illegal, but that was what I thought.

  Then she led us down to the building’s basement, where the storage units were. It was cold and damp down there, moldy-smelling and cobwebby. “Your father was a hoarder, and it got a little crazy,” she said, and unlocked the door. There were boxes and boxes, stacked floor to ceiling, crammed with papers—tax returns, junk mail, unpaid bills and copies of patients’ records, computer printouts of nutty letters that Carol had written to him, and sad, yearning diary entries she’d written about him. There were maps to my house. Copies of articles I’d written, and, later, articles that had been written about me. Back issues of the New Yorker and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Old license plates. Holiday cards from his newspaper carrier. A bicycle tire pump. Shoeboxes full of photographs.

  We dug through the boxes, standing in the musty air, with the cold from the concrete floors seeping up through our feet, and it was like every layer of his belongings that we uncovered took us down deeper into the wreck, from who he’d been in the 1970s and the 1980s to who he’d become by 2008.

  I found his old doctor’s bag, black leather with a gold LGW monogram, and, inside of it, an otoscope and a stethoscope and a rubber mallet. When I was five and six and seven, I had ear infections all the time, and they always seemed to start at night. He would pull out that bag when I would wake him up to say my ear was hurting. He’d sit me on the couch and wrap me up in his old army jacket, with WEINER sewn over the breast pocket, and he’d go to the all-night pharmacy to get my medicine, telling me to be brave and not cry. His diplomas were there, in their frames, the glass cracked. I found his discharge papers from the army, including that unredacted DD-2 form it had taken me so long to track down.

  There were hundreds of photographs—some of women I recognized, more of women I didn’t. Some of them showed my father and these women on vacations—New Mexico, Saratoga, Cape Cod. Then there were pictures of him in different apartments, at holiday dinners, with families I didn’t recognize. Different women, in the same pose, on his blue-and-tan striped couch. Then Polaroids of women, alone or with him, posing naked, touching themselves or him. (“How’d he even get this shot?” I asked my brother, feigning indifference. “Tripod,” said Joe, after one swift glance down.)

  Molly pocketed a few of the shots. “I’m bringing these home to Fran,” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” said Jake.

  “Hey, Carol said we could take whatever we wanted to remember him by. I’m taking these!”

  I kept digging. There were dozens of letters and cards, signed Betsy, signed Abby, signed Vicky, signed Raquel, sig
ned Laurie, all of them saying how much they loved him, some asking why he’d hurt them, why he’d left.

  I found newspaper clippings about his assault (“Girlfriend Arrested in Vicious Assault”). “He kept this?” I asked. “He kept everything,” said Joe. It seemed to be true. Letters from bankruptcy lawyers. Letters from creditors. A letter a neighbor had written, after my father left, telling him to reconsider, to look at his beautiful family and everything he was throwing away.

  Carol stood at the doorway, watching us, occasionally pointing out something that wasn’t junk or ruined. There was a leather firewood carrier, a photo of my father with Molly and Jake and Joe, at Butterfly, the Chinese restaurant in West Hartford where we’d meet him after he moved out. “You should keep that,” she’d say. I found letters that I’d written from college, copies of my report cards, or articles I’d written. “Dear Dad, I won the Academy of American Poets prize. I got $100 and a certificate. Be sure to congratulate me at Joe’s bar mitzvah.” “I wrote this for the Nassau Weekly. Tell me if you like it.” “I got all As again this semester. See you soon.” He’d never written back, but he’d kept every letter I’d sent him. I found copies of short stories I’d written in college and the clipped-out wedding announcement that I had wanted so badly for him to see. I’d gotten my wish . . . but all I could feel was numb.

  Down and down we went. Joe reached into a box and came up holding a bulbous glass pipe wrapped in duct tape, discolored from smoke.

  “Is that . . .”

  “Crack pipe,” Molly confirmed.

  Jake found a can of garbanzo beans, one of my father’s particular favorites. I found the intake form from jail, when he’d been sent there, listing his cell phone, his wallet, his checkbook, his ring. Then there was porn. So much porn. Printouts from websites. DVDs and videocassettes. Magazines. Links to friend-finder websites, profiles of women, handwritten reminders of password for the different sites. Sometimes he’d use our initials—JMJJ. Sometimes he’d use my mother’s maiden name or the date of their anniversary.

  At some point during the Great X-Rated Excavation, we all started singing “Memories” from Cats. Molly kept her promise and brought home some of the Polaroids and handed them to Fran, who didn’t have her glasses on. “What am I looking at? What am I looking at?” she asked, turning the photos upside down, then sideways. Molly was very happy to tell her. “That’s Dad with his noodle out,” she said.

  I felt bruised and numb, but safe. The pornography was awful, and the maps and the printouts were scary, and it was all so sad, sad beyond reckoning. I couldn’t stop thinking about why he’d kept it all, why he’d kept everything, reminders of the worst, most humiliating moments of his life. I’d think about it in snatches, for five or ten seconds, taking tiny glimpses, like I was looking straight into the sun and didn’t want to look for too long. I remembered what my Nanna said when I’d called to tell her—“Well, now you know.” Now we knew how his story ended. Now he’d never hurt any of us again, never scare us or embarrass us. There was no more waiting for the next bad thing; no hope of better days to come. This was it; this was all.

  • • •

  It was sunny and windy as we drove to the cemetery on Saturday. The funeral was anticlimactic—the kids, our spouses, my mom and her partner, and Carol. “Could we see the body?” I asked. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” the funeral director said hastily, taking my elbow and steering me away from the plain pine casket. “You don’t need to remember him this way.”

  I gave him a photograph of me and Lucy and Phoebe to put inside, and Jake gave him a picture of his son and daughter, Ben and Olivia. A soldier in uniform played “Taps,” and we sat on folding chairs, bundled in our coats. The sky was blue, but it felt like winter, the ground still hard, the tree branches bare. There was a microphone, attached to a squat square speaker in front of the grave, and Jake talked about how my father had special rituals with all of us, how he’d take us to get bagels, how he had come to watch our soccer games, how he’d loved us.

  Back at my mother’s house, ten miles from where my father had died, I tried to put together some semblance of shiva. We ordered deli platters from the Crown supermarket, and some of my parents’ old friends—my mom’s old book-club buddies; Judith and Brewster, the couple they’d befriended on their honeymoon in 1967—came over to pay their respects.

  The next day, we went back to Carol’s and continued the excavation. We got out photo albums and looked at pictures of him, back when we’d been a family. It can’t get worse, I told myself bleakly as the minivan swung into the parking lot. I’d seen the doctor’s bag and the diplomas; I’d seen the crack pipe and the porn, and the boxes and boxes of typed transcripts and depositions from the dozens of times my mother had taken him to court. All the promise, then the sordid denouement. At least we know the story, and it can’t get worse.

  Here’s the truth—it can always get worse.

  At the bottom of a box of flyers from insurance companies and unpaid Verizon bills, I found a stack of unopened letters from the Department of Children and Families. I thought they had to do with the child support that he owed my mother, back in the 1980s, when all of us were minors.

  I opened one of the letters and it said, “In the matter of the minor child D.H.” I read on. D.H. had been born on November 24, 2004. His father was listed as Dr. Lawrence Weiner.

  Carol was upstairs in her apartment, and we all went trooping inside, me holding the letters, that cloak of ice wrapping itself around me again.

  Yes, she told us calmly, our father had fathered another child, with a woman who’d been a patient in one of his drug-treatment groups. “But he never intended to be a father to that child. He signed his rights away so the baby could be adopted.”

  It doesn’t work that way; that’s not the way it works. You can’t make a kid and then try to play take-backs, I thought. But the anger felt faint and dim, a lit match flickering behind a triple-reenforced brick wall. It felt like a movie I was watching, a story I was reading, something happening to characters, not real people, not my father, whom I’d known and loved.

  Back down in the storage area, I sat on a box and began to read. I found Probate Court documents from May 22, 2006, where the biological mother’s stepsister petitioned to adopt the baby boy, charging that his birth mother was unfit. She wrote that my father’s name was Larry and that his last known address was in Newington, Connecticut. The documents were handwritten. They “alleged the following specific actions that place the health or welfare of the minor child in danger,” all the things the baby’s biological mother had done.

  Drug usage

  Suiside threats

  Disappearing for 24 hrs without whereabouts.

  Not changing habits.

  Misleading program by providing fake urine for tests

  Baby was removed after we could not wake her. Police was called for her leaving with neighbors vehical 6 hrs and brother had baby.

  I read and learned that DCF had placed the baby temporarily with his mother’s stepsister and her stepsister’s husband, on July 22, 2005. According to a report from D.H.’s guardian ad litem, the plan was for his grandparents to take care of him during the day and return him to the stepsister at night. “Mr. Weiner, the Respondent, is alleged to have had no recent contact with the child and it is reported that there is a support enforcement action pending against him.”

  The birth mother’s attorney wrote and said that D.H.’s biological mother was “devoted to him and is actively pursuing steps to allow her to take care of him.” She was in an inpatient program for addiction when the hearing took place. The attorney also wrote, “D.H.’s father, Dr. Laurence Weiner, has shown no willingness at all to have any emotional or financial connection with the child. Since the father has an ongoing psychiatric practice, it is presumed that he would have the financial resources to provide child support.” Ha, I thought bleakly. How wrong you are.

  The court found that “the minor child has been aban
doned by his father in the sense that the parent had failed to maintain a reasonable degree of interest, concern or responsibility for the minor’s welfare.” There was an order in place, where my father was supposed to pay the adoptive parents $160 a month for the baby’s support.

  Which he hadn’t done . . . at least that’s what the stack of letters from the DCF suggested. Most of them had never even been opened. One of the court documents was stained and crumpled, with a footprint on the front page, as if the court had sent my father his copy and he’d stomped on it.

  • • •

  Back in Philadelphia, I carried the boxes from my minivan into my basement. Every night after Phoebe was down I’d bring one box up, sit in front of the TV with a garbage bag by my side, sorting through the mess he’d left. Court transcripts, depositions, more letters from the state, more evidence of how chaotic his life had become. A Family Violence Protection Order that my father had filed against one of his ex-girlfriends in 2003. Creditors’ letters and letters from lawyers demanding payment. Dozens of pages of photocopies of checks that Carol had written to him, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks. She must have lost her house because of him; must have moved into that crappy apartment because she’d given him, literally, everything.

  A few weeks after the funeral, Carol sent us all letters. Mine said, “Your dad loved you all very dearly and told me that he thought of each of you every day. I know he wanted to see you and your children, but I’m not sure he wanted you to see him. His health had deteriorated profoundly, and he could not bear your seeing him so weakened and broken. Diabetes is a terrible disease. He fought against it every day, with determination and grace, and stayed optimistic in the face of it.