Faith (14 page)

W
here were you during the storm?

In Boston it was the question for a generation. Ma and Clare Boyle remembered Pearl Harbor, Art the Kennedy assassination. Mike McGann remembered the storm.

It came early in February, a frigid Monday. Schools let out early, and to a boy like Mike—big for twelve, strong and tireless—the frigid air smelled of money. He imagined the sky bursting open like a piñata, a shower of five-dollar bills falling from heaven.

At home he suited up in his ski jacket and trousers. He went from door to door knocking, a shovel over his shoulder, but there were no takers. The snow was falling fast, the wind howling. No one was ready to think about shoveling. The storm had just begun.

Inside he stripped off his jacket. Ma was staring at the television. “Your sister called,” she said.

Ever loyal, Mike feigned ignorance. “Oh, yeah? Where is she?” He knew that the high school had closed at noon, that I had gone to my boyfriend's.

“At Paul Donovan's, of course. She claims Lisbon Ave. is flooded. So she's gotten herself stranded at his house, at least until the tide goes out. I guess that's what she wanted.”

Ma was no fool.

“Holy shit,” Mike said, glancing at the television, aerial footage of a massive pileup in Canton. Two tractor-trailers had jackknifed on the highway; traffic had backed up five miles in each direction. No one knew, yet, that it would take a full week to clear the wreckage, the thousands of abandoned cars buried in the snow.

“Watch your language,” Ma said automatically, her eyes not leaving the screen.

“Where's Dad?” Mike asked.

Ma blinked rapidly. She had already called Raytheon. Ted McGann had left for the day. On his way home, a secretary told her; but his wife knew better.

“He could be anywhere,” Ma said.

T
HEY ATE
a late supper, leftover stew from Sunday. Ma had planned a meat loaf, but for just the two it was hardly worth the trouble.

“I'll make your father a sandwich when he comes in,” she said.

Mike watched her lips move as she washed the dishes—counting or praying, who could tell? Finally she called his uncle Leo, trying to sound casual.
Have you seen your brother, then?

Leo had not.

“I don't know what to do,” she told Mike, her voice barely a whisper. “I suppose I could call Arthur.”

“Art?”
He looked at her as though she'd lost her mind. Art tucked away in his rectory in cozy West Roxbury, the other side of the universe; Art who'd be useless even if he were here. “For God's sake, Ma. What's Art going to do about it?”

He put on his jacket and went out to the porch. The sky was dark and moonless. He walked down Teare Street into a wall of wind. His footsteps were silent, muffled by the snow. The sidewalk had disappeared, though it hardly seemed to matter. There were no cars in sight.

He went back into the house. “Power's out across the street,” he called. “At least we still have power.”

At that moment the lights went out.

Ma found candles in the breakfront and wedged them into bottles; Mike had found a few of Ted's empties in the trash. In the kitchen they fired up the gas stove. Most of the neighbors had switched over to electric, but remodeling a kitchen was expensive. Ma was glad, now, that they'd put it off a year.

As she refilled the kettle, they heard a knock at the front door. Dick Brady, the town cop, had arrived by snowmobile. He came in stamping the snow from his feet.

“For Christ's sake, Mary. What are you still doing here?” The block was being evacuated, he told her. A shelter had opened at Grantham High.

“Ted hasn't come home,” Ma said.

“Yeah, well, there's plenty are stranded. Did you see that mess in Canton?”

“He left work early,” said Ma. “I called and checked.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Dick Brady took off his hat and ran a hand over his crew cut. “How long has he been out?”

“I called at two. He'd already left, they said.”

Dick Brady looked at his watch. Mike could see him calculating. How much could a man drink in four, six, eight hours? If the man were Ted McGann, the answer was ominous.

“Everything's closed on Lisbon Ave. Theoretically,” he said with an elaborate shrug. “I can keep an eye out for him, but we need to get you out of here. I can take you right now on the snowmobile.”

“I can't go,” Ma said.

Dick Brady looked ready to slap her. The National Guard was posted at the town line, he said; no one was allowed in or out. Wherever Ted was, he'd have to stay there. “You'll freeze to death waiting for him,” he said.

“We have the gas stove.”

“You're in the flood zone, woman. The surge is fifteen feet. It's coming over the wall.”

“I said no.” Ma's color was high, her voice vibrating. “He won't know where to find us.” She didn't say—she didn't have to—that Ted would need looking after, that he'd be in no shape to take care of himself.

“My God, you're impossible. I'll come back in the morning to check on you.” He gave Mike a stern look. “Keep an eye on her, if she'll let you. And no wandering out. There's a curfew on.”

Ma followed him to the door and closed it behind him—quickly, to keep the heat in. From the window Mike watched the lights of the snowmobile disappear down the road. Then he put on his jacket.

“I'm going out,” he said.

H
E MADE
his way through the dark, looking for the sidewalk, trying to keep his boots dry. Sheila was right: Lisbon Ave. was underwater. Mike stared, confused. High tide had been hours ago; why hadn't the water receded? It seemed to be coming in from both sides, the ocean and the bay meeting in the middle of the street.

He turned down a side street and walked into the wind, head down, fists clenched in his pockets. All the streetlights were out. He raised his head periodically to get his bearings. The familiar landscape had gone white and strange.

He cut down an alley and rejoined Lisbon Ave. The west end of town had power. A few lights glowed in the distance—at the Black Sheep and Fagan's, Dad's locals. Mike quickened his pace.

He went into Fagan's. Music was playing; a small crowd had assembled, but his father was not among them. The indoor heat burned his cheeks.

At the bar was a bald man Mike recognized from church. “That's Ted McGann's kid,” he said, squinting drunkenly. “What are you doing here?”

“Have you seen my dad?” Mike said.

“He was here this afternoon,” said the bartender. “I cut him off hours ago.”

“He was heading home,” the bald man said.

“What time was that?”

The men exchanged glances.

“He could've gone next door,” the bald man said. “They would have served him there.”

Mike went back out into the cold. The Sheep was three doors down, a smaller, darker bar with a green awning hanging askew, clanging in the wind like the rigging of a ship. A neon sign glowed in the small window:
OPEN
. But when Mike tried it, the door was locked.

The windows were crusted with ice. Mike peered inside. The room was empty, the lights on. He could make out a figure moving behind the bar.

Mike pounded the window with his fist.

The man looked up, startled. He came to the door.

“We're closed!” he shouted into the wind. “What's the matter, kid? You stranded?”

“Have you seen Ted McGann?”

The man stepped back and waved Mike inside. The air was harsh and smoky. The Sheep smelled just like Fagan's. He wondered if all of them smelled the same, and how his father could stand it. Why he'd want to spend half his life in a place that smelled like this.

“He left a while ago. He was feeling no pain, so I took his keys.” The man ducked behind the bar and handed them over. Mike recognized Dad's key ring, the miniature Red Sox hat. “He's probably home waiting for you.”

“Thanks,” Mike said.

He went back into the cold. Lisbon Ave. was lined with strange shapes, abandoned cars that had been buried by the snowplows. Mike fingered the keys in his pocket. Any one of them might have been Dad's.

It was a ten-minute walk back to the house, twenty minutes if the wind shifted, thirty if you were slowed by drink. And Ted might have gone down a side street to avoid the flooding, or taken a wrong turn. It would have been easy to do: the streets dark and shadowy, the familiar landmarks covered in snow.

Mike himself had been drunk only once, when Tim Morrison stole a six-pack from the fridge in his dad's garage. Afterward, he'd looked at his own father differently. He had seen, plenty of times, Ted stumbling, puking, lost in his own storm. Now that he'd felt it for himself, he understood it was more pleasant from the inside.

He made his way down the flooded avenue, sticking close to the sidewalk. The water was above his ankles, deeper in the middle of the road. Home was a straight shot down Lisbon Ave. Ted, in his cups, would have taken the most direct route.

He'd walked maybe fifty yards, half a football field, when he spotted a dark figure stretched out on a snowbank. He recognized his father's green parka.

Mike knelt beside him and brushed the snow from his cheeks.

•  •  •

T
HAT LONG
trek home—Dad leaning on him heavily, out of his head and barely walking—will stay with Mike forever. He speaks of it only rarely, when he himself is in his cups. They found Ma in the kitchen asleep in a chair, rosary beads in her hand. Not for the first time and not for the last, she'd sat up waiting for an errant husband, certain that this one, too, had disappeared for good.

The next morning the front door wouldn't open. Outside was a solid wall of snow. Mike went upstairs and opened his bedroom window; he dropped easily to the porch roof and rolled onto a snowbank. The sky was vivid blue, the sun blinding. He walked down Teare Street toward the beachfront. The seawall had broken into pieces like the wreckage of an earthquake. He heard, but couldn't see, helicopters flying overhead.

The beach was littered with frozen lobsters. He grabbed one in each hand and headed for home.

In the kitchen the radio was playing: the power had come back on. A man with a deep voice was reading the weather.
Mostly sunny this afternoon, with a high near ninety. Humidity is at 90 percent.

“What's he fucken saying?” Mike gasped, out of breath.

For once Ma didn't tell him to watch his language, a shift they both noticed. He had located our drunk father passed out in a snowbank and saved him from freezing to death. It was a kind of adulthood.

“They're reading the forecast from last summer,” Ma said. “To take our minds off it, I guess.”

After thirty-three hours, the snow stopped. As Ted McGann lay upstairs sleeping, Ma boiled lobsters and melted butter. She and Mike sat in the kitchen cracking tails and claws, remembering the dog days of August, the ninety-degree heat.

W
hen our father was first diagnosed, the neurologist gave us a fact sheet. Certain behaviors were to be expected: Meager content in conversation. Lack of insight about his condition. Confabulation. A short attention span. Reading it, Mike and I exchanged crooked smiles. It wasn't necessary, it wasn't constructive or kind, to point out that this had described our father for years. He had always been forgetful, scornful of introspection, a teller of tales. Now he lied to fill in the gaps, the hours or days he had forgotten. It is—well, sobering—to wonder how much of Ted McGann's famous personality was simply end-stage alcoholism: tiny holes in the hippocampus, slowly growing; the bleak signs of neuronal loss.

It is an enduring shock to all who know him that my father is now sober. For twenty years Ma begged for this, prayed for it; she made his drinking the central drama of her life, and his. Each day after Mass she lit a candle for his recovery. Over the years she said countless novenas and rosaries, her Hail Marys flooding the heavens like so much junk mail. She saved her sweet talk for the Virgin. With Dad she swapped insults and epithets. There were marital dust-ups that attracted the police, ultimatums that led to AA meetings and, in the early 1980s, the Pioneer Pledge. There may have been more than four DUI arrests, two cars totaled, three bouts of alcohol poisoning; those are merely the official totals, the ones to which Ma will admit. Other incidents defy categorization. I am thinking of the old Chevy that Dad abandoned one night on a street in Hyde Park, in the direct path of the commuter rail. An alert conductor spotted it just in time; my father, passed out cold on the sidewalk, woke to squealing brakes. Less dramatic were the everyday mishaps, the falls and blackouts and finally, hospitalizations: for seizures, hepatitis, pneumonia, a bleeding ulcer, several concussions, a broken collarbone.

It is a litany of ruin.

The fortunate among you will find this implausible. How could one human being survive so many calamities? A man less hardy or bullheaded, or simply less addicted, might have taken any one of them as a sign.

But what all these miseries could not effect, simple atrophy in the end accomplished. Ted McGann forgot. After his last hospitalization, for a bout of acute encephalitis, my father was docile as a child. I can't explain how it happened, only how it appeared: that after years of thinking of little else, the man simply forgot to drink.

He spent two weeks in South Shore Hospital in a state of near oblivion; and when he woke, it was as though he'd taken a trip around the world and lost most of his luggage along the way. Heavy bags they were, packed with thirty years of indignities, rages, brawls and indiscretions. The injustice of it is hard to fathom: the shameful scenes we will never forget, he is spared the pain of remembering. It is perhaps the final irony of a life filled with them: everyone on Teare Street can tell a Ted McGann story, except Ted McGann.

My father who roared like a lion is now silenced, diminished. After years of resenting him, Ma became his caretaker. She lost the man she married, the best and the worst of him. And yet for her there is relief in it. She'll never admit it, but I know this is so.

Sobriety came too late to save him, though for a time his doctors held out hope. Twice a month Ma took him for injections, intramuscular thiamine; but after a year it was clear that there was no point. His memory hadn't improved at all (though, as the doctors pointed out, it hadn't worsened). The patient's oldest memories were intact; he simply couldn't make new ones. He remembered his boyhood, his dead parents, his years in the Navy. He recognized his wife and children, but not his daughter-in-law or grandkids. By the time Abby joined the family, my father's memory was like a doctor refusing new patients. The rolls, it seemed, were already filled.