Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (31 page)

Dear Eileen,

God blessed us with 11 wonderful human beings whom I love beyond anything on earth. My life is you, so please don’t doubt my love and devotion ... You have never done one thing that didn’t make me proud and happy to have the privilege to be your father ... You have an admirable quality in that you want answers for yourself ... I’ve never felt I had to have answers ...

“But do you love me?” I said out loud. Where were those three words written? As I read it at the time, the letter was full of interference from God, my siblings, my mother. Finally I put it back in its envelope and placed it in my dresser drawer.

I tried not to think about why it had taken him a month to write that he loved all of his children. My mind wouldn’t let go: he did have kidney failure, maybe he wanted to choose his words carefully, but does every father need a month to choose his words when his daughter asks if he loves her?

I still lacked the assurance that I belonged in my family. Because I had grown up to be so independent, I worried that I might not fit into any family. My desire for a sense of belonging competed constantly with my will to conquer that need. Then Ted showed up at my doorstep, a friend at his back, and my world opened up again.

CHAPTER 22

Orphans and Ophelias

A
s a child, I didn’t want to associate with Ted. My reputation within the family was bad enough, and Ted, from infancy, was notorious for his bad temper. As a toddler, he terrified nurses during a bout of dehydration by rattling the bars of his crib as if ready to bust out of jail. We siblings mocked him right down to his smelly feet, which were a dead giveaway in every game of hide and seek. “Come outta that closet, Odie,” we’d say. “I can smell you from here.”

Everyone dumped on Ted, and still his ego was gargantuan. He grew tall, dark, and as entitled as an Ottoman sultan. When he was eight and I was ten, he tied me to the basketball pole with a jump rope and swatted me with a Wiffle-Ball bat. I couldn’t understand why he would do that. At the time, I assumed he was showing off in front of Frankie’s friends. Later I told Frank, and we hatched a plan for payback.

One day after school, while Ted scarfed down his third peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Frankie and I shoved him into the bathroom and pulled hard on the knob to lock him inside. Ted pounded and threatened to throw himself down the laundry chute. “I’ll kill myself!” he screamed. We figured he had about four feet of laundry to pad the fall. “Try it,” we said, anxious to see the result. The drop was only one floor. When he stopped pounding we opened the door, but he was gone. Inside the chute, we found Ted jammed between the basement and first floor, his arms wedged against his hips. “I’m stuck,” he lisped through the gaps in his teeth. At first we closed the chute and left him there. Then, worried what Mom might do—not to us, but to Ted—we pushed him.

Mom had this thing about Ted. She was forever chasing him out of the house with a broom, slamming the back door when she couldn’t catch up to him for a swat, and yelling, “Don’t come back until dinner ... second thought, until bedtime!” Once he tumbled from her unlocked hatchback at a red light. Mom drove several blocks before she realized it. After that, Ted began to announce himself with a howl: “I’m the lone wolf. Aaaaooooooo!” On the days when Mom kicked him out of the house, Ted ran straight to the window where she washed dishes, his grubby hands on his hips, a half inch of grit under nails he refused to cut, and taunted her: “Don’t come back! Ever! Aaaaaoooooo.” Sometimes she’d growl back at him or make an ugly face; often she’d laugh.

When Mom was hospitalized for the first time, Ted turned quiet for a while, so quiet he was not even sullen. That summer, the Taylor boys held a carnival in their backyard to raise money for charity. Ted and I decided to collect canned goods for a ring toss. He put me in a Red Flyer and dragged me door to door on steamy summer mornings. The mothers in our neighborhood opened up to find Ted in the tank suit he lived in all summer. His black eyes, fringed by thick lashes, called out to women. Down at the curb I stayed in the wagon, where I dangled my clunky legs over its rim.

“Got any canned food?” Ted would ask in a voice like Phyllis Diller’s, but serious. The women stuffed us with cookies and milk, then loaded our wagon with cans.

In the year after Frank died, Ted shot up to six foot three. He grew his hair and bound it gypsy-style with a kerchief, always anxiously twisting a strand at his nape. At St. Xavier High School, he turned a pep rally into a rally for Communism. An irate priest slammed Ted against the bleachers and the incident got Ted elected as class president, although he hadn’t run for the office.

The following year, Ted arrived on the Williams College campus in a stocking cap and thrift-store clothes. He introduced himself as “Pip” and led everyone to believe that he and his nine siblings were farm laborers back in Ohio. Perhaps he didn’t mislead so much as allow the preconceptions to take over. He, or rather Pip, was given a column on the campus paper.

More recently, Ted had been living his vagabond dreams by hitchhiking through Europe after his junior year in England. When he ran out of money, he came home for the summer to sell cars, but mostly he pinned his poetry to the showroom walls. His poems amused Dad, even though the subtext was always a bash against capitalism. Ted felt bad for people buying cars they couldn’t afford.

By the time he turned twenty-one, Ted was about the most ethical person I knew. Based on his morals and his position in the family—more or less orphan status—I decided that he could be trusted. Since the fiasco with my sisters, I’d become paranoid. Groupthink ruled among my siblings. Individuality was tantamount to moral depravity, but Ted derived a sense of wholeness from the contempt family members showed him. He had never expected to be “the one Jesus loved the most.” He aspired to be the one whose neck Mom most often threatened to wring. I’d confided to him while he was in England about the rift separating me from the rest of the family. Back home, he promised to help my roommates and me move into a house in Newton before he headed back to Williams for his senior year. Already I felt better.

On a muggy Friday evening before Labor Day, the weekend of the fourth anniversary of Frank’s death, I raced through my apartment after work to start boxing things up. Would Ted call to say that he couldn’t fit this trip in after all? I reminded myself that Ted was not one to renege on a promise, nor was he one to plan a visit with Bridget and call me to have lunch on his last day in town. This was my status in the rest of the family: the one people squeezed in while visiting Bridget.

Long before Ted was due to arrive, I was cleaning the bathroom when the buzzer sounded. I opened the door and found two men instead of one, which made me self-conscious in my summer nightgown. Ted had not mentioned that he was bringing a friend, but I forgot all about that when he swept me up in a hug. He was thin under the mechanic’s outfit that he’d probably lifted from Dad’s service department—not that he knew anything about mechanics, but these were free duds. When he set me down, my attention turned to his friend. The guy looked to be about Ted’s height, but with broader shoulders and what I would come to learn was a rugby player’s physique. His half-smile was hokey in that
Risky Business
way that everyone was affecting in 1984.

“My buddy from X,” said Ted, motioning at his friend. “Name’s Tom.”

“Tom?” I said, amused by my own association with Tom Cruise. His friend’s green eyes scolded me, as if he knew what I was thinking. “Tom,” I said soberly, before heading off to change out of my nightgown. “There’s beer in the fridge,” I said on my way to my room.

I came back in jeans and an Indian-print T-shirt. We went out to the balcony, which was more like a rusty fire escape over the alley, and spent about five minutes planning for the next morning. Moving day in Boston deserved at least ten minutes, but I was curious about other things.

“How did you get here so early?” I asked Ted, but it was Tom who explained that the used Microbus Ted had recently bought had engine trouble. “So we didn’t stop at all, except for gas, then I push-started the bus.”

“You must be hungry,” I said.

“Had McDonald’s,” said Ted.

“But if you didn’t stop—”

“Actually, Ted circled the parking lot while I jumped out the back door.”

“Really?” I giggled.

“I had to toss the takeouts in the back, then I belly-flopped on the floor to get back in.”

Ted squeezed his eyes shut and laughed silently at the thought of it, while Tom’s eyes flicked toward me as if to seek my approval. I pressed my lips together and tried very hard not to laugh. Everything was so much more exciting when Ted was involved. His friend wandered inside to use the bathroom.

“I’ve never met Tom before. Why is he here?”

“He goes to school with me.”

“Oh.” Before I could ask another question, I saw Tom staring at me from inside the apartment. Embarrassed, I stopped talking and lowered my eyes. Tom’s eyes seemed to linger briefly, or maybe I hoped so.

T
he next night, Tom and I wandered aimlessly along the empty streets of the financial district through a maze of darkened office buildings. We had walked out of a restaurant in Chinatown ahead of Ted and my roommates. Before I knew it, we were lost. I was tired and I’d had too much to drink. I kept asking, “How did we get here? Where’s Ted?”

Tom shrugged and kept walking, launching into one of Ted’s hitchhiking tales. “Don’t worry,” the story began, “I’m meeting Chip,” to which Mom said, “Chip? Good Lord, Ted!” Chip was a “liberal” from Connecticut, although that detail was tempered by other things for Mom, such as Chip’s last name, Lowell. Because of this, Mom would connect Chip with an oil painting: another sour-faced Puritan or a pre-Revolutionary ship with a British flag. Either would put her at ease. (“You really know my mother,” I interjected, and Tom nodded before continuing.) Chip was trouble, though, one of those boarding-school types who had ventured out nightly at sixteen to meet girls with names like Ophelia.

“Ophelia?” I interrupted again. “Mom said Ophelia?” That sounded like it was coming from Tom, making me wonder how he fit in with these East Coast “liberals.”

Tom ignored my skepticism and mimicked Mom in a humorous falsetto. “But where? Where are you meeting Chip?”

“On the beach.”

“Which beach? And when?”

Ted didn’t know. Chip had only told him he was taking a charter flight which “should arrive sometime between Wednesday and Friday.”

“Now!” said Mom. “That ... is ... ridiculous. How will you find each other?”

To this Ted had apparently scrunched up his face as if to say “minor detail,” and took off.

Back at home, Mom kept asking Dad, “Which beach?” and Dad kept saying, “Hell if I know.” (Tom had that right!) So Mom called information and got the numbers to all the phone booths in Miami. Three days later, Ted made it to the airport just as Chip came down the ramp from the plane.

“No way!” I said to Tom. “Ted got there e
xactly
when Chip arrived?”

Tom held up a hand. “And get this: that night Chip and Ted slept on the beach and at, like, six in the morning Chip woke up to the
rrrring ring ring
of a payphone up on the street. Finally he picked it up and screamed, ‘It’s a payphone, asshole!’ Ted woke up just as Chip was saying, ‘Oh hey, Mrs. Cronin ... Sorry, thought you were someone else. Ted’s right here.’”

“You mean to tell me that Mom randomly called a payphone somewhere in Miami and Chip picked up.”

Tom threw up his hands and shook his head. “I know. I know. But that’s the story.”

It was all so confusing. We were now hopelessly lost in the shadows of office buildings. “How did we get here?” I asked again. This time Tom stopped and gripped me by the shoulders, hands shaking, face earnest. “What is it?” I asked. I thought we were about to be mugged. Instead, he kissed me.

In the morning, I opened my eyes to find Tom beside me on my bed. I lifted my head to check around. We were in our jeans and T-shirts; both of my legs were attached. I fell back on my pillow, relieved. Then I remembered Ted. What did he think of me vanishing with his friend? I jumped up and found my answer: Ted asleep at the foot of my bed.

Later, after an awkward cup of coffee in my dining room, Ted stood up, twisting his hair. “We gotta get back to school ... uh ... We’re moving into a house. Who knows what those tomfools have picked out?”

I started to get up, vaguely aware that Tom wasn’t budging, which was odd since he would be moving into the house with Ted and his friends, the “tomfools” as Ted called them.

“I’ll just hang back,” said Tom quietly.

“What?” Ted said. He looked irritated.

“I’m staying another day.”

Here?
I thought, before turning to face Ted, who looked incredulous. “Looney? Do you
want
him to stay?”

“Um,” I said, trying to meet his eyes, “uh,” and unable to ignore Tom’s stare from the opposite end of the table, “sure. I mean, it’s up to him ... up to Tom.”

Thus began Tom’s weekly adventures hitching the Mohawk Trail. Often I’d pull in from work to find him asleep on my doorstep, always shivering in a jean jacket, which he wore even after the leaves had gone from gold to amber to dusty brown. “What are you doing here?” I’d say. “It’s only Thursday.” He would open his eyes and smile sheepishly.

More than his trips to Boston, I looked forward to my trips to Williamstown. The drive was exquisite, both in terms of its beauty and its treacherous hairpin curve. To manage my fear of that curve I would stop at a store in Deerfield to buy alcohol (not that I recommend it). For me, the hairpin curve, especially in the snow, required two beers. Otherwise I couldn’t do it. And yet, the terror of facing that icy, downward spiral only served to heighten my anticipation of the hijinks to follow.

Weekends in Williamstown were as thrilling as camping in the forest with Falstaff, Prince Hal, and their band of merrymakers. Tom lived with Ted and Chip in an antique-red house on Water Street. It looked as if it had been flung onto the edge of a lot, where it teetered over a creek. Inside, a wood stove provided most of the heat, and the place smelled of fire and ash mixed with coffee and dirt. Living on the grounds, which included the red house plus a cottage up front, were six men and a one-eyed dog named Brandy.