The Cost of Hope (16 page)

Nothing remotely like that happens.

We sit through an awkward and strained lunch where we pass
around ancient Polaroids and find out that Terence has not two, but four younger brothers. These four—Fred, Bill, Dick, Charlie—are the children of Myrtle who, for want of a better word, might now be called Terence’s stepmother. Although she sits nearly silent through lunch, she seems friendly enough and not at all anxious or edgy. Has she always known the long-buried secret? She claims not, and we never do learn for sure.

Unlike in the made-for-TV-movie version, there are no dramatic professions of love or anger. The Germanic reserve of Terence’s Laudeman side triumphs over the untamed volubility of his Foley side. We mince politely around irrelevant subjects and leave.

Still, this is not the end of the story.

Once out of earshot of the parents, the five boys fall on one another with glee, by telephone and later in visits. Whatever the secret or anger or shame of the past, it is immediately clear that no one in this generation shares in it. The four younger boys are as eager to get to know their older brother as Terence is to know them. Cameras. Travel. Motorcycles. Languages. Military service. They compare their life histories and eerily shared memories. They discover that they summered within miles of one another, perhaps even visiting the same Cincinnati-area relatives on the same weeks, or even days, but never encountering one another.

By the end of a week, they are Uncle Fred. Uncle Charlie. Uncle Bill. Uncle Dick. We like one another. We visit one another’s homes. Get to know one another’s children. Little Terry is suddenly one of fourteen half cousins. On my bedroom wall a photo still hangs from the wedding of Fred’s oldest son. There gathered together are the lost siblings, in one place for the first—and as it turns out, last—time. There they stand in a row, sturdy, barrel-chested German stalwarts all, each of the six of them round-faced, stout, and open.

Six? Yes, six. For that is the biggest surprise of all. For in addition to the four boys, it turns out there is another child, a girl, from yet a third wife in the old man’s past.

This lost girl, now a grown woman with seven children of her own, is—for me—the missing piece in Terence’s family story that never quite added up otherwise. Why did Terence’s dad leave the scene so suddenly? Why did he leave behind a pregnant wife and never look back? Why were there no cards? No letters? No visits? Even though, as we discover fifty years later, the families are regularly crossing paths?

Terence grew up hearing his mother, Ruth, tell a whimsical story that to my ears never quite rang true. In this version, she and his father, Turner—sweethearts since high school, and married for seven years after—amicably agree to divorce but only on Ruth’s giggling condition: that she become pregnant first. That mission accomplished, she lets him go and never sees him again.

Does this make sense? Does this explain the total estrangement? The fact that the father never seeks out his son? The mother never introduces the father? The brothers who pass yearly at the farm in Ohio and share visits with the same relatives never meet?

Not to me.

Nothing explains that estrangement to my satisfaction until I meet Terence’s sister. In our excited conversations with our new relatives we compare biographical details. All at once the mathematics of the past’s secrets leap out. Terence, the eldest of the old man’s children, is born to Ruth on September 4, 1940. And when is Terence’s open-faced younger sister Artie born to Virginia, Turner’s second wife?

January 20, 1941, just four and a half months later. Did a hurtful infidelity cause the rift? Did Turner really know Ruth was pregnant? Did Ruth know that Virginia was? Is Artie even Turner’s child at all?

Everyone who knows the true story is dead.

In the slow summery days of 2003, we increasingly feel that Lexington is our home. We may live here forever, we think.

On South Ashland Avenue the bulbs we planted the previous fall bloom and die—jonquils in the front, hyacinths in the back. We go to the Kentucky Derby. I buy a huge floppy white hat with a purple peony. Terence wears blue seersucker and a boater. We win a hundred dollars. We lose a hundred dollars. We drink mint juleps and sing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Funny Cide takes the prize, the first gelding to win since 1929, which yields predictable wisecracks. I play practical jokes on my boss; he stings one back at me. His wife, a nurse, keeps tabs on us.

And then, all of a sudden, it is time to move.

In late spring, I travel with all the other Knight Ridder editors to our annual gathering in California. We trade notes, compare experiences, sit through long PowerPoint sessions on the company’s finances. At dinner the night I return, I regale the children with the pranks that even grown-ups like to play—including a caper in which all of us editors band together to steal as many household items as we can out from under the nose of our host.

The children are enchanted.

After they leave for bed, I casually continue the conversation with Terence.

“Does Tony Ridder know you?” I ask, referring to the chairman of the company I work for that bears his name.

“No, not at all,” Terence says. “Why?”

“He was very interested in what you are doing, asking lots of questions,” I say. At the cocktail party, Tony did in fact seem very interested in Terence. What does he do? How long has he done it? How does he like Lexington?

Terence’s face lights up.

“We’re moving!” he says.

“Huh?”

“We’re moving,” says Terence. “It’s obvious.”

“You’re crazy,” I say. “He was just being polite.”

“Not a chance,” he says. “They’ve got a big job for you. We’re moving.”

“We’re not moving again!” I say. “We just got here. I like it here.”

The next morning when I leave for work, Terence is already in the basement, inventorying boxes.

“You’re out of your mind,” I say. “Have fun!”

Shortly after lunch, my boss calls me into his office.

Philadelphia!

I am not sure what I am expecting, but certainly not the monumental view that greets me as I step out of my hotel on my first day in Philadelphia. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The starkly classical Free Library and Family Court buildings. The reddish brick Italian Renaissance Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. The Franklin Institute. The Rodin Museum. The Swann Fountain with its Native American figures. And off in the distance to the left, looking like the Acropolis, the Philadelphia Museum of Art hulking over the whole scene. To the right, City Hall with its fussy detail and its statue of William Penn atop the clock
tower. Soon enough the children will discover the hilarious—to a fourteen-year-old and a nine-year-old—phallic view that can be had of Old Billy if you stand and look at him from a certain angle.

Everything about Philadelphia seems monumental. Its buildings. Its history. Its art. Its poverty. Its sheer daunting size—143 square miles that stretch out far beyond any place any visitor normally ventures. Even
The Philadelphia Inquirer
—Knight Ridder’s flagship paper—is monumental. The paper’s square-shouldered white building topped by a clock tower and dome can be clearly seen from miles away. The top story is the former home of Walter Annenberg, the paper’s onetime publisher.

And the newsroom! The newsroom! It too is monumental, like no other newsroom in America. It is like everyone’s fantasy of a newsroom—only more so. In perhaps one of the most improbably thoughtful acts of industrial redesign, the newsroom has been carved out of the space that the paper’s presses once occupied. The news floor is as long as a football field, and its ceiling soars the equivalent of four stories up. The entire whitewashed space is punctuated by massive white columns, while a balcony that rings the room is big enough to house a quarter of the paper’s five-hundred-plus reporters and editors and photographers. The walk into the newsroom is a daunting one, past framed certificates of the paper’s Pulitzer Prizes—eighteen of them over the previous eighty-six years.

The newsroom is particularly daunting for me. The paper is teetering on the edge of the disaster that will engulf all newspapers all too soon as readers and advertisers flee to the Internet. I know I am the first woman editor in the paper’s 174-year history. It’s in all the news stories. Yet I don’t fully realize what that means until I take stock of the newsroom on my first day at work. The entire place is a hearty, overexaggerated paean to maleness, from the brooding nineteenth-century-style editor’s office that looks straight out of Dickens—oversized mahogany credenza, dark
walnut paneling, and stand-up desk—to the trophies of past editors’ athletic pursuits. The crossed oars of one—a rower—dominates one end of the newsroom, flanked by the hockey jerseys of another. Framed overwrought tributes from one past male editor to another dot the room.

Others apparently have noticed too. When I arrive that morning, I find a gigantic pink girdle suspended across the front of my office. It is a reference to a wiseguy remark I make in my opening speech about relaxing and taking it easy in our jobs. There is a sign attached: Welcome Amanda Bennett, First Woman Editor. It is an affectionate and hopeful sign.

I think.

We throw ourselves into the city. We force the grousing children—by now at ages fourteen and nine just a touch too old for this—into field trips. Independence Hall. Carpenters’ Hall. Valley Forge. We walk on streets still covered in cobblestones. “Benjamin Franklin probably walked here,” we tell them. “George Washington probably sat here.” Philadelphia has become a mecca for chic and edgy food. Le Bec-Fin is called America’s finest French restaurant. All around it, new restaurants sprout up. Stephen Starr opens the sexy Striped Bass. El Vez. Buddakan. The futuristic Pod. The city also spews trendy BYOs that you need to reserve three months in advance.

That’s not where we go. Instead Terence prowls the narrow streets of South Philly, with their white-sided rowhouses, narrow front porches, green aluminum awnings, and front windows that flaunt decorations for every holiday. He finds the old Philly red gravy joints and we drag the kids out every Friday night for spaghetti and meatballs or ziti with big, fat sausages in thick red sauce. Criniti’s. Dante & Luigi’s. Tre Scalini. Ralph’s. Vesuvio. Before a month is out we have sampled every cheesesteak. Pat’s.
Geno’s. Jim’s on South Street. John’s Roast Pork on Snyder. Terence finds the bakeries (Termini Brothers, Isgro) and the best cheese shop in the Italian market (Di Bruno Brothers). He learns to make pasta e fagioli and Italian wedding soup. We find a Quaker school for the children—ninth grade for Terry, fourth grade for Georgia—just a few blocks from my new office.

And so we settle in to what will be our last home together.

This is Philly, so we buy a Philly house, a tall, narrow brick rowhouse with red shutters and a basement door that slants from the house to the sidewalk. It was built in 1850. It is being used as an apartment building. We rip out the insides and turn it back into a home. I would be happy living with the chairs I bought from Goodwill when I was in college; with the coffee table made from a giant discarded wooden spool used for electrical cables; with the old church pew I bought when a Methodist church in Toronto was hollowed out to make room for a Hare Krishna enclave.

It is only because of Terence that we live like grown-ups. Over the years he makes us buy proper wing chairs. Antique rugs: two from China, one from India, one from Pakistan. A mahogany china cabinet. A grandfather clock. Floor-to-ceiling white bookshelves filled with novels and plays and poetry, with vases and family photos. He hangs oil paintings and sketches he has bought all over Asia. A still-faced Vietnamese girl, her hands folded quietly in her lap, looks hauntingly down on our dining table.

Time has softened us both.

Yet we still lock horns in angry arguments, usually when he refuses to do something exactly the way I want, or I refuse to do something exactly the way he wants. I explode at the sight of him sitting in the living room chair, hat and coat on and car keys in his hand as I try to get a teen, a preteen, and me out the door in the morning. There is lunch money to dole out, shoes to be found,
lost homework papers, breakfast to be levered in. Why won’t he help? There is so much to do!

He won’t budge.

“You think you can leave at eight and get there by seven thirty,” he says, not stirring from the chair. “You always have.”

I crab and rant. Why do you always …? Why don’t you ever …? Why are you so …? We trade mindless barbs. After we drop the kids off, I fling the car door shut and stomp off to work. A half hour later, I see his cell number pop up.

I snarl at the ringing office phone: “I’m not answering. I’m still mad. You can just forget it. I’m not speaking to you.”

I pick up the receiver.

I hear him say: “I’m sorry …”

Then there is a long pause.

“… that you are such an asshole.”

I laugh. I can’t help myself.

Then comes another day, and another meaningless fight. What is it about? I no longer have any idea. Afterward, I drive myself to work, talking to myself all the way, replaying the argument, winning this time. Thinking of the words that will once and for all prove me right and him wrong. Chewing out the phone for daring to ring, even as I bring the receiver to my ear.

“All right! All right!” he growls. “I accept your damned apology.”

My assistant pokes her head in the door to see why I am laughing so hard.

Over dinner one night, I tell the children about how, years earlier, Terence and I watched a dramatic helicopter rescue of an injured skier in Glacier National Park. “That was the day Daddy locked the keys in the car,” I say.

“Mommy,” Terence says.

“Mommy what?” I ask.

“The day
Mommy
locked the keys in the car.”

“Daddy,” I say.

“Mommy,” he repeats.

Terry slaps his hand on the table.

“WHO locked the keys in the car?”

“Daddy.”

“Mommy.”

Georgia kicks the table.

“WHO locked the keys in the car?”