We Are Not Ourselves (76 page)

Connell found a notebook from this later period, but there was no cache of revelatory notes, no raw materials from which he might fashion a second act for his father in death. There were only scribblings in a wavering hand and endless, unlabeled columns of numbers.

He sat back down and held the envelope before him. His fear of the verdict had waned as he read his father’s notebooks. He flashed with a juvenile hope that it contained something he urgently needed to hear, and now he hesitated to open it out of fear of disappointment. He wanted to preserve the seal of possibility on it; to reserve the option to project whatever he wanted onto it; to use his imagination to drag himself out of the hole he found himself in.

98

May 16, 1992

My dear son,

I wanted to take some time to tell you a few things that I think you should hear and that you can only hear from me, because a while ago I got some bad news, and to the extent that your knowing the things I will tell you here can answer questions you may have someday, I want you to know them. I don’t mean to insist on their importance by telling you them; I want my presence in your life when I’m gone to be a hand on the shoulder, not one around the throat; but if these things are important to you, then they are important to me to precisely that extent. I hope you can read my handwriting, let alone follow the train of my thoughts, which I fear may be hazier than I understand it to be at any given moment. I want to write this before the opportunity slips away.

I want you to remember me, but only if you want to remember me. I tried to be the kind of father that a son could recall with a full and open heart and not out of a sense of duty. The way you know me as your father is the way I most purely am. The understanding between us goes beyond words, and it is there that I live most fully, there and in the mental space I inhabit with your mother. It may be important to future generations to know the biographical facts of my life, to place some leaves on a bough of the family tree, but that is an abstract notion; you are the reason I am writing, you whom I feel in my blood and bones. I don’t want to leave you with questions. I want you to carry me around to the extent that it makes you happy to do so and gives you strength. I want you to forget me if you need to. I want you to suck the marrow out of life.

I am going to slow down. I am going to take a deep breath.

If you want to remember me, remember all the things we did together. The times we ran through words for your spelling bees, hours and hours of words. You used to sound like a monk chanting. We started before dinner, picked it up afterward, went until your bedtime. Remember the driving range, emptying buckets of balls. Remember the fishing trips, the canoe trips. The catches we had, the games we went to. Remember the radios we built together, the remote-controlled car. Remember the trips to the comic book store, the trip to Italy, the trip to Disney World. Remember us going through your homework together. All the times we went to the batting cages. When I taught you the names of birds and plants and animals. When we went bird-watching. The symphonies we went to. The plays. The Mobil games at the Garden. The time we watched the pole vault record get broken. The long-jump record. The mile-time record. The Knicks games. The wrestling matches. George “The Animal” Steele. King Kong Bundy. Andre the Giant. Hulk Hogan. The way I rubbed your back until you fell asleep. The Mets games we listened to on the radio together. The times we read together at night. The ground balls I hit you. The fly balls. The times I drove you all over the five boroughs and beyond to your friends’ houses, or picked you up from the train when you called. The trips to the museums. The trips to the barbershop. Getting our hair cut side by side. The way we went to get you your new baseball gear every year. The jogs we went on. The push-ups we did together. All the times we went out in the cold to throw the football around. The way we got you over your fear of the rope swing at the Coakleys’ summer house. The way we got you to jump off the train trestle. Making Easter eggs. The way you loved to watch the tablets dissolve and the cloud of dye suffuse the water. All the times we shoveled snow.

What matters most right now is that you hear how much I want you to live your life and enjoy it. I don’t want you to be held back by what’s happened to me.

I want you to know that I loved my work and did some good with it, and I believe that is worth more than any amount of money. I have not given you a lifetime of riches, but I have faith I have given you a father you can be proud of.

You will not have me there to speak to about the major events of your life, the ups and downs. But when the hardest times come, I want you to think of this:

Picture yourself in one of your cross-country races. It’s a hard pace this day. Everyone’s outrunning you. You’re tired, you didn’t sleep enough, you’re hungry, your head is down, you’re preparing for defeat. You want much from life, and life will give you much, but there are things it won’t give you, and victory today is one of them. This will be one defeat; more will follow. Victories will follow too. You are not in this life to count up victories and defeats. You are in it to love and be loved. You are loved with your head down. You will be loved whether you finish or not.

But I want to tell you: this is worth summoning some courage for. It doesn’t matter that you win; it matters that you run with pride, that you finish strong. Years will pass in an instant, I will be gone. Will you remember me on the sidelines, cheering for you? I will not always be here, but I leave you with a piece of my heart. You have had the lion’s share as long as you have lived.

When I am gone, I want you to hear my voice in your head. Hear it when you most need to, when you feel most hopeless, when you feel most alone. When life seems too cruel, and there seems too little love in it. When you feel you have failed. When you don’t know what the point is. When you cannot go on. I want you to draw strength from me then. I want you to remember how much I cherished you, how I lived for you. When the world seems full of giants who dwarf you, when it feels like a struggle just to keep your head up, I want you to remember there is more to live for than mere achievement. It is worth something to be a good man. It cannot be worth nothing to do the right thing.

The world is closing in on me. I have begun a race of my own. There will be no laurels waiting at the finish line, no winner declared. My reward will be to leave this life behind.

I want you never to forget my voice.

My beloved boy, you mean the world to me.

99

H
is mother was reading the newspaper over a cup of tea. There was a plate of cookies in front of her. She had set him up with a cup and saucer.

“Well?” she asked. “What did it say?”

He stood in the doorway. “I didn’t finish.”

“Why didn’t you finish? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Here, sit down.”

He made his way to the chair. He had the letter in his hand. He placed it on the table next to his saucer.

“Why didn’t you finish reading it?”

“I read it,” he said.

“You just told me you didn’t finish it.”

“I finished it, Mom.” He could feel his lip quivering. “Give me a second to think.”

“Fine. Tell me when you’re ready.”

He took a cookie in order to do something. They were the jelly-topped ones she liked, butter cookies. He took a bite but didn’t chew it. He let the little chunk dissolve on his tongue.

“I said I didn’t finish,” he said. “I didn’t mean the letter. I meant something else.”

“Didn’t finish what? What the hell are you talking about? You’re not making sense.”

“College,” he said. “I didn’t finish college.”

“Of course you did,” she said quickly, taking a cookie.

“I didn’t.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I didn’t finish college. I was a couple of classes short, and I just came home.”

She gave him a long, hard look and chewed slowly.

“You’re telling the truth now?”

“Why would I lie about this?”

“
You
tell
me
. You’ve been lying all along, apparently.” She took another cookie and ate it quickly. He did the same, to distract himself from the anxiety he was feeling.

“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell the truth.”

“You’re telling me you don’t have a diploma?”

“I don’t,” he said.

She sighed, put her face in her hands. “Is that why you’re working at that goddamned building?” Her voice was muffled a little from talking through her hands.

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know anymore.”

“It is,” she said, practically shouting. “That’s exactly why you are.” Her face had brightened, not with joy but with the glow of an insight. “That’s
exactly
why. That’s not the kind of kid I raised. I knew it. I knew something was fishy. I should have seen this myself. I don’t know how I missed it.”

She had a faraway look in her eye, as if she was figuring out the solution to several problems at once. Her expression opened up in a way he hadn’t seen in a while. The stress of the last years with his father had taken some of the fullness from her face and left lines in its place.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re angry.”

“Oh, you’re damned right about that,” she said. “I’m furious. Make no mistake. You had no right to do what you did. I don’t care if it’s your life. There were other lives involved here. Not just mine or your father’s. My father’s, my mother’s. Your father’s mother’s. A lot of people worked hard to put you in the position you were in. There was a lot of money involved.”

“I’ll pay it back.”

“What you will do,” she said sharply, “is quit that godforsaken job immediately and go back to that school and take the classes you need to take to graduate. I don’t care if I have to drive you to Chicago myself. I don’t
care if I have to sit there and watch you do your work like I had to watch you when you were a child. I don’t give a good goddamn what kind of reasons you thought you had for doing this. Let me tell you what those reasons were. They were bullshit, is what they were. You will get that degree, and you will make a real life for yourself. And I will be goddamned if you think anything will happen other than that.” She clapped her hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t see this. I knew this wasn’t you. I
knew
it.”

“What wasn’t me?”

“This ridiculous life you’re leading.”

“What if it is?”

“It’s not,” she said. “I carried you in my womb. I know a thing or two about you.”

“What’s wrong with the life I’m leading?”

“Don’t you get superior on me,” she said. “My mother pushed a mop around for thirty years. Understand? She cleaned up the vomit of snot-nosed kids. There’s nothing wrong with hard work. What’s wrong with it is that it isn’t your life. It never was. It belongs to someone else. You’ve been borrowing it. You’re simply not allowed to do that anymore, is all.”

“You can’t make me go back to school,” he said.

“I can, and I will, and I don’t care if you’re too thick to see I say that out of love. You can thank me when I’m dead and you’re not getting up to open the door for some goddamned punk. I will be damned if I let that happen to my son. I’m still your mother.”

100

W
hen Eileen heard that someone at work was selling a pair of tickets to the Mets game, she remembered the time, the spring before they moved, when Ed told her he’d bought tickets of his own at work. Back then she’d thought of it as a subterfuge, but now she liked to think of it as a troubled man’s authentic attempt to give his family a carefree afternoon, even if he couldn’t share in it fully with them. She had been hard on him in those days, before she understood what was happening. There was room to be easy on him now.

She bought the tickets and went alone, the empty seat for Ed. It was the first day of October 2000. The leaves had begun to turn. It was warm and a little cloudy—
A good day for baseball
, she could hear Ed saying. It was the last game of the season. She had been told that not much was at stake. The Mets would be in the playoffs no matter what happened. She arrived late and found the stadium packed. They were playing the Montreal Expos, whom she remembered as being not very good, but it hardly seemed to matter who the opponent was. A palpable energy hung in the air, the kind Ed would have loved, especially if he’d had Connell with him.

She placed her pocketbook and coat in the empty seat and settled in. A hot dog vendor made his breathless way up the aisle, stopping a few rows below her. She watched him cradle an open bun, deftly spear a floating dog, sift through the bulging apron pocket for change. She was hungry, but she felt too raw for his sweaty humanity, the workaday intimacy of the moment of transfer.

She had been trying to clear her mind of the interfering noise of everyday life, including the loud silences when she was alone in the house,
and this was a good place to do so. She kept her seat when the others stood. She didn’t clap along to the rhythmic thumping coming from the giant speakers, and she didn’t shout “Charge!” when everyone else did, but she allowed herself to siphon off some of their excess spirit.

The Mets held a narrow lead until the seventh inning, when the Expos tied it up. The score remained tied heading into the bottom of the ninth; after the third Met out, she slammed her hand down on her knee and looked at her bitten nails and realized that it mattered a great deal to her that they win this game, even if it didn’t matter to the team. It would have pleased Ed to see it head into extra innings: the decision of fate forestalled awhile, both teams working on borrowed time. The outcome’s importance rose with every out, as if all would be right in the world if the Mets prevailed.

She understood what had made these games so compelling to her husband: every day could bring the breaking of a new record, but the larger world would persist undisturbed. There was always news, even if little of it was newsworthy. Every pitch was different, every swing, and yet they all were variations on a familiar theme. The lines on the field, the fences around it, the neat geometry suggested that these, for a discrete but somehow infinite period, were the limits of the world.