The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  But I had received the apology I wanted from the school—and that was enough. Just as the retribution meted out to Judson seemed fair and reasonable. However, when asked by a journalist on the Press Herald whether I took pleasure in his downfall—and the fact that he was now considered unemployable as a broadcaster and a writer—I said that you’d have to be a deeply malicious person to enjoy the collapse of another person’s career, even though that person had done you grievous personal injury.

  Was I feeling that saintly? Not really, just worn down by everything that had hit me in the last few months and also cognizant of the fact that—as Rita, my great public relations brain, so wisely noted—the best strategy right now was to be magnanimous, forgiving, and determined to vanish from the public eye. This is why I refused all other interviews—bar that with the Press Herald, as they were my local paper—and I also told assorted publishers and movie-of-the-week types that I had no interest in seeing my story between hard covers or on the small screen. I didn’t see what had happened to me as some great parable about sticking to your guns and telling the truth. Frankly, I saw it as a cataclysm that had ended my marriage, nearly terminated my career, and caused a disastrous ruction between myself and my son.

  But around three weeks after all the fallout from The Jose Julia Show had ended, the phone rang one morning and Jeff said hello. He sounded cautious, a little circumspect, and formal. But still, he was on the other end of the line. And he had phoned me.

  “I was just wondering how you were getting on,” he asked.

  “It’s been a curious couple of weeks.”

  “With a good outcome, though. I watched the show.”

  I said nothing.

  “I thought you did well, under the circumstances. And I was very touched when that Billy guy talked about how you only agreed to drive Judson to Canada out of fear of being turned in by him and being separated from me.”

  I chose my words carefully.

  “As a parent, you know how you will do just about anything for your children.”

  A pause. Then Jeff said, “Yes, I do know that.”

  Another pause. Then Jeff said, “Our minister cited you in a sermon a couple of Sundays ago—talking about the way you used that settlement money to set up the travel thing in Lizzie’s name, and how you also showed great courage in turning the other cheek. He glared at Shannon and me when he said that.”

  “I see.”

  “She’s still really mad at you for what you said in that interview.”

  “That’s her privilege. Are you still angry with me?”

  “I’m feeling . . . well . . . a bit guilty, I guess.”

  “I see.”

  “Is that all you can say, Mom?”

  “What else am I supposed to say?”

  “I’m sorry, okay? I should have believed you when you told me he’d blackmailed you. I didn’t. I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  Another pause.

  “I’ve got to go now,” he said. “I’m between meetings. I’ll call again soon.”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  He did phone around three weeks later—another tentative “Hello, how are you?” call, in which he made small talk and tried to act as if we had a normal relationship. At this point, it was early summer, and he asked what I’d be doing, and when I said that I’d agreed to teach summer school at Nathaniel Hawthorne High, he expressed surprise.

  “What else would I do?” I said. “I like teaching. I’m glad to have my job back. And, quite frankly, it fills the time productively.”

  “But surely, after everything that happened, you need some time out, a summer off.”

  “No, after everything that happened, I need to be teaching. And you and the family? Where are you going this summer?”

  “I’ve only got a week off—we’re probably going to spend it with Shannon’s family at Kennebunkport.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, refusing to fish for an invitation, even though it was less than an hour from Portland.

  “I’d ask you down, Mom,” he said, “but Shannon’s still pretty adamant—”

  “Fine,” I said quietly.

  “I’ve tried to talk her out of her position . . .”

  “Fine.”

  “I’m sure, in time, she’ll come around.”

  “Fine.”

  Another awkward pause.

  “You ever get down to Hartford?” he asked.

  “You know I don’t. But let me say this: if you’d like to get together with me, I’d be very pleased to see you.”

  “That’s good to know,” he said. “Thanks.”

  Since then, he’s been calling me once a week. Always from his office, always “between meetings,” but gradually the chill has started to lift. We’re not close, we don’t make each other laugh, we’re still terribly guarded, we’ve yet to sit down over a meal somewhere and talk. And though he keeps me up to date on the doings of my grandchildren, he still hasn’t broached the idea of me visiting them as yet, though he has dropped many hints that he’s still “in negotiation with Shannon” on this subject.

  “Just give me a little more time, Mom.”

  “Fine.”

  “It’s not fine. I don’t like it. I want it to stop. The problem is . . .”

  “I know what the problem is, Jeff.”

  I had, on one occasion, offered to apologize to her for the comments made—and, at Jeff’s urging, wrote her a very short note, in which I said that what I’d said during that interview was taken out of context, but if I had hurt her feelings, I was genuinely sorry. A few days after she’d received the letter, Jeff called, sounding harassed, saying that Shannon felt “the apology hadn’t gone far enough.”

  “What more could I have said?” I asked.

  “She felt you should have been more, well, uh, humble.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m just reporting what she said . . .”

  “The fact that I made the apology in the first place . . .”

  “I know, I know. And you’re right. Still . . .”

  The subsequent silence said it all. On the home front, my son was a weak, browbeaten man.

  “I will get her to agree to a visit,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will.”

  “Dad was here last week.”

  “I see.”

  “He came alone.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you at all in touch?”

  “Surely you know the answer to that question, Jeff.”

  But now, contact had been made by Dan—and I had slammed the door on it, refusing his offer of a lift down to Boston. But why salve the man’s conscience? I wasn’t ready to be “just friends” with him.

  Still, my residual anger toward Dan took second place to the realization that, at midday tomorrow, I finally might have to begin to accept that my daughter was truly dead.

  I couldn’t sleep. I got up at one point and walked down the corridor and stood in her room. It had long been stripped of its juvenilia. But I still could picture the big poster of the Ramones that dominated one wall when she was thirteen, to be replaced by Springsteen and R.E.M. And there was the old 1980s boom box that she traded in for a nice stereo system she bought with babysitting money, and on which she first played me Nick Cave (“He’s my kind of depressive”). And then there were the stacks of books everywhere. She was always such a fanatical reader, with strong opinions about everything—and might have been the only person I ever met who actually finished Gravity’s Rainbow. She was always suggesting new writers to me. She talked about DeLillo long before Underworld came on the scene, and was reading tough-guy crime writers like Pelecanos when they were still obscure. I was always hopeful she might try her hand at fiction—she certainly talked about it enough. But the necessary discipline eluded her. Just like happiness eluded her.

  Tears started cascading down my face.

  My daughter is dead.

/>   Four words I had refused to contemplate for all these long, terrible months.

  I so wanted to speak to Margy now. But that was impossible. Margy had died seven weeks ago—and yet the idea that she too was no more was still hard to accept. Even though I’d been with her at the end. Another late-night call—from Rita, in this instance, around midnight in early September. She spoke in a near whisper, telling me that she was in a corridor at New York Hospital, where Margy had been rushed earlier that day.

  “I’ve just spoken to her doctor. It’s just a matter of days now. The cancer is everywhere. They’re keeping her drugged up on morphine, because there’s nothing more they can do. If you want to see her, I’d come tomorrow. They really don’t know if she’ll last another night.”

  I caught the first plane out the next morning and was at the hospital by nine. Margy was in a private room on the sixteenth floor. Her bed faced a window that was open to the midtown skyline. The back of the bed had been cranked up so she could look out. She was wizened, tiny, her skin the color of ash, her hair nothing but wisps. The cancer had triumphed—and had reduced her to this tiny denuded creature, dwarfed by the tubes and medical monitors that surrounded her. A plunger had been placed in her right hand. It was attached to a tube that fed her a self-administered dose of morphine whenever the pain became too unbearable. As I approached the bed, I expected her to be at least semi-comatose. But she was awake—and surprisingly lucid.

  “Nice view, isn’t it?” she said as I pulled up a chair by the bed.

  “Great view.”

  “My town. But you know what the real irony of every New York life is? Everyone who’s ever done time in this city thinks they have made some sort of impression on it. The truth is: nobody ever makes a lasting impression here. It’s all . . . ephemeral.”

  “Isn’t that the case with most lives everywhere?”

  She shrugged. And said, “I’m not going to do a summing up—or any of that ‘final curtain’ shit. It’s too depressing to think how little I’ve accomplished.”

  “Hey, that’s stupid talk—and you know it.”

  “I do stupid talk well. Just as I’m now very aware of the fact that life always leaves you feeling gypped. And now . . .”

  “I thought you were going to avoid a summing-up.”

  “Allow me a little self-pity, please.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  She managed a small laugh, then suddenly clenched over in pain and pressed down the plunger. There were more spasms of pain. They racked her completely. I was about to run for the nurse, but the morphine kicked in, and she stopped convulsing, the drug deadening everything, including her ability to speak. She looked up at me, glassy-eyed, and said nothing.

  I sat with her for the next half hour, her hand in mine, her eyes as frozen as a lake in winter, the bright morning light streaming through the window, bathing the room in a harsh, fluorescent glow. A nurse showed up. She checked the monitors, shone a little penlight in Margy’s eyes, checked the level of morphine, and depressed the plunger again.

  “Would you mind waiting outside for a few minutes? I need to change her diaper.”

  My friend is dying in a diaper. Life isn’t just randomly cruel. It is also absurd.

  I went downstairs and stepped outside the hospital and lit up a cigarette, and thought about the inanity of smoking while, sixteen floors above me, Margy was dying of lung cancer. But the cigarette tasted wonderful, the nicotine had its balming effect, and I vowed I wouldn’t smoke another one until I got back to Maine late tonight. I walked across the road to a little coffee shop, sat down at the counter, ordered a mug of coffee, indulged in a Danish, read a copy of The New York Times that somebody had left on the stool next to mine, checked my watch, noticed that forty-five minutes had passed, and decided to go back upstairs to Margy’s room—and the continuing deathwatch.

  But when I reached it, I found it empty—a cleaner mopping up the floor while, nearby, a technician began to dismantle all the machinery that had surrounded the now-vanished bed.

  “Where’s my friend?” I asked.

  The cleaner looked up from her mop.

  “She passed,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Passed. Died.”

  It didn’t register at first.

  “And they took her away just like that?” I asked.

  “How it’s done ’round here,” she said, turning away from me to continue mopping. Without thinking, I hurried into the hall, almost running right into the nurse who’d come into Margy’s room earlier.

  “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Your friend . . .”

  “So fast?”

  “Cardiac arrest happens in a flash. Especially in terminal cancer cases. She felt nothing. It was very quick, very clean.”

  No, it wasn’t clean, I felt like shouting. The cancer had pillaged and savaged her for months. There was nothing clean about it at all.

  But I said nothing. Because I was suddenly crying. For the next fifteen minutes I could do nothing but cry. The nurse led me to a little room with an institutional-looking sofa and an armchair. She sat me down in the armchair and said she’d be back in a few minutes. This was obviously “the grief room,” as there was a box of tissues on the adjoining table and a pile of pamphlets with titles like “Letting Go” and “Coping with Loss.” I took in all these details as the sobs intensified. Just as another thought crossed my mind. Not a thought, actually, more of a remembrance. A visit to New York over a decade ago—and Margy bringing me to hear La Bohème at the Met. She was teary-eyed at the end. I found the production strangely cold. On the way out she said, “You seemed totally unmoved.”

  “Oh, it was beautifully sung and all that. The problem for me is that I’ve never really bought into that high romantic idea of doomed love.”

  “I wasn’t crying because of that,” Margy said. “I was crying because Rodolfo and all the others are in another part of the room when Mimi dies. I was crying because Mimi dies alone . . . which is probably how I’ll die.”

  “Oh, come on . . .” I said.

  “Allow me a little self-pity, please . . .”

  Her exact words at the time. Her final words to me. And she did die alone—because I went out for a cigarette.

  “Or because the nurse kicked you out,” Dad said when I called him later that morning and started weeping on the phone.

  “If I had come back after five minutes . . .”

  “She would still have been drugged up on morphine and oblivious to whether or not you were there. So please stop this now. You’ve been through enough recently.”

  Dad was the first person to call me all those months ago after The Jose Julia Show to congratulate me for “sticking it to him” and to say, “Thanks to your friend Billy, that man is finished and you’re vindicated.”

  When I sounded subdued, he said, “I know: Lizzie’s there in your head right now.”

  “That she is.”

  “And you have to accept that you’ll never be happy until Lizzie’s found. How could you be otherwise?”

  How well he always read me. Every time we spoke now, I could always sense him gauging my mood, trying to figure out whether I was down or having a reasonable day, if I was feeling particularly vulnerable, if I needed advice or simply a sympathetic ear into which I could rant. He was the first person I called after Margy died. And tonight, once the news came from Boston about finding the body in the Charles, Dad was the first person I phoned as soon as the conversation with Dan ended.

  “This is difficult news,” I said before giving him the rundown on Leary’s call to me. When I finished, he said, “I don’t want to sound absurdly optimistic, but a relatively common necklace isn’t prima facie evidence that—”

  “Dad, what do you really think?”

  Silence. Then, “It sounds bad.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think too.”

  “Maybe it’s best if you go down there without much hope.”

  “That
’s what I’m planning to do.”

  “I could join you, if you could use some support.”

  “The detective also called Dan—and he’s coming. He even offered to drive me down. I said no.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  “But you don’t think it’s right?”

  “Did I say that?” he asked mildly.

  “No, I was just trying to read between the lines.”

  “You are perfectly right to still be angry at him. Just as you are perfectly right to doubt your decision to be angry at him.”

  “Now you are reading between the lines.”

  “True. Why don’t you see how you feel when you see him tomorrow. If he offers lunch and you still feel angry, turn him down.”

  “He might not even offer lunch.”

  “That’s true. And changing the subject: how are plans progressing for Paris?”

  “The flight’s booked for the night of the twenty-sixth—and I’ve arranged the little commuter flight from Burlington to Boston at four p.m. that day, so I’ll be able to stay with you until then.”

  “Paris for six months. I am envious.”