The Cost of These Dreams

by Wright Thompson

  Something else has happened since Katrina.

  When Payton arrived in New Orleans, he lived in the suburbs, where things are scrubbed, orderly, and boring. Then his marriage failed in public, and he lost his team for a year, and along the way, he fell in love with the city, as the city has fallen in love with him. A year ago, he bought a condo in Uptown, eight blocks from Clancy’s Restaurant and six blocks from St. Charles Avenue. Now he’s got a goldendoodle named Murphy, and he likes to walk Murphy up Webster to St. Charles, turning left through the park. A long row of houses fronts the park, with the tall oak trees and walking paths as a lawn, and he and his dog enjoy the shade and air. People leave him alone. Sometimes he stops for a sno-ball. At night he loves Clancy’s, the clubhouse for the neighborhood. The women who answer the phones have a list of customers who are always to be given a table, regardless of how packed the reservation book might be. Payton, like any sensible person, orders the panned veal atop the pasta—Veal Annunciation, it’s named—and looks forward to dessert. “I want the frozen peppermint ice cream that sat in the back of the freezer,” he says.

  Ten years ago, Sean Payton arrived in New Orleans young and hungry, willing to do anything to reach his dreams. Some of those dreams have come true, and some of them have not. Whatever happens now, a strange thought occurred to him not long ago: He will never sell that condo.

  Some part of him will always consider New Orleans home.

  * * *

  —

  Steve Gleason is 38. Rivers Gleason is 3. They’re both kids.

  Every Tuesday, they do something fun together. They call it Dude’s Day. The plan today is a big warehouse filled with trampolines named Sector6. They’ve been before, and Rivers refused to go off the trapeze. That’s the goal for today.

  “Awesome ain’t easy,” a painting in Steve’s living room declares. Rivers is at his swimming lesson up the street. Gleason is getting his trach hole swabbed with hydrogen peroxide. It hurts, but he doesn’t complain. The light in the big windows makes his house open and airy, the bookshelves a window into the broad and diverse life being crushed by his disease: The Goldfinch, Catch-22, The Lords of Discipline, The Road, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book about the town brutalized by United Fruit. Blair Casey, a former college athlete who works for Steve, mixes coffee with coconut water and injects it into the feeding tube.

  Casey loads Steve into the front seat of the big black custom van—black rims and tinted windows—and locks him in place. They pick up Rivers, who bounds across the lawn and into the back seat.

  “You wanna go to Sector6?” Steve asks.

  “Trapeeeeeze!” Rivers yells. “I be a good boy!”

  Casey straps Steve’s head in place for the bumpy ride, and Rivers gets quiet in the back seat. He pays close attention whenever his dad needs help; even at 3, he is aware that something is different. The graphs and gauges on the back of Gleason’s chair give constant readings, and Rivers watches them too: H2O, 19.7, Peak Flow, 41.5.

  “Rivers, what’s our rule on Dude’s Day?” Steve asks.

  “No crying!” Rivers says.

  “No crying or we have to go home,” Steve says.

  Casey drives up a ramp, onto the interstate, rain pelting the windshield. Steve uses his eyes to call up a playlist called Rivers’ Sing Along Songs, and he hits play.

  “Put me in, Coach, I’m ready to play!” Rivers sings.

  Three-year-olds sound like they’re drunk when they’re singing. It’s hilarious and impossibly cute. A Lion King song comes on.

  “I just can’t wait to be king!” Rivers sings.

  The third song is “Release,” by Steve’s favorite band, Pearl Jam.

  “Rivers, who’s singing?” Steve asks.

  “Eddie Vedder!” Rivers says, a grinning stick of 3-year-old dynamite, vibrating with an energy that every one of Steve’s former teammates would recognize. Today, Rivers will try to confront his fear. He wants to jump off the trapeze, flying through the air toward a pool of foam blocks, looking oddly like a grown man laying out for a punt.

  * * *

  —

  Rivers Gleason wasn’t alive during Hurricane Katrina. He wasn’t alive when his dad blocked a punt on Monday Night Football, and he wasn’t alive when the Saints won the Super Bowl. Those things are just words to him, stories he’ll hear as he gets older. He doesn’t understand them, just as he doesn’t understand that his father has a fatal disease. There are other things he needs to learn that his father might not be around to teach. That bothers Steve, who has solved the problem as best as he can. On a hard drive at the house, there is a series of five-minute videos, hundreds of them, for when Steve dies and Rivers needs a daddy. Little tutorials, things like how to whistle, or change a flat tire, big things like drugs and alcohol, or what to do when your heart is broken—things a son should learn from his father. Things that need to be passed along, in stories and code, when one generation takes over where the previous one left off. Rivers Gleason, like his hometown, must learn from the past and remain unafraid.

  * * *

  —

  Sector6 is a personal injury attorney’s chicken dinner. Kids fly through the air, doing flips and landing akimbo, slinging dodgeballs at one another’s faces. Rivers gets inside and tears off through the trampolines.

  “Rivers, are you gonna do the trapeze?” Steve asks. “Are you ready?”

  Rivers nods.

  “Me, too,” Steve types.

  Rivers does backflips into pits of foam blocks, and he dances to the music. Saints fans ask Steve for photos, and he takes the time to type out hellos to them. One young boy comes over and says, “No white flags.”

  Gleason suddenly struggles to breathe.

  “You need to cough?” a friend asks, calling to Casey to come help. As Casey gets the electronic machine to help Steve cough, the friend rubs Steve’s arm, talking softly, reassuring him. Steve is shaking.

  “Coming right now,” his friend says.

  Casey hooks up the coughing apparatus, and Steve returns to normal.

  “Rivers,” he says, “I want to watch you on the trapeze.”

  He’s been pushing him, encouraging. Last time, Rivers made it as far as the platform in the air, looking down at the pit before refusing to jump. Today Rivers heads up and stands in line.

  “He’s going up the steps,” Casey says.

  Steve motors his wheelchair so he can get a clear view. He is laughing with his eyes, and Rivers grabs the rope and jumps off into space, flying through the air. He did it. Climbing out of the foam, he runs straight to his dad, slapping his right hand.

  “Did you see me?!” Rivers asks.

  “Nice job, Rivers,” Steve types. “The trapeze isn’t scary anymore. I’m so proud of you.”

  The car ride back is quiet. Rivers is exhausted, falling asleep, while Steve watches him with his tablet’s camera. One day Rivers will understand. People will tell him stories about his father, a brave man who did so many things. Big things, like changing the way people with ALS live their lives, and small things, like blocking a punt. Rivers’s eyes flutter and close.

  “Done,” Steve says.

  The van rumbles over the awful New Orleans roads, passing the bayou and the levee wall. Mardi Gras music plays on the stereo. At the house, Casey carries Rivers to bed, the boy’s sleeping head resting on his shoulder. Then he goes back outside to unload Steve. Rivers wakes up and tiptoes around the corner, slipping back to the van to get his blanket, which he can’t sleep without. Steve sits in the space between the foyer and the kitchen. Casey is mixing the shake for lunch. Now it’s Steve’s turn to sleep, his eyelids heavy. Rivers sees that his dad’s head has fallen forward, hanging limp. And after looking around and seeing Casey at the counter, he decides to handle this all by himself. Rivers puts his tiny palm on his father’s forehead and gently pushes him back into pl
ace.

  AUGUST 2015

  The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived On

  Ted Williams’s ambitions shaped his legacy but wrecked his relationships. If his lone surviving child has her wish, the family’s cycle of suffering might at last be broken.

  Claudia Williams found comfort wearing her dad’s favorite red flannel shirt. It smelled like him. Time frayed the threads, pulled apart seams, and years ago the shirt went into a safe. She keeps many things locked away. In a closet next to her garage, her father’s Orvis 8.3-foot, 7-weight graphite fly rod leans on a wall. His flies are safe, too, and she can see his hands in the bend of the knots. She feels closest to him fishing but has been only once or twice since he died. Nearby, pocketknives rust at their hinges. His old leather suitcase is there, too, in its final resting place after years of trains, ballparks, and hotel rooms.

  Her husband, Eric Abel, comes home from running errands. He’d been through the safes and the storage unit they keep filled to its 10-foot ceiling, hunting for the flannel shirt. She is laughing in the kitchen, a lazy Sunday morning. Eric takes a breath and enters the room. “First of all, Claudia,” he says slowly, “let me apologize; I don’t know what we’ve done with that shirt.”

  Suddenly quiet and hiding now, she says, “I don’t wanna think about it,” as one more piece of her father slips away.

  * * *

  —

  She is hiding from loss and from regret, hiding from her family’s past, which is always operating the strings of her daily life. Whenever she lets herself go back, she ends up at the same place: the beginning. Ted Williams’s mother gave him nothing but a name, and as soon as he grew old enough, he gave it back, changing Teddy on his birth certificate to the more respectable Theodore. He longed to rewrite the facts of his life. His father drifted on the edge of it. His mother, May, was obsessed with her work at the Salvation Army, abandoning her own kids, and the descriptions of his lonely life exist in many accounts, most notably biographies by Ben Bradlee Jr. and Leigh Montville. San Diego neighbors would watch Ted and his younger brother, Danny, 8 and 6, sitting alone on the front porch late into the night. The anger that dominated both their lives started there, on those lonely evenings outside 4121 Utah Street, waiting for their mom to come home. May Williams never saw her son play a major league game, even though she lived through his entire career. When she died, 11 months after he hit a home run in his final at-bat, he went through her things and gathered up family photographs. He tore them into pieces and threw the pieces away.

  That was 1961, and he never wanted family to hurt him again. He lived most of the next 41 years as a kind of island. He died in 2002 and is frozen at 7895 East Acoma Drive in Scottsdale, Arizona. Claudia and her brother, John-Henry, supported cryonics; older half sister Bobby-Jo wanted her father cremated and sued her siblings in the courts and fought them in the media. Ted Williams gave his three children the name he’d made famous, and when he died, their battle turned a solemn passing into a late-night punch line. Death exposes everyone, and it exposed Ted Williams, stripping away the armor he’d created as a boy on Utah Street, revealing what he’d tried so hard to hide: He came from damaged people, and he left damaged people behind.

  * * *

  —

  Claudia Williams, now 43, rarely tells anyone about her relation to Ted Williams. Her co-workers at the Crystal River, Florida, medical center where she’s a nurse are only now finding out on their own. It was two years before her best friend knew.

  If people do know, she tests them constantly, to make sure they don’t like her for her dad’s name. She recently stopped to pick up swim fins from a workout partner, and he said he was having an office party and invited her in. Instead, she sat in her car in the parking lot, stewing, wondering whether he just wanted to show off “Ted’s daughter,” and finally she drove away, enraged, leaving the fins behind.

  Upon occasion, she curses exactly like he did, stringing together blistering oaths, a kind of profane poetry: “that whore of a bitch fucking cunt of a bimbo,” say, of a nurse who spoke to reporters about the family. Claudia is beautiful and familiar, her face a combination of her mother’s Vogue model cheekbones and her father’s all-American jaw. When she is up, laughing with a goofy smile and light in her eyes, you cannot get close enough to her, and when she is down, spiraling into a darkness only she can see, you cannot get far enough away. With no children of her own, she’s destined to remain a daughter. She’s young because her dad was much older than her mom—Ted, the eternal player, tossed Dolores Wettach a note across the first-class cabin of an international flight, introducing himself simply as a fisherman—starting Claudia’s lifelong struggle to hold tight to something slipping between her fingers. “I hate time,” she says.

  She lives in a sprawling Florida community popular among retirees whose first resident and primary pitchman was her father. He’s everywhere. Her country club membership number is 9. Every day, she drives on Ted Williams Memorial Parkway. She turns from West Fenway Drive onto Ted Williams Court in her black Acura, the Euro club music rattling the rearview mirror.

  “You should look at the lyrics,” she says as the stereo plays. The songs bleed together into a singular anthem of loneliness and loss. This will be my monument / This will be a beacon when I’m gone / You’re everywhere I go / I promise I won’t let you down / It’s not over, not over / Not over, not over, yet. The lines speak to the two competing desires governing her life: She wants to be close to a father she didn’t really know for much of his life, but she wants to escape his shadow too.

  She left home at 16, moving to Europe to finish high school, working as a nanny, training for triathlons, living in France, then Switzerland, then Germany, any place where nobody’d ever heard of Ted Williams. In letters home, she described being adrift, telling her dad she felt “like a lost athlete looking for a sport.” She cooked hot dogs in a gypsy circus. Her father offered her money, but she refused it. In this stubbornness, she found the emotional stability sought but never discovered by her brother, who died 11 years ago from leukemia. “I surpassed John-Henry quicker because I got away,” she says.

  She never asked for anything. Her dream was to attend Middlebury College in Vermont. When she didn’t get in, Ted called the governor of New Hampshire, who pulled some strings. The reconsidered acceptance letter made her weep with rage because she knew what had happened. She told Middlebury no. Her friends at Springfield College didn’t realize her father was Ted Williams until she asked some guys who played baseball to teach her to throw; the Red Sox had requested she toss out a first pitch as a surprise to her father, and she didn’t want, as she told them, “to throw like a girl.” Her brother lobbed one wild, but Claudia kicked her leg and delivered a strike. Ted beamed, a reward she seldom got while he lived and craves now that he’s gone.

  “I think I’m just looking for him to still be proud of me,” she says.

  She trained for a triathlon and then devoted her life to making the 2000 Olympic team, falling just short. Around 2005, she started playing tennis with some older ladies in the neighborhood. Then the Williams kicked in: She moved up the USTA ratings, 3.5 to 4.0; then, she says, she became the best 4.0 in Citrus County, then the top-ranked 4.0 player in the state. Hooked, she decided to play at the local junior college. For a season, at 37 years old, she competed against teenagers. After her father died, she received a sponsor’s exemption to run the Boston Marathon in his memory; she turned it down, trained, and ran fast enough to qualify on her own. “I don’t know who has to say, ‘You did well,’” says Abel, who was the Williams family attorney when he met Claudia.

  When she decided to be a lifeguard, she completed the most advanced open-water rescue training. After deciding to make jewelry, she took classes to become a master craftsman. She learned how to sky-dive, and after having to deploy the backup shoot on her first solo jump, she went back up again: I’ll show you, sky! Her workout routines—miles i
n a pool and on a treadmill, hours daily in a gym—break the alpha dogs who try to hang with Ted’s daughter. She makes them earn their story. In the past few years, she studied nursing, and even that hasn’t been enough, so now she’s studying biology and statistics, prerequisites for graduate school. Her top choice is Duke, and in her application essay she talked about her life as a frustrated athlete without a sport. She talked about the influence of her father, but she never mentioned that the father in question was Ted Williams.

  * * *

  —

  This story began two years ago, when I reached out to Claudia about meeting at her home in Hernando. The timing never worked for her because she struggles to look past her obsessions: nursing school and a book she wrote about her father, which started as a stocking stuffer about lessons she learned and turned into a cathartic exploration of the person she’s still trying to be. Finally she said yes. The first visit lasted a week in the fall of 2014, and we made paella and she told funny stories about her dad—he’d call the public phone in European hostels and boom at unsuspecting travelers, “Is CLAUDIA WILLIAMS there? This is her FATHER! OL’ TED WILLIAMS!”—and she got melancholy later and said, “We need to laugh more.”

  She let me poke through the family’s filing cabinets, its safes, her dad’s hospital records, anything I wanted—she could prove, she said, that her father agreed to be frozen. We talked for hour upon hour. To her, the many accounts of Ted Williams are all fatally flawed because most people didn’t understand that the two famous acts of his life—ballplayer and fisherman—occurred only because he was hiding from the third and final act of his life: fatherhood. He’d been raised by an erratic and absent mother. He had a cousin who was murdered by her husband, and a criminal brother who died young and angry.