The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  The next day was bright, and my father’s wife suggested we go for a walk out on a nearby breakwater to a lighthouse. A soft breeze blew and sailboats floated in the shimmering sea. The stone breakwater was much longer than I had expected—nearly a mile out to the lighthouse. There were wide and deep crevices between the unevenly spaced rocks. It was difficult to get a rhythm walking, particularly for the kids. But they raced ahead anyway, with D and my father’s wife trying to catch up. I fell back with my dad.

  His walking seemed labored and slow. I thought he was merely taking care of where he was putting his feet, but that kind of caution seemed uncharacteristic of the man I used to know. He asked after my mother, the way he always did when we spoke on those rare occasions over the phone—“How’s your mama?”

  When we were growing up he never referred to her as “your mama,” but it is the term he has always used when asking about her over the past twenty-five years.

  When we got to the lighthouse it was locked up tight. We started back. My son began to hang back with my father; soon the distance between us was getting greater and greater. I kept looking over my shoulder. Then a woman came running up. “The man back there, is he with you? He fell.” I went racing back.

  My father was up on his feet; two women were helping him. He was walking slowly, but he seemed confused, and he was beginning to arch his back, putting his weight on his heels. D and I took over for the women and walked with him. My father’s arching became more pronounced and we called an ambulance. We sent my son running down the long breakwater to wait for the paramedics. We were still nearly a half mile out on the rocks.

  Soon my father’s back was completely stiff, the arching even more severe. If we hadn’t been holding him up he would have fallen straight back. With his full weight pushing back on our arms, he was extremely heavy. A man came and took over for D, who went to try to calm my father’s wife while simultaneously holding on to our daughter so she wouldn’t fall into the deep spaces between the rocks. As our progress slowed, my father’s head cleared and he kept up a strangely upbeat conversation with the man helping us. It was typical of him; he was having what I assumed to be a stroke, and yet he was chatting away to a stranger about where the man was from, and who my father knew from that part of Pennsylvania, and what the man did for a living. I’ve often wondered if my reticence with strangers grew out of a reaction to my father’s more gregarious efforts, efforts that to me as a child seemed so at odds with the more volatile man I knew at home.

  He tried hard to appear completely normal as we struggled along the breakwater, unaware that his body was arching drastically back. His hips had begun to lock and his already awkward steps had become even more labored. It became more and more difficult to keep him moving toward help. Eventually we sat him down on a small step. Then my eight-year-old son arrived with the paramedics.

  We followed behind the ambulance to the hospital and spent several hours waiting while various tests were performed. No cause was immediately evident, and my father began to regain normal movements and clarity. The doctor said that it was perhaps a TIA—a transient ischemic attack—a kind of mini-stroke, but that he couldn’t be sure.

  I had to be back in New York for work the next day. If this had been D’s father, there would have been no question that she would have stayed, no matter the consequences. But it spoke to the distance and lack of pull that had grown to define our relationship that after consulting the doctors and his wife several times, we ultimately left my father at the hospital, where they were to keep him overnight and then send him home.

  When I went to say good-bye, I pulled back the curtain in the hospital room and he sprang up in bed, like a jack-in-the-box. He broke into a wide and startling grin. It was a desperate smile, a salesman’s smile. It was so typical of him, and it broke my heart and made me love him. If either of us could have acknowledged the fear of the moment out on the jetty, or the bizarre intimacy it had created between us and cast over the visit, perhaps there would have been an opening to move closer. But instead, my self-conscious withholding and his mask of bravado left me shaking my head, at both of us.

  We spoke a few times in the days immediately after, to make sure everything was all right with his health and to relive the more pleasurable aspects of our visit. Sometime later he called and said that he and his wife would be coming to New York and would love to see the kids, and us, but their trip never materialized and we haven’t made it back to Maine.

  As D’s father and I stepped out of Dr. Freud’s house and onto Schwarzspanierstrasse, the sky had begun to cloud over, and there was a sting in the winter wind. I wondered how much transference Freud might have detected in the mixture of deference and offhanded impatience with which I treated Colm as we squabbled over which direction to head to catch the tram.

  On our last full day in Vienna, I woke before dawn and while everyone slept, I walked out. In the deserted gardens of Maria-Theresien-Platz, I saw a lone man standing up in a pruned tree, posing like a statue. I wanted to speak to him, to ask what he was doing, and how long had he been up there, but I didn’t. I watched him for some time, until finally he moved his arm. I wandered down to Stephansdom Cathedral and walked in on the dawn Mass, being said in the first side chapel, beside the main entry. I passed Mozart’s house again and walked into a baroque church where I sat for a few silent minutes, alone in the last pew. Outside, I passed Kleines Café, where D and I had had coffee the night before.

  It was when we had left there that we strolled into the Hotel Sacher. While D ordered a drink in the Blaue Bar, I excused myself to the bathroom but went instead to the front desk to get us a room. I walked back into the bar and dropped the key on the table, and D followed me up to the third floor. We made love with the glow of the opera house shining a golden light over us.

  When I walked back in the apartment after my early-morning stroll, everyone was at the breakfast table.

  “Where have you been, luv?” D asked.

  “Never you mind,” Margot broke in. “Leave the man some privacy, he’s had enough of us all by now.”

  Surprisingly, she wasn’t correct in her analysis, but I appreciated not having to explain myself.

  “Now, Andrew,” Colm started, “I don’t know what you’ve got planned for today, but tonight I am taking us all out to a Heuriger.” Colm had been trying to drag us to one of Vienna’s traditional—and tourist-infested—wineries up in the hills on the edge of the Vienna woods for the entire trip.

  “Now, there’s no use arguing, Andrew, my love.” Margot shook her head. “He has his mind made up and we are going to go. And we’ll just enjoy it as best we can,” she said, patting my arm.

  I studied the public transportation map, and when night fell, we headed on our usual tram toward the center of town. We switched at the Volkstheater to the same tram that had led Colm and me astray on our way to Freud’s house, and we began to climb the hills out of town. The tram was crowded with late rush-hour commuters heading home. Then an announcement was made over the loudspeaker. Our tram was being taken out of service. People grumbled, and we were deposited on the side of a dark road on a steep incline.

  “Perhaps we should have taken a taxi,” Margot said quietly, “just this once.”

  Ten minutes later another tram arrived and we climbed aboard. After a while, Colm discreetly asked a fellow passenger which was the stop for the famous Heuriger.

  “This next stop,” the woman replied.

  As the station approached everyone began to rise and squeeze toward the door.

  When the tram stopped I heard myself say, “No,” in a clear, strong voice. “It’s not this stop. We need to go two more.”

  “Are you sure, luv?” D asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Margot looked at me, then at her husband.

  D sat down, so did our daughter, and then Margot. Colm bit his tongue. The tram went on, up the hill. No one spoke.

  “This is it,” I said when we arrived at a
n unlit corner across from a gas station. We were the only ones to get off the tram. “It’s two blocks up that hill.”

  And to all our great relief, it was.

  “That a boy, Andrew!” Colm shouted, patting me on the back. “Never doubted you for a second.” He of course had no belief in my navigational abilities at this point, but he had remained silent and demonstrated faith nonetheless.

  Through a cobblestone courtyard, under a vine-covered trestle above, we entered a low and long room with blond-wood-paneled walls and hard wooden booths. There was a man playing an accordion by the fireplace, at the far end of the room. There was no busload of tourists, as I had feared. Only a few of the tables were filled, with locals. A waitress dressed in a traditional Austrian dirndl came over and Colm ordered a few different carafes of the fresh wine from the most recent harvest that is the Heuriger’s specialty. D’s parents tasted and commented on the bouquet and flavor. The man playing the accordion took frequent breaks and visited the tables of the other patrons. He drank copious amounts of wine, moving slowly, with great and deliberate care, back and forth to the bar to refill his glass.

  We went across the courtyard and ordered from the small women behind the buffet counter—traditional cold cuts and pickled cabbages. We ate several kinds of salami that my son would have devoured.

  Eventually Colm got up to invite the accordion player to come over and sing us a song. For a long time the man didn’t come and we assumed that in his drunkenness, he had forgotten. But then there he was, on a stool at the end of our booth. Close up he looked like a bloated Robert Goulet, with a thick dark mustache and watery eyes. He spoke only German, but even in a language I didn’t understand, I could tell his words were formed with the extravagant care of a drunkard.

  Margot requested “Edelweiss,” from The Sound of Music. I wanted to crawl under the table.

  When the man began to sing, his voice was as rich and clear as it was thick and clouded when he spoke. My daughter, who was wearing her authentic Austrian dirndl bought by her granny and had begun to drift off to sleep with her head on my lap, now suddenly sat up.

  “Mommy, how does he know this song?” she asked in wonder, and stared at the musician as he pushed and pulled his accordion, closed his eyes, and emptied himself into a song he must have sung every night of his life.

  D’s parents swayed back and forth in unison and then began to sing along. Colm put his arm around his wife and she leaned into her husband, their eyes burning with unapologetic happiness.

  I took out my phone and snapped a photo of them across the table. It is slightly out of focus, but their eyes are clear. They’re sharing a look of such unguarded joy in each other. It’s a look that trumps all of the baggage that I know they carry after fifty years of marriage, and all the baggage that I don’t know about. At that moment, in their togetherness, they rose above all that life does to weigh people down.

  I looked at D and she smiled at me and tilted her head toward her parents, as if to say, “See that? It’s all worth it, this feeling right now, it’s worth it, isn’t it?” I smiled at her and looked down at the table. She touched my cheek, in acceptance of my awkwardness. I looked at her again and took her hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BALTIMORE

  “The Best Thing That You Could Do Is Show Up”

  Something had indeed happened in Vienna. My attitude toward the notion of family began to shift. Perhaps I was simply ready to see it, or experience it, differently.

  As with so many important emotional events in my life, there was no “aha” moment. It was something that happened gradually, without my knowledge, over time, but with a seeping certainty. The change that had silently begun in Vienna had manifested one day in my consciousness, and announced its presence, while I was down in Costa Rica, where I had the space and silence to hear its not-so-confident whisper of arrival. Perhaps I was indeed finally ready to take the plunge and commit to family and all it might offer besides responsibility and strain.

  Yet as I sat with the idea, there was still a voice in me, still a resistance, an ambivalence that flashed like a yellow light of warning just at the edge of my consciousness. But if it wasn’t the resistance to the idea of family, then what was it?

  This newly uncovered reluctance—which had been cloaked beneath my obvious misgivings—felt darker, more pervasive in my character, more embedded in who I was, than my more obvious and garden-variety resistance that I had been aware of up to now, no matter how difficult it had been to overcome. It felt like something I’d need help with, something this traveler couldn’t do on his own. Which explains why I’m on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line, heading south.

  When I press the black plastic button that says “push,” the silver metal door snaps open, slides across, and I see Seve standing two-thirds of the way down the aisle, holding on to the back of his seat as the train gathers speed and bounces from side to side down the track. He’s grinning, that Seve grin. We haven’t seen each other in nearly a year.

  We high-five, hug, and settle down. I begin to criticize his choice of seat, the time of day of our travel, the hotel he’s booked us into. This kind of snapping, caustic judgment I am engaging in is not an unusual way for us to begin; it’s the sort of childish behavior I am free to indulge in only with Seve. Usually he ignores me.

  “So who’d you invite?” He cuts right to the topic he knows I’m avoiding.

  “No one yet.”

  “Isn’t it about that time?”

  “I guess.”

  “Who are you going to invite?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, how many?”

  “I don’t really want anyone to come.”

  “Great,” he says.

  “Not many anyway.” I am looking past him, out the window at the back of small and run-down houses on the outskirts of Philadelphia. We roll past empty lots, garbage, stray dogs. I was in Philadelphia talking to a bunch of students about travel writing—they weren’t interested in what I had to say—and Seve was in Boston, where he had been on business. We are on our way to his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.

  “Well, from the sound of it, this wedding is going to be a lot of fun.”

  D has identified a subgroup of my friends, of whom Seve is the closest—men who are usually physically larger than me, often older than I am, and have a protective nature. “Your bodyguards,” she calls them. I had never noticed the pattern until she pointed it out. Perhaps I’m trying to re-create my relationship with my older brother—who was all those things for me growing up, before we drifted off into our own lives. I do know that I relax when I’m with any one of my “bodyguards” in a way I don’t with my other friends.

  Seve and I met not long after I moved to New York, when I lived in a top-floor apartment of a five-story walk-up on Bank Street in the West Village with an unobstructed view of the Empire State Building from my bedroom. I would often lie awake at night, waiting for the colored lights that lit the upper floors of the great building to snap off at midnight.

  I came of age in the year I lived on Bank Street. I had my first real girlfriend in that apartment. I got my first acting job while living there. And I began a pattern of drinking during that year—just a few blocks away at the Corner Bistro on Jane Street—that would soon grow to haunt me. I can’t walk past my old building without looking up and recalling the sense of wonder I knew at the time, when I felt like my life was just beginning.

  Seve’s girlfriend lived in the apartment across the hall from me, and he was a frequent visitor. We began to play tennis together and would sometimes go out to the racetrack at the Meadowlands or down to Atlantic City on a late-night whim. We drank a lot in the local bars. Occasionally we played golf. It was on the golf course that Seve got his nickname. A terrible golfer, he once hit what was for him a superb shot. Our playing partner, another good friend, called out, “Nice shot, Seve!” referring to the great Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros, whose charismatic style was dom
inating the golf world at the time. The nickname stuck. Over the years I’ve introduced Seve to scores of people who have no idea that Seve isn’t his real name—no one has ever questioned why a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Irish-American would have a name like Seve.

  And it was with Seve that I first went to Ireland, back in the mid-eighties, establishing a relationship with a place that would first influence and then change my life. And it was on that first trip to Ireland that I initiated the impulsive, serendipitous, and intuitive pattern of travel that would take me out into the wider world. We roamed around the west, drinking, getting lost, occasionally playing golf. We found a spot by the Burren that I still return to every few years.

  At some point Seve moved away for business, first to Los Angeles and then to Denver. I went through my dark times with drink, while he went through some searching of his own—we saw little of each other and spoke rarely. Eventually we found our way more regularly back into each other’s lives, but when he couldn’t come to my first wedding because of a dental convention, I never missed an opportunity to remind him of his failure to show up. I have told him that his being my best man in my marriage to D is his one shot at redemption.

  “I’m only getting married so you can set the past right, dude.”

  “Will you stop being an asshole?”

  Seve has booked us into a large, generic chain hotel downtown. I find such buildings soul-crushing in their lack of individuality, while he likes the transient invisibility of the herd that such places offer. He justifies this by saying they’re convenient.

  “Convenient to what?” Our train crosses the bridge over the Susquehanna River. “It’s downtown in a nothing neighborhood, with a bunch of conventioneers.”

  “Where do you want to go, Mr. Cheerful?”

  “What about Fells Point? I heard that was a good neighborhood.” While in Baltimore, I am supposed to be writing about the hidden charms of an overlooked American gem, a city on the rise.