The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Oh, yeah, that’s a nice area,” Seve says.

  “What about this hotel?” I point to a picture in my guidebook.

  “You have a guidebook, to Baltimore?”

  “Obviously I can’t depend on you to show me what I need to see.”

  He pulls out his cell phone to try to change our hotel reservation. “I really thought you’d be better at handling this whole wedding thing this time around.” Seve shakes his head as he dials.

  “Go to hell.”

  We end up in Fells Point. The inn we check into is just off the water. Built in the late eighteenth century, it has a nautical theme; framed drawings and photos of sailing vessels of days long gone line the walls. A ghost reputedly haunts the halls. The bumpy streets outside are paved with stones originally used as ballast in the holds of sailing cargo ships. The brick-covered Fells Point Square is out my window. A tugboat is tied up at the old Recreation Pier. One of the small white water taxis that ply the harbor is docked nearby. This used to be a rough-and-tumble neighborhood. You would never know it today. Like much of Baltimore, Fells Point has had a facelift. Now a camera-ready nook comprised of narrow and crooked lanes down by the waterfront, filled with art galleries and ice cream parlors, where local bars anchor corners, it is a poster child of urban renewal. We head just down the block, to Duda’s Tavern. There are brass lamps affixed to the bar and a life preserver ring mounted behind it, above the rows of whiskey bottles. The walls are covered with black and white photos of old Baltimore and sailing ships. Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life plays from the stereo.

  Our waitress comes over and introduces herself. Suzy is in her fifties, blond, stout, wearing no makeup and a loose green T-shirt, pleated black shorts, and sensible shoes. She’s friendly, not casual. Her manner is direct and uncomplicated. She takes our drink order and walks away. I take my napkin from the plastic tablecloth that is emblazoned all over with the black and orange symbol of the local baseball team, the Orioles.

  “How are the O’s doing, still suck?”

  “Hey, hey, we’re rebuilding.”

  “We should go to a game while we’re here.”

  “Planning on it.”

  Suzy returns and plunks down our drinks. “Ready?”

  “How are the crab cakes?” Seve asks.

  Suzy glares at him. “The best.”

  “I’ll take ’em. I’m from Baltimore, so I’ll know,” he says, and raises a finger of warning.

  “You won’t be disappointed.” She stares him down and then turns to me. “What about you, hon?” It’s the first time I’ve heard the famous Baltimore salutation.

  “How’s the steak?”

  Suzy shrugs, almost imperceptibly. “Good.”

  “I’ll have the cheeseburger, medium.”

  “Better,” she says, jabs her pen behind her ear, and pivots away.

  Seve nods after Suzy. “That’s Baltimore.”

  “Ordinary Pain” fades out and Stevie Wonder segues into “Isn’t She Lovely?”

  “So how did this come up—that you’re finally getting married?”

  I tell him the story of my son calling me on the phone to say he didn’t want to come back home to us and how it acted as the needle that punctured D’s and my balloon of habitual conflict, and that since our trip to Vienna, we have been getting closer.

  “One moment can just change everything, can’t it?” He’s reacting to my story, but I know he’s also talking about his own relationship that recently ended. “I just never saw it coming. I walk in and she says, ‘It’s over.’ I was just totally blindsided.”

  I was never a big fan of Seve’s recent ex. “Well, it’ll give you a chance to be alone for while.”

  “No one really wants to be alone,” he retorts, and then looks across at me. “Well, almost no one.”

  Our food arrives. The burger is huge and good.

  “I’ve always wanted to ask this,” Seve says. “The moment you met, what happened? Was there a moment when you said, ‘I’m not in control here’?”

  “Are you kidding me? I wasn’t in control for six months. I’m still not in control.”

  Seve has always idealized my relationship with D—the notion that love can just slam into a person and there’s nothing to do but follow it. As if love were something that happened to you and not a thing that requires the work we both know it does. But that Seve seems to recognize some nugget in my relationship with D that he holds in special regard always triggers in me a gratitude that D and I found each other. And it helps keep me moving forward.

  Later, when the check arrives, I give Suzy my credit card.

  “You know, when I heard you on the phone, when you told me, there was a real excitement in your voice,” Seve says. “I’m not saying you accept this whole marriage thing yet, but you actually seem to be embracing it.”

  I resist the impulse to push back at his assessment and simply nod instead. “Well, I mean it’s going to happen.”

  “And how do you feel about it?”

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s try that again. How do you feel about it?”

  Again, I shrug. “I mean, I love her. And I think it’s the right thing to do. And a good thing to do.”

  “But?”

  “There’s no ‘but,’ I just—” Suzy returns with my card and I sign the receipt with a pen she gives me advertising “Big Boys Bail Bonds—3 locations in Baltimore.”

  “Oh, how were the crab cakes?” I ask Seve.

  “Disappointing.”

  “Too late, I already overtipped her.”

  Just down the street from Duda’s we come upon a man in a plaid shirt and glasses, with tufts of unruly gray hair flying in the breeze. He’s standing beside a large blue telescope that’s pointed up into the night sky.

  “Have a gander, fellas,” the man says.

  “What are you looking at?” Seve asks.

  “Right now, Saturn.”

  I peek into the eight-inch Schmidt-cassegrain reflector telescope and there is what must be Saturn with what must be rings around it.

  Herman Heyn has been standing on this spot for approximately 2,255 nights—“That’s within a night or two,” he says, correcting himself. “I first came down on November 13, 1987.”

  I resist asking the obvious question of why. Herman is a Baltimore native from Waverly, a few miles north; he was a concrete inspector on the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, among other jobs, before he retired and started hanging out on street corners with his telescope. Beside him is his lady friend, Phyllis. They met under the stars, only recently, 118 nights ago, and have been hanging out together since. They’re tender with each other and have a humble, contented air about them, as if they understand something that Seve and I don’t. We drop a dollar in their bucket and cross the street.

  Seve returns to the subject of his ex.

  “But, Seve—is it ego, confidence, or heart that’s been hurt?”

  “I was totally blindsided.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  He’s silent a minute. “What’s the difference?”

  “It wasn’t your last best chance.”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “Hey, look at Herman and Phyllis,” I say. “You just need a good telescope.”

  We wander past a building with a self-congratulatory plaque out front, proclaiming that it was this very building where television history was made with the show Homicide. “My mother used to do marionette shows here when she was a teenager,” Seve tells me. Just up the street, the comforting smell of baking bread grows strong. Through an open back door we see a lone man in white apron and hat, baking in the kitchen of Bonaparte Breads. Out on the waterfront, the red neon of the Domino Sugar sign glows across the harbor. Our amble is without purpose; we say very little.

  Later, I call D.

  “I need your list, we need to get these invites out.”

  “Well, how many people are we going to have? You n
eed to decide,” I say.

  “My family is at least a hundred and fifty, before friends.”

  “I thought you were going to have like eighty or ninety.”

  “I don’t know how I can’t invite my cousins, but what I was thinking is that maybe . . .”

  This goes on for a while, different permutations and possibilities. D agrees that maybe all the cousins are too many; maybe we can keep it to two rings of extended family. But then how could she face her relations down in Cork? They had invited her to a christening.

  Eventually I give up. “I mean, these conversations are ridiculous, because you know you’re just going to go back to the original idea because it’s all you can do, which is why you came up with it first.”

  “Which is?”

  “Invite everybody. Throw it against the wall and hope it works out.”

  “Aw, thanks, baby!”

  “So, are we going to go to Mozambique?” I have a potential writing assignment there, and we’ve been talking about its doubling as a honeymoon.

  “Well, what’s the deal with malaria?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “I mean, they got it. We should just take Malarone.”

  “I’m not taking that poison, and neither should you.”

  “Well, it’s better than the other option.”

  “Which is?”

  “Dying.”

  “Let’s just go,” she says. “It’ll be an adventure.”

  “Done. Amazing, something actually got decided.”

  “Oh, shut up, it’s going be a great wedding. Are you inviting your uncle Hank?”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “We’re actually in the same time zone, aren’t we? That’s so weird.”

  I’m sitting on a bench across from our hotel, waiting for Seve. BALTIMORE: THE GREATEST CITY IN AMERICA is stenciled in large block letters on the back of the bench. There’s an empty Paul Masson brandy bottle carefully placed beside it. It’s 8:39 in the morning, and already the temperature is in the nineties. And it’s humid. I send D a text, “Did I miss you?” wondering if she has left the house for the day.

  Seve comes out of the hotel and we walk across the square to Jimmy’s Diner. We take a seat at the Formica counter. “My family used to come here on Sundays when I was a kid,” he says, looking around the large, fluorescent-lit room. A waitress slides two plastic glasses filled with water across the counter.

  “Two coffees?” she asks, and is already turning away to get the pot.

  “I’ll take a tea,” I call after her.

  The waitress stops, turns back, gives me a good long look. “Course you will, hon.”

  Seve starts right in. “You meet any beautiful women on any of your trips lately?”

  “Don’t.”

  “So?”

  To satisfy his need for a thrill I tell him about Holly, the woman I met down in the Osa who ran the remote lodge deep in the rain forest. I describe her blond hair, her blue dress, and her solid knowledge of her beauty.

  “So how’d that end?”

  “It didn’t even start.”

  “There’s a rule, you know, the Mississippi rule. Anything beyond the Mississippi doesn’t count,” he says.

  “Don’t be an asshole.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Yeah, right. I would just finish having sex and I’d get a text from my beloved fiancée, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ ”

  “My fear would be bringing something home,” Seve says.

  “I can’t talk about this anymore.” Then my phone beeps; it’s a text from D in response to the question that I sent while waiting for Seve, asking if I missed her. D’s text reads, “I don’t know, do you??”

  We head downtown, toward the Inner Harbor. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t get anyone to go downtown with me,” Seve says. “Now, my nieces and nephews, no one wants to be anywhere else.” The port of Baltimore was created at Locust Point in 1709 to support the tobacco trade. It grew quickly as a granary for sugar-producing colonies in the West Indies and was hugely important in colonial times. There were riots in Baltimore during the Civil War and a great fire in 1904. There were riots again when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and by the 1970s Baltimore was entrenched in hard times. The harbor area was cluttered with derelict warehouses and seedy bars. But as we walk along the redbrick promenade, sweating in the morning sun, past swarming young families heading to the aquarium and the restaurants and shopping malls, all this is just a story of the past. So much of Baltimore’s life now takes place along the waterfront that a large number of visitors never see anything else.

  We make our way a few blocks inland, over to the house where baseball legend Babe Ruth was born. It was my ex-wife who first introduced me to the “home as micro-museum.” We were in Stockholm, Sweden, when she dragged me to the apartment of August Strindberg. What I feared would be a dreary and dull hour proved to be a fascinating look inside the writer’s life. His desk and chair, his pens and notebooks and letters, his eyeglasses and walking stick, relics of his life, proved fascinating. I have sought out “home museums” ever since. The Bambino’s home is on Emory Street, a narrow lane of red brick row houses tucked just off the six lanes of throbbing traffic on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—and a two-minute walk to Camden Yards baseball field.

  Inside, an old man rises to greet us from behind a counter.

  “Gentlemen,” he calls out. “Welcome.” We are the only visitors and our host is eager for company. I leave Seve to make small talk and head inside.

  There are uniforms, and bats, even a wooden chair that was used in the box seats at Yankee Stadium, and there’s a video of the old Biography television show, hosted by a very young Mike Wallace, telling all about “the Babe’s” improbable life. Yet there’s something lacking; the museum is nearly all memorabilia. There are very few personal things that hint at the lonely boy, discarded by his parents, who grew up to be the hero of a nation. I’m looking for something. Perhaps that’s why I turn to Seve—“Let’s go out to your house,” I tell him.

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s go out to where you grew up. How long since you’ve been there?”

  “To the house I grew up in? Uh, I don’t know. Thirty years?”

  “How far away is it?”

  Seve shrugs. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “You grew up fifteen minutes from here and you haven’t been back in thirty years?”

  “When we moved, we moved.”

  “How far did you move?”

  “Another twenty minutes out.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Seve wavers.

  “Why is this like pulling teeth? Come on. It’s too damn hot to walk around. Let’s get a cab and go.”

  The air conditioner of the taxi we get into is broken, and the windows in the back won’t go down. The driver is upset when, after a block, we switch cabs. The next car we get into is cool, and the driver is an easygoing young guy from Nigeria called Paul. Juju music plays softly on his radio. We head west.

  Just fifteen minutes from downtown are a series of small, freestanding, identical-looking brick houses with aluminum awnings and small, fenced-in lawns. Like most American cities, today’s Baltimore is an outgrowth of the suburbanization of the country in the 1950s. Seve’s parents were part of that great migration away from the inner cities. Seve’s mother has since moved even farther out.

  “That’s St. Bonaventure’s,” he announces as we pass a yellow brick church. “I was an altar boy there. Turn left.”

  Paul cuts through the parking lot. “Where to now?” he asks.

  We turn right and farther on a ball field opens out beside us. “I hit my first home run right there.” Seve points. “I remember it like it was yesterday.” We drive on. Seve leans forward in his seat, squinting through the windshield, looking for his youth. “Make your next left, my friend,” Seve says softly.

  Paul slows the car and eases onto Knollwood Drive. These are no longer single
-family homes but a series of two-story apartment buildings that line the left side of the road across from a park.

  “A little bit farther,” Seve directs him. We glide on. “That’s it.” And we stop out in front of number 4105. It’s much more humble than I had anticipated.

  We ask Paul to wait.

  “You take your time,” he says slowly, and lowers his window to rest his elbow and watch our progress.

  There’s a short, steep incline that leads up to the apartment building’s metal storm door. Seve stops halfway up the hill. “I knocked my brother out right here.” He pulls on the door; it’s open. Up a flight, Seve stands in front of a red door with a number 1 on it. He has a quizzical expression on his face. He wants to go in, or to knock, something. Then he shrugs.

  “I was always ashamed—all my friends lived in houses, and we lived in an apartment.” I can feel his shame again now.

  I want to turn away. “Stand by the door, let me take your picture,” I say instead.

  “Yeah,” he says, and a silly grin comes onto his face. He looks befuddled and awkward, in a way I’ve never seen him look. He looks decidedly vulnerable and human.

  “Nice,” I say when I snap the shot.

  Although Seve lives out in Denver now, his work has asked him to consider a move back east. He decides that maybe he ought to look at a few apartments while we’re here. We head back to town and Paul insists on shaking our hands when he drops us in front of a sterile-looking glass tower. We have no appointment. We simply walk in, but an on-site agent is only too eager to help. The building and the apartments in it are so new, geometric, and without history, so strange in comparison to the worn, memory-filled halls we’ve just been to, that we are both left baffled and speechless. After the third apartment Seve says, “I don’t want to have a place, I just want to leave Denver and keep moving around.”

  What I hear behind Seve’s words is a sense of transience to which I know he is attracted—to a large degree it is the reason he doesn’t have a family. It’s a sentiment I understand and one that could easily be mistaken for my own wanderlust. But my travels are driven by a force that is quite the opposite. Impermanence is not what I crave and never has been. That I’ve traveled in order to feel at home in myself is a paradox that has helped me to create that feeling while in my familiar surroundings—I desire a feeling of “at-home-ness” everywhere, quite the opposite to Seve’s desire for transience.