Matters of the Heart (23 page)

Hope found it unbelievably hard to work the next day. She was nervous and distracted, and couldn’t make a decent connection with her subject, which was unheard of for her. She finally forced herself to concentrate with enormous effort, and she managed to do the shoot, but it wasn’t one of her best days. And the rest of the week was pretty much the same. Now that she knew someone was checking on Finn, she wanted to get the information, deal with it, and put it behind her. The suspense was killing her. She wanted everything to be all right.

And that weekend she went to Boston to see Paul, who was in the hospital at Harvard. He had caught a bad respiratory flu on the boat, and they were afraid of pneumonia. The captain of his boat had arranged to have him sent to Boston by air ambulance, which had probably saved him.

Paul was doing better but not great, and he slept through most of Hope’s visit. She sat next to him, holding his hand, and now and then he opened his eyes and smiled at her. It was painful to think that he had once been a vital man, brilliant in his field, full of life in every way, and now it had come to this. He looked so old and frail, and had just turned sixty-one. His whole body was shaking. And at one point, he looked at her and shook his head.

“I was right,” he whispered, “you wouldn’t want to be married to this.” As he said it, tears filled her eyes and she kissed his cheek.

“Yes, I would, and you know it. You were stupid to divorce me, and it cost you way too much money,” she teased him.

“You’ll have the rest pretty soon, except for what Harvard gets.” He could barely speak, and she frowned as she listened to him.

“Don’t say that. You’re going to be fine.” He didn’t answer, he just shook his head, closed his eyes, and went to sleep. She sat with him for hours, and flew back to New York that night. She had never felt so lonely in her life, except when Mimi died, and then she had had him. Now she had no one, except Finn. She tried to talk to him about it on the telephone the next day.

“It was so sad seeing him that way,” she said as her voice trembled, and tears rolled down her cheeks, which she wiped away. “He’s so sick.”

“Are you still in love with him?” Finn asked coldly, and Hope just closed her eyes at the other end of the phone.

“How can you say that?” she asked him. “For chrissake, Finn. I was married to him for twenty years. He’s the only family I have. And I’m all he has.”

“You have me,” Finn answered. Everything was about him.

“That’s different,” she tried to explain to him. “I love you, but Paul and I share history, and a child, even if she’s not here anymore.”

“Neither is ours, thanks to you.” It was a cruel thing to say, but he was jealous of Paul, and wanted to hurt her in whatever way he could. It was a side of Finn that she deplored. And telling her that the miscarriage was entirely her fault didn’t make it true. It just made him seem mean. It wasn’t a part of him she loved, although there were many other parts that she did. He was wonderful to her in many ways.

“I have to go to work,” she said, cutting him off. She didn’t want to get into discussing the miscarriage with him again, or his jealousy of Paul, particularly now. If he was going to be foolish about that, it was his problem, not hers. It was very disappointing to hear him talk to her that way.

“If I were that sick, would you be there for me?” He sounded like a child as he asked.

“Of course,” she answered, sounding bleak. Sometimes his bottomless pit of need was impossible to fill. She felt that way right now.

“How can I be sure?”

“I just would. I’ll call you tonight,” she said, glancing at her watch. She had to be uptown in half an hour.

When she got there, it was another long, hard day. She was in a terrible mood. Finn seemed to be upsetting her constantly all of a sudden. He was unhappy that she was away, and said his writing wasn’t going well. And Hope was waiting to hear from the investigator Mark had hired, and nervous about what he was going to say. She hoped that everything would be okay. It didn’t make up for the fact that Finn was lying to her about his current publishing situation, but at least if everything else was in order, she could tell herself that he was reacting badly to a difficult situation. That would be forgivable at least.

She didn’t hear from Mark until the end of the week. The investigator had been told to send the information through him. Mark called Hope on Friday afternoon. He asked her if she could come to his office, he said he had some files and photographs to share with her. He didn’t sound particularly happy, and Hope didn’t ask him any questions until she got to his office. She was nervous all the way uptown. Mark’s face gave nothing away until they sat down. And then he opened the file sitting on his desk, and handed a small ragged photograph to her. His face was grim.

“Who’s that?” Hope asked him as she stared at it. It was a photograph of four little boys, and the photograph was yellowed and tattered.

“It’s Finn.” When she turned it over, she saw that there were four names on the back. Finn, Joey, Paul, and Steve. “I’m not sure which one he is.” All four were wearing cowboy hats, and they looked very close in age. “It’s him with his three brothers.” As Mark said it, Hope shook her head.

“Someone made a mistake. He’s an only child. It must be a different O’Neill. It’s a pretty common name.” That much she knew was true. Mark just stared at her, and then read down the page. “Finn was the youngest of the four boys. Joey went to federal prison and is still there for hijacking a plane to Cuba a hell of a long time ago. Before that, he was on parole for bank robbery. Nice kid. Steve was killed by a hit-and-run driver when he was fourteen, somewhere on the Lower East Side where they lived. Paul is a cop, in the narcotics division. He’s the oldest. He gave the investigator this photograph. We promised to get it back to him. Their father died in a bar fight when Finn was three. He was a jack-of-all-trades. The mother, according to Paul, was a maid for some fancy people on Park Avenue, and she and the four boys lived in a one-bedroom walk-up apartment in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The boys slept in the bedroom, she slept on the couch in the living room. I think her name was Lizzie. She died of pancreatic cancer about thirty years ago, when the kids were still young. Apparently, they went to hell in a handbasket. Pretty shortly thereafter, Finn and one of the others were in foster care, and Finn ran away.

“He worked as a longshoreman when he was about seventeen, after their mother died, but his brother says he was always the smart one and told a hell of a good story. He’s been doing just that ever since, and making a nice living at it, until recently.” Mark looked at the file in front of him with blatant disapproval as Hope listened in painful silence. He hated doing this to her, but she had wanted the information, and now she had it. Just about nothing Finn had told her about his early life was true. Yet again, he had been ashamed to tell the truth, in this case about his humble and rocky beginnings compared to hers. She felt deeply sorry for him and what Mark had described of Finn’s youth. “His brother says he did manage to go to City College, and after that he never saw any of them again.

“Their mother named him after some Irish poet, which I suppose was prophetic. He says she was kind of a dreamer, and always told them fairy tales before they went to sleep, and then drank herself into oblivion on the couch. She never remarried, and it sounds like she had a pretty miserable life and so did they, you have to feel sorry for them.” He handed her a photograph of Finn then when he was about fourteen. He was a handsome boy, and it was clearly Finn. He didn’t look that much different now, and the face was the same. “There was no money. Eventually, their mother lost her job and she was on welfare, until Paul could help her on his policeman’s salary. But that couldn’t have been easy, since he was already married and had kids himself.

“Their mother died in the charity ward of a welfare hospital. They never had a dime. There was no apartment on Park Avenue, no house in Southampton. No father who was a doctor. Their grandparents came from Ireland, via Ellis Island, and if there is any ancestral tie to the house you’re living in in Ireland, Paul O’Neill knows nothing about it, and strongly doubts it. He said their grandparents and great-grandparents were potato farmers who came to this country during the Great Famine, like a lot of other people, but they would never have owned a house like yours. After Finn was a longshoreman, he seems to have done a lot of things, waiter, chauffeur, doorman, barker at a strip joint. He drove a truck and delivered papers, and I guess he started writing fairly young and sold some stories. After college, his brother doesn’t know a lot about what happened to him. He thinks he got some girl pregnant and got married, but he doesn’t know who she was and he never saw the kid. He hasn’t been in touch with him for years.

“And according to the investigator, Finn is in deep shit financially. He’s in debt up to his ears, he’s had a number of bad debts, and his credit rating is a disaster. He declared bankruptcy, which is probably why he eventually went to Ireland. He doesn’t seem to be able to hang on to money, although he’s made a fair amount with his writing in recent years. But now his publishers are pissed at him, so that’s gone up in smoke too. It sounds like the best thing that ever happened to him was walking into you a year ago. And let me tell you, this is going to be one hell of a lucky sonofabitch if he marries you. But I don’t think I’d say the same for you.

“There’s nothing wrong with his background, or with having been born poor. A lot of people have come up from situations like that and made something of themselves. That’s what this country is all about. And you have to admire the guy for crawling out of a pit like that. His credit is a mess, but that’s not the end of the world, if you want to help him with it. What I don’t like,” Mark said, looking over the file at her, “is that he lied to you about damn near everything. Maybe he’s ashamed of where he comes from, which is sad for him. But marrying a woman and claiming you’re someone and something you’re not doesn’t show much integrity on his part, and it’s none of my business, if you love the guy, but I don’t like the smell of it for you. The guy is a first-class liar. He’s invented a whole history for himself, including aristocratic ancestors, titles, doctors, and an entire world of people who don’t exist. Or maybe they do, but if they do, or did, none of them are related to him, which frightens me.”

He handed Hope the file without further comment, and she glanced through a neatly typed, fully documented report by the private investigator. Mark told her they were searching further, and promised additional information on his background in the next two weeks. But they seemed to have been very thorough so far, and as Hope looked back at Mark, she felt sick. Not because what she had heard was terrible, or unacceptable, but what she knew now was that Finn had lied to her about every fact and detail. It made her heart ache to think about it. He had had a miserable childhood in a walk-up tenement apartment, with a drunken mother, a father who had died in a bar fight, and he had wound up in foster care, which must have been nightmarish for him too. And instead of trusting her and sharing it with her, he had invented a mother who was allegedly a spoiled Irish aristocratic beauty and a father who was a Park Avenue doctor. It was no wonder he clung to her like a lost child every time she walked two steps away from him. After a childhood like that, who wouldn’t? But the problem was that he had lied to her about so many things. It made her wonder what else he had lied about, and what secrets he was keeping from her. He hadn’t even told her that his publisher had fired him and was suing him. So he was continuing to lie to her right up to today. There were tears brimming in her eyes as she looked at Mark across the desk.

“What are you going to do?” Mark asked her gently. He felt sorry for her. After a man like Paul, she had fallen into the hands of Finn. Mark knew she was in love with him, but his fear for her was that Finn O’Neill might be hiding something worse. And Hope was afraid of that too. She had had eleven glorious, exquisitely happy, fabulous months with him, with the exception of the miscarriage and his reaction to it. But other than that, everything had been loving and great. And now their whole life seemed to be unraveling, and Finn with it. It was extremely depressing.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said honestly. “I have to think about it. I’m not sure what this means. I don’t know if he’s too embarrassed to admit how he grew up and is trying to save face, which isn’t admirable, but maybe I could live with. Or if he’s a profoundly dishonest person.” Mark suspected that that was more likely, and even that he was after her for the money. In Finn’s current situation, that seemed easy to believe, and the same thought had crossed Hope’s mind too. She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and believe the best of him. She loved him. But she didn’t want to be blind and foolish either. She had wanted this information, now she had it, and she had to digest it and come to her own conclusions. And she didn’t want to say anything to Finn. She didn’t want to hear any more lies from him. It would only make the situation worse, until she figured out what to do.

“They don’t have anything yet on Finn’s marriage. They know the woman’s name, and the dates and circumstances seem to coincide with what you said. So maybe he told the truth about that, and not his childhood. They’re doing some more investigating, and verifying her cause of death. You said it was a car accident. The investigator said he’d have that for us by next week, or at worst by Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll be back in Ireland by then,” she said sadly.

“Be careful, Hope,” Mark warned her. “Be cautious about what you say to him. There’s a possibility that even if you love him, you don’t know who and what this man is. He’s probably just a very creative liar, which is what makes him such a good writer. But there’s always the possibility that he could be something far worse. You never know with people. Don’t corner the guy and stick this stuff in his face. Use it for yourself, to make a good decision. But be very, very careful how you handle him. You don’t want to wake up a sleeping demon. For what it’s worth, his brother says he’s a sociopath. But he’s not a shrink. He’s just a cop who has a crazy brother. And remarkably, no one has ever blown Finn’s cover, not even his brother, which is amazing. Paul O’Neill says Finn would lie about the time of day. It certainly looks like it from all that, although most of it is harmless. It’s just sad. Just be very careful you don’t help him turn it into something worse. If you embarrass him with this, he could get very nasty with you.” He was seriously worried about her, particularly after reading everything he had. His suspicion was that Finn O’Neill was a pretty sick guy, and it was hard to believe, under the circumstances, that he wasn’t after her money. And he had her to himself, far away in Ireland, in a big, deserted house in the countryside. Mark Webber didn’t like it at all.