Truth in Advertising (26 page)

I have giant words in my head when I think of certain people. For Ian it's
SECURE
. For Martin it's
CONFIDENT
. For Phoebe it's
LOVELY
. With Amy the word
KIND
appears in big letters, maybe a strong, clean Helvetica. And I threw that away. And in this moment, like so many others, I regret everything and in the exact same moment wonder if maybe we could get back together, if only for tonight. And the mere thought of that floods me with a comfort that is palpable. My mood lifts. I can see her bright, warm, clean apartment, the working fireplace, the big bed with far too many pillows. Her tidy kitchen filled with All-Clad pots and pans and complete sets of dishes, glasses that match, place settings. A refrigerator with food in it. She buys flowers for no other reason than they look pretty on the table. And I think yes, perhaps we could talk all night in front of the fireplace and drink wine and order food. I could tell her the whole story, the story even I don't understand, about how I've gotten here, to this distant, empty, emotionless place. I would purge my soul to her and she would listen, nod, comfort and affirm me. “Life is a process, Fin,” she would say, slowly, nodding. “You're doing fine. Just a little slower than most.” And later, after much sex, we would sleep for many hours. And then I would leave, run screaming into the morning, wanting nothing more than to escape again.

“I wanted to call because . . . this is a bit awkward . . .”

I knew it. She wants to get together. I could be on a shuttle flight at five and in her apartment by seven.

She says, “I wanted to call because my boyfriend proposed to me New Year's Eve and we're getting married in a month. We're flying to Paris. He's rented the restaurant at the Crillon. He's bringing my family and his family, some of whom live over there and . . . I'm rambling, I know, but I'm just so happy. And I wanted you to know
that because I know how upset it made you to make me as unhappy as you did. I was really angry at you for a while, but I'm over that now. I wanted you to not feel bad about it anymore because looking back, not marrying you was the best thing that ever happened to me. And I wanted to thank you for that.”

It's as if someone has just handed me a different script to my life. As if the one I was working from was the wrong one. In the old one I was someone with time, with a great job, with possibility ahead of him. It was a rollicking good comedy. This new one is a sad drama. The hero is almost forty, which means he's almost fifty, which means his life is basically over and any chance of success long gone. And the truly sad part is that it's his own fault. He thought he could live a life where you blamed fate for your lot. Father left. Mother died. Poor me. What he failed to realize is that there is no fate. There is only how hard you are willing to work to be happy. And in this new script, he's a fool.

In the end all I can manage is, “I'm very happy for you, Aim. Honest.”

We hang up and I stand there, thinking I may shit myself. I see a door that says
TOILET
but underneath is a sign that says
OUT OF ORDER
.

I turn to see the old woman staring at me. She squints and says, “Did you hear the one about the most optimistic man in the world? He jumped off the Empire State Building and halfway down the window washers hear him say, ‘So far, so good.'”

She cackles and turns away.

•   •   •

We are in a small conference room at the law office. Sullivan, O'Neil & Levy is a working man's law firm. From the looks of it the offices haven't changed much in forty years. Beiges and browns on the walls, the furniture. Cheaply framed posters of Cape Cod, the Freedom Trail, the Boston skyline.

Tom Hanley introduces himself as my father's attorney, shakes hands, smiles, looks us in the eye. A full head of snow-white hair, stocky, broad-shouldered, fat fingers. Two rings. One a large class
ring. Boston College. The other a gold Claddagh ring with a diamond on his wedding finger. He keeps smoothing his tie over his belly, a nervous tic maybe. His tone is more like that of a parish priest about to say a funeral mass.

“Coffee? Water? Something stronger? The restrooms are just down the hall if anyone needs one before we start.”

He's saying,
I'm sorry. I know this is painful. I want to make it a little easier.
Boston Irish. Don't say what you're feeling. Find another way to say it.

We take our seats. A woman who Tom Hanley introduces as Rosemary sits with a stenograph at the end of the table. And there, on the table in front of Tom Hanley, to the left of his yellow legal pad and gold Cross pen, sit the remains of our father.

“Okay,” Tom Hanley says. “This is the reading of the Last Will and Testament of Edward Lawrence Dolan, Senior. Present at the reading are Thomas Hanley, attorney at law representing the deceased, Rosemary Kelleher, stenographer, and the children of Edward Lawrence Dolan, Senior, Edward Lawrence Dolan, Junior, Kevin Francis Dolan, Maura Ann Dolan-Macaphee, and Finbar Thomsen Dolan.”

He pauses. It feels like church. Why do I keep needing a toilet?

“‘I, Edward Lawrence Dolan, a resident of Bradenton, Florida, and Hyannis, Massachusetts, hereby make this Will and revoke all prior Wills and Codicils. I was born May 17, 1926, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I am not currently married but I was previously married to Emily Kelleher Dolan from October 1955 to 1980 and the marriage ended by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1982. I have four living children.'”

Eddie is looking out the window. Kevin is looking at his iPhone. Maura is examining her nails.

It takes only a few blurred minutes to read through the will itself because there was nothing to bequeath. No money, no houses, no antiques, no art, no cars, no stocks or bonds. Except the letter.

Tom Hanley removes the letter from a binder and lays it out in front of him on the table. He sips from a glass of water. He looks at us. “We good?” No one says anything.

He reads. “‘My dear children.'”

Eddie, stage whisper: “Oh, give me a break.”

Kevin says, in a voice a bit too loud, “Eddie.”

Eddie shakes his head back and forth, stands, and goes to the window, hands in his pockets, back to us. Tom Hanley is unfazed. How many times has he sat in this room, read these kinds of documents to families? Hurt families, fractured families, loving families. Every time drawn back into the past, to the beauty of a memory, the pain, the ongoing tragedy of family. He seems like the kind of guy who'd be a great neighbor.

Tom Hanley continues. “‘My dear children.'”

He pauses, as if a small scold to Eddie, as if to say,
You dumb asshole, you still don't get it, do you?

One day you will sit down and write out something that you know will be read after you die. If you've done it all wrong, they will be the words you hope will replace the actions of your life. I wasn't a very good father. And I wasn't a very good husband. If you think it is easy for me to write these words you are wrong. I tried. I swear to God Almighty I did. What I tell you now I tell you not as an excuse but so you might understand. Your mother and I grew apart. She stopped being in love with me years before I left. I couldn't be the man she wanted or needed. I couldn't get a handle on my anger or, for a long time, my drinking. But just so you know, I did not choose to leave. Though I believe it was for the best in the end, your mother asked me to leave. Your mother had met someone else.

Tom Hanley is channeling Anthony Hopkins because he knows to pause here, the perfect dramatic beat, not too long. He's ready for this. He's read the letter before today and knows the effect these words will have on us.

“He's a
liar
!” It's Maura.

“This is bullshit.” Eddie, turning from the window.

“Let him finish.” Kevin.

Tom Hanley sips from a glass of water and continues.

It doesn't matter who, as he's long dead. He was married at the time. It was not something that was ever going to be. But she did love him. Your mother was a good woman and a good Catholic and the guilt and shame of it was very hard for her. She told me. She told me I had ruined her life. She said that I had taken her for granted and that the children are afraid of me. She said things I will never forget and I sat there and took them because they were true. She asked me to leave and to leave you all alone. There are things that you do that you cannot change no matter how hard you try. The rest of my life is of little consequence to you now. I met people, they saw me as a good man. I liked that. But know this. There are things I did that were good. There are memories I have, as clear to me now as if they happened this morning. I can picture each of you as small children. I can feel you, in the middle of the night, holding you as you cried, feeding you a bottle, sitting in that chair in the den rocking you back to sleep. Hundreds of times over the years. And what do they count for? To you nothing. To me so much more than you can know. I do not ask that you forgive me. I wouldn't if I was in your place. But I would ask that you try to understand that a person can make terrible mistakes. No one in this room is free of sin. You asked me to be more than I was capable of. I ask only one thing and it is of all of you. Or any one of you. I would like my ashes spread at sea, in the Pacific, 12 nautical miles from Pearl Harbor, latitude 21 degrees, 23 minutes north longitude -158 degrees, 57 minutes west. That's where I was the day the war ended. I would say I'm sorry but I don't think it would mean much. Your father, Edward Dolan.

Rosemary, the stenographer, has stopped typing but she continues staring at the machine.

Tom Hanley stands. “I'll leave you alone.” He and Rosemary leave.

I have an odd capacity to escape reality. It makes life much more pleasant. Now, in this moment, I realize I have no intention of ever spreading my father's ashes off the coast of Hawaii or the coast of Coney Island, for that matter. A Buddhist might say that I wasn't living in the moment. I would reply to my saffron-robe-wearing meditator that with rare exceptions there are few moments I want to live in. I like escape. I like my made-up world.

No one says anything for a long time. Until Kevin says, “I was hoping for cash.”

•   •   •

How do you see the world? Is there music underscoring scenes of your life? Do you slow things down for intensity and drama? Speed them up for comedy? Do you rewrite dialogue, if, say, you've had a fight with your boss or your wife or some jackass who cut the line at Dunkin' Donuts? In these rewrites are you wittier, more bold? I do and I am. It makes life more interesting for me, gives me a wonderful sense of false empowerment.

And yet I know I miss the far more interesting narratives, the narratives I will never know, of strangers. Because you can't possibly know what's going through someone's mind when you pass them on the street, see them standing at a traffic light, looking around in front of an office building in downtown Boston, looking left, looking right, wondering where to go. I wonder what the four of us look like as we walk out of the building. Do we look like lost tourists? What do passersby see? Does anyone notice Maura's fast blinking or Eddie's slightly shaking right hand as he smokes a cigarette or Kevin's near-constant text messaging to God-only-knows who. Does anyone notice my heart palpitations and sweating palms in the twenty-degree weather, holding a cardboard-beige box with several pounds of human ash, searching out a cab to Logan for the next shuttle to LaGuardia?

In a near-perfect example of Dolan family dynamics, we all walked out of the conference room without the box containing my father's ashes before I returned for my gloves and saw it sitting there.

I say, “That was fun. We should do that again soon.”

Maura says, “I'm freezing. Can we get a coffee or something?”

There is a Starbucks across the street. We go in and eat cold sandwiches. We drink burnt, awful-tasting, nuclear-hot, overpriced coffee. The Carpenters sing,
“I'm on the . . . top of the world lookin' . . . down on creation . . .”

Eddie says, “He's a liar. It's not true.”

Maura says, “What if it is?”

Eddie says, “It's not.”

Maura says, “But what if it is?”

It's strange how it didn't come as a shock to me. Strange how once I heard Tom Hanley say the words—“Your mother had met someone else”—it unearthed a vague memory, the seemingly chance encounter in the supermarket or the dry cleaner's. “Oh you remember Mr. So-and-so, Finny.” A brief chat. I could sense her awkwardness with me standing there. I watched him watch her, thought nothing of it, but somehow, in the memory, I can see it differently, see the intensity with which he looked at her. Later, after my father left, there would be phone calls, a man's voice. She would take the calls in her room. Not often. But enough for me—for all of us, is my guess—to remember, to sense at the time that something was happening.

Kevin says, “What does it change? He was still an asshole. He still left. And good for her, by the way. I hope it is true. I hope she did find love.”

Maura says, “What about the ashes?”

I look at Kevin for some reason. He and Maura are looking at Eddie, waiting. I notice, in the cold light of Starbucks, the small scar near Kevin's left eye. My father wore a ring, Golden Gloves. He'd been a boxer as a teenager.

Kevin says, “It's insane.”

Maura says, “Even dead he never fails to disappoint. The gall. Eddie?”

Eddie says, “What? Are you asking me if I'm going to buy an airplane ticket to Hawaii and rent a boat and find this spot and spread my father's ashes and say a few thoughtful words about what a great guy he was?”

I say, “So what do we do?”

Eddie says, “This is pretty common.” He was in the Marines. He knows about these things. “World War Two vets. Korean War vets. They ask that their ashes be spread, ask for burial at sea. If they saw combat, they're entitled to a full military burial. I know a guy at the VA. He's in veterans affairs.”