Hidden Falls, page 12
There was a lot of tension in the room, but I was okay with that.
“Are you exhausted, buddy?” I asked Ben.
“Not too bad,” he replied.
“When we’re done here, I’ll give you a quick tour of the neighborhood and then we’ll get you settled in my old room so you can rest before the wake,” I said. “Sound good?”
Ben stiffened and looked to Sarah. “Mom got a big place on Airbnb on the other side of town,” he explained, “so, I was going to stay there with her.”
“It’s very roomy, and he also needs to get some schoolwork done while he’s here,” Sarah added.
“And he’s a big boy, Sarah,” I said, trying to not show my anger, but some seeped through. I really wanted to spend more time with my son. I wanted him to see me in my natural habitat in hopes that it would help him understand me better. “He can speak for himself.”
I used my toast to wipe the last of the bacon grease and egg off my plate—it looked clean enough to put back on the shelf. As I collected the other dishes, I noticed a familiar look in Sarah’s eye. I felt like a sea captain staring into a red sky at morning. It was an old look, a trigger that reminded me why I’d been preparing for a fight. I could try to sail around the storm, or I could batten down the hatches and ride it out, but no matter what a storm was coming.
“So, Ben showed me Jake’s obituary,” she commented, looking at my mother. “He found it online.”
My mother nodded and made a dismissive grunting sound. Ben seemed worried, which worried me. I hadn’t yet read it and had no idea if we were headed for a summer shower or a category five hurricane.
“I didn’t see it—was it in the Standard Times?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sarah said dismissively as she plowed forward. Her eyes fixed on my mother. “All I know is that it listed us as if we were still married. Do you know how something like that could have happened?”
“Oh.” I rolled my eyes and went back to cleaning dishes. My worst-case scenario was the last line of the obituary reading something like, “The gambling bastard will eventually be joined in Hell by his heathen son and Jewish ex-daughter-in-law.” I was fine with just about every alternative.
“I was also listed as Sarah Quinn,” Sarah snapped. “Which has never been my name. Ever.”
“The report’ah, or whatev’ah they ‘ah called, asked if my son mah’ried,” my mother replied calmly. “I said yes, Sarah, she spells it with an “h,” and they have a son, Benjamin. It’s reasonable to assume a wife would take the husband’s name. A decent one, anyway.”
“Did they ask?”
“He may have. I don’t rememb’ah,” Mum said and then looked to me. “Let me do this. I’ll finish the dishes. You take Ben on ya c’ah ride.”
“This is not okay!” Sarah exclaimed.
“Look!” my mother barked. “I invited you into my home. Stop being selfish! It’s not ya husband who died, or whoev’ah ya living with now. So, stop demanding attention—we can all see you!”
“How is it being selfish for me to be upset that you took it upon yourself to not only say I’m still married to someone other than my current husband, but that I have also decided to change my name?!”
“Sarah, please,” I began. “It’s the fucking local paper—it’s not the Sunday Times. No one you know is going to read it.”
“It’s on the Internet,” she snapped. “I have a right to know why she thinks that’s okay.”
“You have a right?” My mother had an Old Testament look in her eye. It was officially on. “That’s what you think. ‘Ah you the only one with rights?”
I had to try to stop this somehow, but I knew the attempt would be futile. “Mum, please stop, please. If not for Dad, then please, for Ben’s sake. Don’t let this go any further.”
“Why don’t you tell her to stop?!” my mother raged. “Why don’t you ev’ah ask Ben’s moth’ah to do what’s best for Ben?! Or for you?! Maybe you would still be mah’ried if you ev’ah stood up for ya’self!”
“Is that what this is this about?” Sarah demanded.
“I-I don’t know,” I stuttered, and it was true. I didn’t.
“You don’t know?!” my mother shouted at me. “When has she ev’ah made a decision that wasn’t solely about what she wanted? Tell me that! ‘I don’t know!’ Maybe if you made her take ya name then you’d still be mah’ried!”
“Enough with the ‘you’d still be married’ nonsense! ‘Maybe if you chained her to a pole in the basement you’d still be married!’” I mocked. “Wouldn’t that make everybody happy?”
Ben laughed nervously.
“Everything’s a joke to you,” my mother said curtly. “Religion, ya mah’riage, everything.”
“How did this become about me?”
“Right, because nothing is ever your fault,” Sarah piled on. “You’re always the victim.”
“Are we really doing this now, Sarah? Is this the opportunity you’ve been waiting for to tally up the score? You won the marriage. You won the divorce. Is that why you came here without telling me? Winning isn’t enough? You needed fly across the country to kick me in the nuts while I’m down? In front of my mother and son, no less!”
Sarah dug in her heels. “Is that what you think? That our marriage was a competition?”
“Yes, Sarah, it was a competition to you!”
“Where is this coming from? Why is this the first time I’m hearing this?”
“Maybe it’s the first time you’ve actually heard it, Sarah, but it’s not the first time anyone’s said it. Dr. Bashir said it, so we stopped seeing her, and then Dr. Rock said it, so you looked for another couples therapist to sell your story to—”
“How dare you!” Sarah roared. “That is not fair! What kind of monster acts like this in front of his son on the day of his father’s wake!?”
My mother looked over at me with a small, wicked smile. Sarah started the argument, my mother baited me into it, and now it was all mine. I’d fallen for it completely, and I was ashamed that Ben had to witness it.
I took a deep breath and calmed myself as much as I could. “It wasn’t fair. You’re right. I played by the rules. Rules you created. It was never about fairness to you. It was about winning.” Guess I didn’t calm down very much. “I’m sorry you forced my hand in front of our son. It was unfortunate and unnecessary, and nothing I said was untrue.”
That made my mother’s vindictive smile widen, which only made me angrier that I’d fallen into this carefully set trap.
“Do you seriously believe that?” Sarah asked me, folding her arms. “You think our relationship was a competition to me?”
“Yes, Sarah, I do and stop asking me if I believe the things I say. If I say it, I believe it. We couldn’t settle these issues in therapy, but now you think we’re going to work them out in front of our son, and my mother? Is that it?”
“Right,” she said. “Make me the bad guy in front of everyone.”
“Sarah, you didn’t need any help with that today.”
“Oh, please, enlighten me!”
“You walked through the door on the day of my father’s wake, at the last minute, without letting me know, and made this all about you. There’s no other way to see this. That’s exactly what happened.”
“I don’t need to sit here and take this,” Sarah growled. “Ben, come with me, we’re leaving.”
I straightened my spine until it popped. “Ben and I are going on a tour of New Bedford. Text him the address and I’ll drop him off when we are good and fucking ready.”
Ben was watching this drama unfold like a researcher observing his lab rats. He seemed unfazed by the biting sarcasm and general nastiness, but I knew it couldn’t be easy to see us all like this. I took a deep breath and once again tried to find higher ground.
“Look, this is a difficult time for all of us.” I stared at my mother, who I knew would escalate this all over again any chance she got. “Let’s put this, all of it, in the past and move forward. Okay? This weekend is going to be hard enough without us bickering.”
“That’s so like you to want to move on without finding a resolution,” Sarah muttered.
“She’s right,” my mother agreed. “If you weren’t so afraid of conflict, maybe you two would still be mah’ried.”
“Good, great. You guys have found some common ground. That’s fantastic. Now, Ben and I are going for a ride and I’m going to let you two very well-adjusted and non-conflict-averse women stay here and build on what you’ve started. Okay? Okay. Trashing me is great bonding material for the two of you, so just go ahead. Go nuts! Have at it!”
Ben sought some sign of approval from his mother, which he got in the form of raised eyebrows and rolling eyes. My mother hugged Ben as he stood. “Don’t you mind any of this,” she said to him as we headed toward the door. “This is just old people blowing off steam.”
“Don’t keep him too long. Have him back to the Airbnb before he gets too tired,” Sarah called after us.
I waited until we were some distance away before turning to talk to my son at long last. “I love them both,” I said to him. “At least, I kind of do. And I’ve never understood why.”
“Yeah,” Ben replied quietly. “I don’t know what just happened. I thought mom was mad at Grammie, but then it got real weird. Sorry that I showed mom the obituary.”
“Buddy, you don’t have to apologize for that,” I insisted as I put my arm around his shoulder. “In no way, shape, or form was any of that your fault. In fact, you were the only one in that room who kept their head. The rest of us should be ashamed of ourselves, and I am. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“It’s alright,” he said. “It makes me feel more like a grownup when you do it in front of me. It’s definitely better than when you thought I couldn’t hear you.”
“Yeah, I guess we liked to pretend we were sheltering you from all that.”
“Yeah, you weren’t,” he quipped as we got to the curb.
“Well, I don’t like the way I just behaved. I want to be a positive role model, not a cautionary tale.” I wanted to add, “but it was your mother’s fault anyway!” but I thought better of it. Instead, we hugged, and even laughed a little at the absurdity of it all. Things already felt different with Ben. Better. Maybe being on my home turf helped us jump out of our old routine. As I reached for my keys, I realized they were still hanging from the hook on the sunporch doorframe. I let out a big sigh. Ben volunteered to get them, but I insisted on being a grownup and getting them myself.
As I walked back past the kitchen window, I saw my mother and Sarah acting in a way that confused me. I squinted and leaned closer to be sure I wasn’t witnessing a crime, but it looked like their hands were gently and carefully placed on each other’s backs. They were comforting each other, and it warmed my heart to see it. They really can be human when they think no one’s watching, I thought. As far as I could hear, they were silent. I was able to get the keys completely undetected.
I let their moment of warmth and vulnerability be their secret.
Ben asked if I’d become a Republican as he climbed into the SUV for our neighborhood tour. It was a reference to the run-up to the 2004 elections when he observed that all the trucks in the Costco parking lot had Bush bumper stickers and all the Priuses had Kerry stickers. He asked if Democrats were allowed to drive trucks and Sarah and I told him, “no.” It remained a family joke.
We drove to the docks where my father worked when I was really young, and then to the Market Basket where he was a butcher. I explained that my father taught me how to drive a stick shift in that parking lot when the Blue Laws kept stores closed on Sundays. I showed him my elementary school, and the porch of Susan Maguire’s childhood home where, on the last day of fifth grade, I’d had my first kiss. “My face was redder than her hair when she told me how much she’d miss seeing me every day at school. We saw each other almost every day at the park instead.” I got so giddy as I told him about it that he suggested I look her up, which made us both laugh.
I didn’t really have a lot of memories to share that involved my dad, but I tried my best to tell Ben what I could. “‘Quinn men don’t complain,’ your grandpa would tell me, ‘they provide.’ I suspect that Quinn aphorism has been passed down for generations. I think somewhere along the line, though, complaining and conversation became synonymous. The saying seems to have evolved into something like, ‘Quinn men don’t talk, unless it’s about sports.’”
“That’s weird. If everyone else was so quiet, how do you think you became a writer?” Ben asked. “Or do you think that’s why you became a writer?”
“Yeah, good question. I never really thought about it in that context,” I replied. “When I got into journalism it was much more of a quest for truth than being driven to write. Growing up post-Watergate we all understood the importance of the Fourth Estate—journalism literally saved the country. What made you think of that?”
“We’re learning about oral histories in my sociology class,” Ben explained. “The professor said that for most of human history that’s how people passed information from one generation to another. She explained it in a way that made telling stories seem like part of our DNA.”
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that a lot these past few days,” I agreed. “Well, about stories anyway, and how they keep us connected to our past and tie us to a region, especially the stories we tell ourselves.”
“And they help us make sense of our world, and shape our identities, and teach us how to conform to social norms,” he added.
“Are you taking this class or teaching it?” I joked.
“It’s an interesting class,” he said. “It’s just getting started, obviously, but it seems like it’s going to be more about the role of storytelling in society and who gets to choose the narrative. But it made me think of you and how you got interested in journalism.”
“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure if I should be flattered or if I was about to learn my son thought I was a narcissist or a manipulator. “What did you come up with?”
“Just questions, really. We’ve talked about it before, but then I was wondering what came first. I know you really liked that columnist from New York, the author …”
“Jimmy Breslin.”
“Right, Breslin. Did you like, idolize him and then decide you wanted to be a journalist, or did you want to be a journalist and then become a fan of his, or …?”
“Journalism came first. I started my paper route in the fifth grade and it made me want to know more about how it was made, who made it, and all that. I knew the newspaper business was important in the grand scheme of things and it was important to me because it provided me with money, plus in the ’70s, journalists were cultural heroes. It was Post-Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers had exposed all the lies we were being told about how the war was going. Then there was Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. They were huge. There was a movie about them, and they were played by the two biggest movie stars in the world. Right. So, yeah, I understood the importance of journalism, and I understood the role of the journalist, they were heroes, but then I found Breslin and he championed causes for the average person. So, yes, he wrote this great book on Watergate, but he also seemed to be looking out for people like me and my family. So, I was definitely interested in journalism and then he really, um, I don’t know, showed me what was possible with it.”
“So, did you want to be a hero, or did you want to serve the people?” Ben asked.
“To me, a hero was someone who served the people,” I answered.
“And gets movies made about them,” he joked.
“I was definitely influenced by the movies, and things I saw on TV, and the celebrity journalists. I won’t lie. The most watched TV show of the era was 60 Minutes. Growing up poor and always feeling like an outsider, there’s no question that I was looking for that kind of respect, that authority.”
“Do you think you would have become a journalist if you were born when I was?” he asked.
“God, that’s a great question,” I said. “I still believe in journalism. I believe it’s more important now than ever, but the media landscape is so fractured that it’s just hard to get people to pay attention to what’s important. There are a lot of organizations out there profiting from misinforming the public. It’s a scary time for democracy.”
“But I guess I’m more interested to know if what drew you into journalism is strong enough that you’d do it over again if you had to start today,” he said. “What drove you to want to be a journalist?”
“I guess it’s true that popular culture influenced me,” I responded slowly, digging deep. I wanted to say yes without hesitation, that I would have been a journalist no matter when I was choosing my career, but I wasn’t sure if that would actually be honest. “Um, I was driven by a quest for the truth, and honestly, as corny as this is going to sound, a love for my country. I felt like I was doing my country a service. It really felt like it was a calling for me, like how people are called to religious service.”
“But where do you think that came from?”
“My desire to know the truth,” I said because that’s what I always said, but then took a moment to reflect. “You know, I always felt like an outsider, even in my own family, if I’m being totally honest. I just felt kind of adrift in the world. I felt like knowing more—the things important people knew—would make me feel like I belonged somewhere.”
“Did it work?” Ben asked.
“No,” I said. “The first time I felt like I belonged somewhere was on the day you were born. Being your dad is where I belong.” My voice cracked as I spoke. We looked at each other, smiled, sat in comfortable silence for a bit as we drove.
I parked the SUV in front of Sarah’s Airbnb. “I’m pretty sure this was a brothel when I was a kid. I knew your mother was trying to corrupt you,” I said with a wink. We laughed. It felt so good to laugh with my son.
