The Hartford Atonement, page 1
PRAISE FOR
The Hartford Atonement
“Gun violence is an issue for our times. Emil Scordato, a self-made billionaire, decides to take up the crusade to reduce violence. Though, like the Job of Scripture, he is met with loss and lack of support, he never loses his belief that he was called to bring the changes we seek. The Hartford Atonement accurately reveals the effect gun violence has on each of us and challenges us to be like Emil and take up his quest. May his hope for safer communities be our hope, too.”
—Monsignor Robert Weiss, pastor emeritus, Saint Rose of Lima Parish, Newtown, Connecticut
“With rapid-fire prose, The Hartford Atonement takes dead aim at Congress’s open and dirty secret: Lawmakers are more interested in getting reelected with the help of the powerful gun lobby than protecting constituents from ever-rising gun violence. Pushcart Prize–nominated author Philip Barbara’s deeply researched story makes you want to scream, ‘Wake up Congress. Do something!’”
—Thomas Ferraro, twenty-year Capitol Hill correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg
“Emil Scordato’s crusade in The Hartford Atonement typifies how successful members of the Wall Street community use their wealth to ease a societal ill, in this case trying to get assault weapons off the streets.”
—Jonathan Niles, retired New York Stock Exchange floor trader, Oppenheimer Securities
“Philip Barbara’s The Hartford Atonement probes how survivors in a small town process shock and grief after a high school massacre and the risks a billionaire takes to atone for his investments in gun companies. A heart-wrenching story of altruism and faltering hopes. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to see if Congress would finally do something to stop the slaughter.”
—John DeDakis, award-winning novelist, writing coach, and manuscript editor
The Hartford Atonement
by Philip Barbara
© Copyright 2024 Philip Barbara
ISBN 979-8-88824-498-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
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To my parents, the late Ann and Anthony Barbara,
and to every elected official and citizen who votes for laws
that in time cut gun violence by 25 percent.
1
My grandson Jack fell into a coma after being trampled by spectators escaping a man who was shooting up a high school gymnasium. We don’t know if he’ll ever wake up. The boy’s trauma prompted his dad, Ted, a lifelong drunkard, to knock off a bottle of gin every day by 5 p.m., before turning to beer. The parade of services for the twenty dead began today with a Mass for our wrestling coach. Ted’s wife, Mary, held his arm to steady him as he wobbled up the church steps. Kelly and I followed them, ready to help our son. People bundled in coats and scarves against the January cold streamed up and around us. Several gave me a knowing nod to assert grimly, “Emil Scordato, we’re in this together.”
One mourner broke the silence by calling out what I’d been thinking these past several days: “Where does the love of God go?” If pressed, I couldn’t answer.
As we filed in, an Irish tenor’s voice filled the church, singing “Fields of Gold.” The Todd’s Chapel school colors were displayed, and flower arrangements on vases and easels stood on each side of the altar. We walked up the center aisle. Mary carefully handed Ted off to a former teammate so that he could sit with the wrestling team that won the regional championship nineteen years ago; several members had come a good distance to pay their respects to Coach Brian Cleary. Kelly and I sat several rows behind them, and Mary joined us.
The coach was the intended target when the shooter stepped into the packed gym during a wrestling match and sprayed the bench with machine gun fire. In addition to the dead, another dozen were wounded. Many were hurt as they tumbled down the stands to escape. Jack, the only freshman on the team, was knocked to the gymnasium’s hardwood floor and fell beneath the cascading feet.
As the tenor’s final notes died away, the sounds of sobbing and coughing rose up, and Father Paul Rushmore began the Mass. I followed along but kept an eye on Ted. The men beside him stood as erect as Marines, but as we knelt and stood time and again, my son nearly buckled. I half expected him to lift a flask from his pocket; he had bottles stashed everywhere at his home. That first day after we visited Jack at the hospital, I should have driven around town with Ted to see other families stricken by the shooting, taken him to a Yale basketball game, or just sat with him, anything to keep him from drinking all day and into the evening. The gravity of the situation should have sobered him up instead of blinding him to our family problems.
When the priest began his homily, people ceased shifting in their seats. “Until now, Todd’s Chapel had been an invisible town. It’s a quaint and hospitable place, and if you were to go any distance, few people would know much about it. That has changed. Now it will be known everywhere as a place of terrible tragedy, like Columbine, Parkland, Uvalde, and our neighbor just up the road, Newtown.” He spoke of gun violence like a war. “At the end of World War I, a New York Times correspondent in France wrote: ‘Four years’ killing and massacre stopped as if God had swept His omnipotent finger across the scene of world carnage and cried, ‘Enough.’ The combatants heeded His command and signed an armistice. So now I ask: Where is our armistice from such wanton killing? Where is our peace? There is none. Rather than listen to God, our leaders in Washington listen to themselves in one great echo chamber.”
Kelly gently elbowed me and nodded in Ted’s direction. “He’s faltering. He better sit down.”
“His friends will keep him upright.”
After the benediction, the tenor sang “The Parting Glass,” a gift to Coach Cleary’s wrestlers as everyone began filing out. Mary caught up with Ted, and Kelly and I walked behind them to their car. He settled into the front passenger seat, and Mary drove off. I followed her home.
I was glad for a few moments of quiet on the short drive. Our son’s drinking tormented Kelly, who swore Ted’s alcoholism was hereditary. Her father was a drunk and died of a heart attack at fifty-nine. She had often expressed alarm about how Ted was heading toward that future. I was worried about Kelly too; she anguished over both Jack and Ted, so she wasn’t sleeping at night. She looked haggard; her tall frame bent forward when she walked. But a sideways glance now revealed she appeared peaceful. Her hands rested on her purse in her lap, and she looked at the road ahead. Our concierge physician, Dr. Bertrand, had come around and, after a brief exam, had given her a prescription for her anxiety.
Our second child, Carol, was killed fifteen years ago when hit by a truck while cycling. We both felt that pain and how near it was again. I couldn’t deny that, but I tried not to show it. After attending to Kelly, Dr. Bertrand said to me, “You also look terrible. How do you feel?”
“I feel the bottom has yet to drop out. Jack could die. Ted’s in serious trouble.” I told him about a scene at the hospital that had been especially unnerving. “I’m standing in the lobby when a woman who was crying uncontrollably shouted over the heads of everyone, ‘Hey Mr. Scordato, what are you going to do about keeping this town safe?’”
“She’s looking to people of stature for answers. That’s natural.”
“But I don’t have special powers. I can’t even protect my own family.”
“You need to relax.” As he wrote out the prescription for me, he said, “When I was a teenager, I attended an aunt’s funeral. My uncle said to me that death is a door that opens to reveal the lives of a family. If that’s true, a mass murder reveals the life of an entire community.”
I considered this. Todd’s Chapel was a small, quiet, well-to-do town northeast of Bridgeport. If a crow were to fly over the trees that cover the rolling hills of Connecticut, it would be forty-five miles from Hartford, the city where I grew up. Todd’s Chapel retained its colonial charm because dozens of centuries-old homes had been restored. On Main Street, new street lamps with LEDs lined the red brick sidewalks. The bricks were reset last year. The town was home to a few Wall Street financiers like me. Once in a while, someone I knew sounded off about the wealth here. After a round of golf at the country club where I’m an investor, my partners and I would sit for dinner in the grill room. We played poker late into the evening and discussed everything, getting off on tangents and having round after round of drinks. One night, a guy asked in an offhand way, “Hey Emil, how much did you make last week?” As if wealth relieved me of all burdens.
We could hear Mary shouting at Ted as we came up the walk. Inside, Ted was fixing himself a gin and tonic. He slumped into a cushioned chair and took a long sip. Kelly and I took a seat. Ted’s face sagged, but then he looked up: “I’m trying to imagine what the echo in the gym was like when that guy fired seventy rounds in twenty-five seconds.”
I acknowledged his curiosity with a nod. Ted took another s
“Would take a lot of money and a lot of risk.” I changed the subject. “I wish you’d have your first drink at dinner rather than lunch.”
“I make it to work every morning.”
“What about Mary? What about Jack?”
“What about him?”
“When he recovers, he’s going to need special care. You’ll need to be sober.”
Mary shook her head in dismay and told Ted, “You may be the one needing care.”
“I’ll get clear when Jack pulls out of it.” He yawned, and Mary gave us a look of frustration. He excused himself and went off to his bedroom. His departure lifted the tension.
Knowing Kelly wanted to keep Mary company, I decided to visit Jack alone. “I’m going to the hospital.” As I left, curiosity guided me through the garage to check the recyclable bin. I was right: empty bottles of Seagram’s gin sat at various angles atop a pile of other empties. My son would light up with big ideas when he was drunk, like buying up the firearm manufacturers. We had talked about how Hartford is the historic heart of America’s firearm industry. He knew that several chief executives of nearby gun companies were members of the country club and were in my foursome a few times. Still, there may have been something in his idea. In my Wall Street career watching the economy and picking stocks, I’d studied correlations, like how job growth correlates to higher inflation or when a company hikes its quarterly dividend that correlates to a higher stock price. There was an undeniable correlation between the abundant manufacturing of assault rifles in the Connecticut River Valley—what I’d heard people call The Silicon Valley of firearms—and one of them getting into the hands of a local madman.
Jack had a private room in intensive care. After the shooting, he was rushed to the emergency room by ambulance. He was placed in a medically-induced coma to rest the body and calm the brain to allow him to heal. We waited in the ER overnight, and in the morning, Dr. Bertrand came to us to deliver test results: the internal bleeding in Jack’s skull had stopped, but his brain was still inflamed. To reassure us he said, “There’s a good expectation he will come out of this. But we don’t know when.” Now, as I stood at Jack’s bedside, he lay motionless. His eyes were closed and his chest gently rose and fell; a breathing tube ran to his mouth from a machine and lines ran from his arms to fluid bags hanging on a silver pole. Monitors astride his bed beeped his vital signs.
Dr. Bertrand came in. I wanted to hear from him something more than assurances that Jack would come out of it. I needed something more than hope and expectation, words he had used before. I felt impatient, and he was an easy target. “I want the best experts to help my grandson. Bring them in from Europe. Bring them in from anywhere. I don’t care how much it costs.”
He winced. Despite my rude tone, he remained calm. “The doctors here are among the best in the country. In fact, staff here is frequently called for its perspective on difficult cases.”
I softened my tone. “I’m sorry. I see. Okay. We’ll be patient.” Maybe I needed another pill.
He left, and I took Jack’s hand. I felt for the gold pinky ring Kelly and I had given him for his birthday, but it wasn’t there. I rubbed the indentation the ring made on his skin, thinking that if he could feel the irritation, he might react with a twitch or show any kind of movement. But he didn’t. I placed his hand back on the sheet. I pulled a chair up to the bed and opened the newspaper I had brought with me. When Jack was younger and we ate breakfast together on Saturdays, I read the famous comic strip Zits by the team of Scott and Borgman to him. I went slow because he often laughed uncontrollably. I bent down and whispered into his ear: “Hey Jack, let’s see what Jeremy is up to today. Try not to laugh too hard. That might excite the nurses.” I found the page. “Jeremy tells his dad, ‘I’m anchoring the morning announcement this week. It kind of makes me a celebrity around school.’” I pointed my thumb to my big-shot self, mugged a smile, and glanced at Jack. There was no reaction. “Jeremy says, ‘I hope I don’t become difficult to live with.’” I frowned, as Jeremy’s dad did in the comic strip, and deepened my voice to a lower pitch. “‘You? Difficult? Never!’”
I had to stop. I blinked to clear my eyes; teardrops had formed dime-sized gray spots on the newsprint. I breathed a deep, cleansing breath. I folded the paper and gripped it with both hands. I mumbled to my grandson, “Jack, we’ll wait for you till hell freezes over.”
I earned tens of millions of dollars every year. Kelly and I were worth $1.1 billion. We owned a 125-foot custom-built yacht, a majority stake in the country club, timberland in Maine, and big investments in downtown Hartford office buildings. I was proud of my extensive portfolio of stocks, bonds, and other securities. I’d been profiled in the New York Times and appeared as a talking head on CNBC television to offer my analysis of the markets. I knew influential people and could get nearly anyone short of the president on the phone. Kelly and I had entertained the governor at our home and on our yacht, and I was close with the congressman who represented our district. I had enough cash to cover the cost of security guards at every school in Todd’s Chapel for a century. Yet as I stood next to Jack, I couldn’t dodge the irrefutable fact that everything I had, all my money and recognition, didn’t amount to a damn thing.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said before stepping out into the hallway. Across from Jack’s room, a nurse stood at the door and gestured to the bed inside, quietly speaking to an attendant with a gurney, “We need to get this body down to the morgue.” That drove home Jack’s perilous condition
I needed a cup of coffee and drove to the diner. Traffic was light. I turned down Flowers Street. One of Ted’s classmates who had lived here died a few years ago of opioid abuse. Next to the dead man’s house was the home of one of Jack’s wrestling teammates. Traffic cones stood at the front of the driveway to warn reporters not to bother the family. Police caution tape ran between the cones like a yellow ribbon of sorrow. Twin killers, drugs and guns, resided on Flowers Street.
The diner was nearly empty. A customer who arrived just ahead of me sat at the counter. The waitress placed a menu before him; their greetings to one another sounded inert. I took a seat near him and ordered coffee. CNN was on several televisions hung from the stainless steel walls, so it was impossible not to hear the news anchor glibly call the carnage in Todd’s Chapel the “wrestling match massacre.” He was hosting a panel discussion on gun violence. A panelist said: “We’ve accepted these events as routine.” A second panelist who had lost a daughter at Virginia Tech demanded closure: “I want gun company executives to be called before Congress and be forced to tell the American people why they sell military rifles to civilians. I want them to be held accountable for choosing profits over children’s lives.”
That panelist had a definite goal, an admirable one to inspire a personal crusade. I had never felt passionately for or against reforming our gun laws. I knew very little about guns. When I was young, I’d heard shots fired from apartment building rooftops in Hartford celebrating the Fourth of July. During race riots in the late 1960s, I heard gunfire uptown, and news reports of the rioters killed didn’t mean much to me, a kid in high school. I never lived in a violent neighborhood where Black mothers despaired street shootings involving their sons. There were no bad neighborhoods in Todd’s Chapel.
I drank my coffee and paid at the cashier. The woman there knew me; we often exchanged friendly banter about her job, her customers, or anything just to be sociable. She thanked me by name but that was it. Her eyes flickered briefly, and she looked down at the bill. The nature of her job gave her the most rudimentary connection with anyone who stepped before her, a chance to share a good word. But this time, she averted her eyes as she gave me my change. I think she feared saying the wrong thing.
I went outside and overheard two men finishing their lunchtime conversation. One said, “Guns are just a tool if used properly.” The other said in a cynical tone, “That’s a big ‘if.’ It just seems there’s nothing to be done about them.” I watched them separate, get into their cars and drive away, still hearing the echo of “nothing to be done.” Were we truly helpless? I wondered. I went to my car but did not get in. It was quiet. I stood perfectly still and listened hard, as if a moment of complete silence could help me comprehend the context of what had happened to Todd’s Chapel. There was no traffic, no tolling of bells, not even the cold rush of winter wind through the trees. The stillness reminded me of TV commentary after some previous mass murder: “Grief and silence covered the town like a pestilential haze.” I sensed this in my town, this stillness and pain like a pestilence.
