Truth in Advertising

WHERE ARE YOU GOING TODAY, MR. DOLAN?


Frank is speaking. My sense is that he’s been speaking for some time now, though I don’t know for how long or, for that matter, what he’s talking about. It’s the day before Christmas, and what says Christmas better than kissing the asses of several oil company marketing executives?

We are gathered—Frank, Dodge, Martin, myself—in the midtown offices of Petroleon, the ninth largest corporation in the world, with headquarters in either Dallas, London, or Dubai (they refuse to say which). Their New York offices occupy one of the greenest, most ecologically friendly buildings in the world, a tribute to renewable architecture and design, and a breathtaking public relations coup, high above the East River, just south of the United Nations. “‘Green’ isn’t simply a wonderful marketing ploy for us, Fin,” one of the marketing people had said to me while we were all shaking hands. He kept shaking my hand as we spoke. “We absolutely believe in it, as is reflected in our sizeable marketing budget. People say, ‘Hey, aren’t you guys an oil company?’ No. We’re an energy company. Even though technically ninety-one percent of our profits are derived from oil. Oil is an exceptionally dirty word, as focus group testing both quantitatively and qualitatively proves out in spades. Energy is clean. We’re the good guys. Try the Danish. They’re insane.”

There seemed to be very few humans in the halls—blond wood, glass, steel, plush carpeting—except for the receptionist and two armed guards. One is escorted everywhere at Petroleon—keycards, punched numbers, heavy steel doors. A humorless woman named Claire acted as our guide and took us to the conference room we’re in now, asking that we sit anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in the center of the table, north side, since that’s where Mr. Cameron, Petroleon’s CEO, sits.

Directly underneath the table at that seat, Claire said, is a panic button. Previous privileged guests to Petroleon, she tells us, not having had the advantage of Claire’s direction, have sat in that seat and silently kneed the button. To their great surprise, approximately eighteen seconds later, an insistent knock had come at the door. The conferees did not answer correctly (a one-word password from Mr. Cameron to let the guards know he’s not in a hostage situation) and six extremely serious men (three former SAS, two former Mossad, one former Navy SEAL) burst into the room, fingers on the triggers of short-barreled Heckler & Koch assault rifles. One of the conferees that day, a Stanford geologist giving a presentation on the composition of subocean mafic rock, wet himself. Claire tells this story in a quiet voice, a slim, knowing smile. “One can’t be too careful these days. Certain constituencies have taken offense to the work of Petroleon. You can’t please everyone, can you?” Certainly not the indigenous people of Honduras, Liberia, and northern Brazil, where Petroleon has decimated groundwater supplies, been linked to absurdly high cancer rates, spilled millions of gallons of heavy crude, and, according to human rights organizations, hired mercenaries to murder protestors. You certainly can’t please everyone, Claire. Especially if you’re trying to kill them.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to be in this room with you today,” Frank says with the gravity of an archbishop. In the car on the way over, Martin had coached Frank on his opening remarks.

“These are serious people,” Martin had said, mostly for Frank’s benefit. Frank was focused on a grilled cheese sandwich at the time. “They don’t muck about. This isn’t soda and it’s not toothpaste. To do what they do they spend a billion dollars a month. Also, let’s be very careful not to mention the spill of a few months ago.”

Martin says this because Frank has a bad habit of not being able to stop speaking when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or is lying, two things he does often. He is a nervous speaker. This is due in part to severe self-esteem issues, causing him to both love and loathe himself in alternating moments. He can’t believe he has the job he does, the money, the stuff. He feels he deserves it and, in the same moment, feels like a fraud. It makes for interesting meetings. He pops Xanax like Tic Tacs.

Frank says, “What spill?” He has a blob of cheese on his chin.

Martin says, “Third largest oil spill in U.S. history. Destroyed eight hundred miles of Alaskan coastline. Fishing, polar bear habitats, seal, otter, sea lion. They’ve offered money. But these things happen in a world hungry for oil, don’t they?”

Frank says, “Should I mention that?”

Martin says, “No, Frank!”

Frank’s job is simply the setup. “It’s the day before Christmas and all over this city agencies are closed, employees are gone, but we’re here. Christ himself couldn’t get us to Bethlehem to miss this opportunity to meet with you today.” He feigns a laugh. No one else so much as grins. Mostly they drop their heads out of embarrassment, pretend to make a note or check their BlackBerry.

Frank continues. “Your company is a towering monument to what is good about this country. We love you. We don’t want to leave. We never want to leave.”

I catch Martin making a small head motion to the senior client, a “not-to-worry-we-will-leave-the-building-at-some-point” motion.

Frank hands it over to Martin, who deftly walks through the agency’s credentials, showing a PowerPoint slide with the logos of our many internationally known brands—diapers, packaged goods, candy, fast food, soda . . . oil? Martin talks about our “remarkable growth” during the “nightmarish global recession,” but does not get around to saying exactly how we achieved that remarkable growth (we cut our fee after most of our clients demanded that we cut our fee, laid off 129 people, and imposed an across-the-board pay cut of five percent, all of which achieved remarkable growth).

A quick scan of the room suggests that someone appears to have dabbed a tiny, yet pungent speck of poo under their collective noses, if their expressions are any indication. Though, in casually turning to my left, I notice what may be the cause of their poo expressions. Dodge is sitting next to me, asleep. Martin has seen Dodge’s sleeping visage a fraction of a second before I have and now appears to be sending me a signal with his eyes, as he is widening them to an unnatural state, one that looks painful. He is sending me a signal, I am sure of it, and that signal is to wake Dodge because Martin—I know this from the agenda in front of me, in front of all of us—is about to introduce Dodge, who, after rambling about God only knows what, will then introduce me, and I will impress the ninth largest company in the world by showing them a reel of commercials about diapers and candy.

And then, with his eyes closed, Dodge says, “I was just thinking.”

It’s somewhat difficult to believe he was daydreaming and not sound asleep, as he’s curled his slight, boneless-breast-of-chicken body into a sideways ball in the chair.

“I often do that with my eyes closed,” he says, eyes open now, trying to find the focus, casually righting himself, as if he’s just awoken from a lazy afternoon doze.

He continues, sounding oddly like Mr. Rogers. “I was just thinking that it takes courage to make mistakes, doesn’t it?”

Everyone is confused now, but he has their attention, this wee, curiously dressed man. He leans forward, arms splayed out on the polished table, and looks around, the confidence of a Harvard Business School grad. This is Dodge’s genius. This is why he is a rich man.

Dodge says, “I was told not to mention the spill. But I’m going to mention the spill, because to ignore it is to ignore an ugly pimple on the tip of your nose. Everyone knows it’s there. And what you have is a big ugly pimple on your oily, oily nose.”

I’m excited because I can see that both Frank and Martin are terrified. I’m excited because Dodge is finally going to flame out, not be able to pull up from his bullshit nosedive. It is his Christmas bonus to me.

The reaction of the oily-nosed clients suggests profound confusion. In fact, it looks like one of them is on the cusp of saying something. But Dodge gets there first.

Dodge says, “You’re Babe Ruth. That’s right. I just said Babe Ruth. We all know he hit the most home runs”—Dodge is unfamiliar with Barry Bonds—“but do you want to know a little something else about the Babe? He also holds the record for most strike-outs. Now I’m not saying you’ve struck out or that you’re a portly, cigar-smoking, dead baseball player. I’m saying that you get up there every day and swing the bat, do amazing things, and sometimes miss. Let’s celebrate that. Let’s celebrate the courage of effort, the nobility of trying. Some fish died. They died in a noble cause. Some beaches were soiled. They were soiled in an effort—granted, a failed one—to bring the world energy. Think about that. To bring the world energy. To make it run. To make lives better. What’s wrong with that? Can someone please tell me what’s wrong with that?”

And just like that, as if someone threw a switch, Dodge loses his energy, sits back in his chair. The silence roars. It’s the moment at the end of the car chase where the car is hanging off the edge of a cliff. Will it fall?

One of the senior executives says, “I think that is a remarkable perspective.” And he smiles.

Frank is a giddy schoolgirl. “That’s why I love this man. If I weren’t happily married . . .”

Martin cuts him off. Then he reels it in.

“Television. Print. Social media. We can envision a sweeping campaign. A campaign about Petroleon’s courage.”

Look at their faces. You can see it all.

• • •

“What are you doing with your life, Mr. Dolan?” I hear the woman behind the American Airlines counter at JFK ask me.

“I beg your pardon?” I say.

“Where are we going today, Mr. Dolan?” the woman behind the American Airlines counter at JFK actually asks me.

“Well, Betty,” I say, looking at her nametag, “we’re going to Bhutan, to the Kingdom of Bhutan. Have you heard of it? They have something called the Gross National Happiness. They measure people’s happiness, not just their productivity.”

Betty gives me a fake smile. “Says here you’re going to Cancún.”

“Must be some mistake. Come with me, Betty. Do you have plans for the holiday? We’ll pop over, try some local food, feel the happiness. It’ll be great.”

She types quickly and hands me my boarding pass.

“I’d go, but I’ve got these family plans.” She smiles again. “Gate forty-six. You’re all set. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas, Betty,” I say.

I make my way to the Admirals Club and wait.

I am one of the only people left, I think—certainly after 9/11—who still enjoy airports. Airports to me—after the near strip search and often less-than-confidence-inspiring security staff—are places of possibility, of new beginnings. You’ve got a ticket on the red-eye to New York. Or do you? What about walking up to the ticket counter at British Airways and buying a ticket to London instead? What about connecting through London for service to Marrakech? What about LAX-Johannesburg, Johannesburg-Mumbai? Imagine waking up in Mumbai! Because it’s possible. Because you can. I’m convinced, possibly by the glossy photos I see and the persuasive copy I read (photos and copy manufactured by my very own colleagues), that in these places—these St. Barths, these Kenyan safaris, these Bali beaches, these happy-obsessed Kingdoms—are the keys, the experiences, the visual and emotional stimuli that would bring happiness. I’m sure of this. And airports are the gateway. Don’t think of a flight delay as a hassle. Think of it as an opportunity.

Have I myself done it? Have I found myself killing time in JFK or OHR or CDG, leafing through a swimsuit issue, drinking a coffee, staring at the crowds, and then changing my trip, my destination, my future? No. Never. Only a crazy person would do that. I’m just saying it’s possible. Because I have these two tickets. These two first-class tickets, and I can go anywhere.

My phone rings.

“Hi,” I say.

“You’re a jerk,” Phoebe says.

“Merry Christmas.”

“That was really sweet,” she says. “Thank you.”

I put a gift on her chair before I left today. A hat and scarf from Barneys. It sounds boring but they’re cashmere and she’s been talking about wanting a new hat.

“Your fashionable warmth is my concern.”

Phoebe says, “Where are you?”

“Airport.”

“You excited about your lonely trip?”

“Lonely? Maybe you’re unaware that most of my relatives are Mexican?”

She says, “You’re an odd man.”

“Where are you?”

“On the Acela to Boston. I just got a beer. I’m wearing my new hat and scarf. I’m very happy.”

Three, four seconds of silence. I think about telling her about Eddie’s call, about my father.

I say, “Okay, then.”

Phoebe says, “You good?”

“Never better.”

“Don’t miss me too much, okay?”

“I’ll try not to.”

I leave the Admirals Club and walk through the airport toward my gate. Businessmen hustle past awkwardly, holding briefcases, garment bags, pulling wheelie suitcases that won’t stay steady. Families camp out eating makeshift dinners. I look for a seat alone but the gates are crowded with holiday travelers. I sit against the corridor wall and watch people pass. The wardrobes of many people strike me as aggressively casual. Teenage girls wear pajama bottoms and UGGs and oversized sweaters, pulling the sleeves down to cover their hands. They walk in pairs, laughing, bad posture, unsure of their bodies. A wave of sadness sweeps over me watching them, and I call home. My phone number growing up in Boston. I have done this a few times over the years. I usually get an answering machine but twice I’ve had to hang up on a real person.

A woman answers. “Hey, did your cell phone die?”

I say nothing, confused for a moment.

She says, “Steve?”

I’m about to hang up when I say, “Is Fin there, please?”

It’s my house. I can picture her, where she’s standing, if the phone is at the same jack. The small kitchen with the windows looking out onto our small backyard. She’s in my house. I should have asked for my mother. A quick word. What time’s dinner? Is Dad home?

“Who?” she says.

“Fin Dolan. He used to live there.”

“No, I’m sorry, there’s no one here by that name. You’ve got the wrong number.”

It’s not the blatant, drunken screamer who does the real damage. Give me the father who beats you, who’s always angry, any day of the week. At least I can learn to hate him. At least you know where you stand. It’s the mood shifter who’s the real danger. He’s your friend, the mood shifter. How was your day, dear? Really? No pork chops at the market? Oh, well. Hot dogs and beans is just as nice, isn’t it, Finny? Maura? How’s that homework coming? She tiptoes through a mine field with harmless answers, my mother. She can see the other side, safety. It’s going to be a good night. She can feel it. I’m sitting there. It’s almost dinnertime. Maura is at the dining room table, in the next room, doing her homework. I can see her. We all feel it. All is calm. Except then he opens the cupboard and sees that we’re out of Barry’s Tea. His favorite. The only tea he drinks. No coffee. Never coffee. Tea. Barry’s Tea. Two bags, two sugars, a lot of milk. Big cup. His hands are searching for it, moving packages and boxes, Saltines, Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix, baking powder, peanut butter. The hands moving faster now, violent hands no longer just moving things but knocking them over. He’s mumbling, “Where’s the Barry’s Tea? Where is the . . . it has to be here. We have to have Barry’s Tea. I asked you for the Barry’s Tea, this morning, before I left. What was the one thing I asked before I left the goddamned house this morning before I went to work and put on a bulletproof vest for this family?! I asked you to get some Barry’s Tea!” I turn to Maura, who’s put her hands over her ears, to my mother, who’s trying to say something—that she forgot, that she can go now, that she can be back in ten minutes, that it’s okay. But it’s not okay, he says, his voice louder. It’s not okay. Kevin at the back door, just having gotten home, staring in at the scene.

I try to remember a specific Christmas Eve but it’s a Thanksgiving that comes to me. Him blind drunk, trying to take the turkey out of the oven, falling, the bird skidding across the kitchen floor, Kevin and Eddie carrying him up to his room. My mother putting us in the car, stopping at a convenience store for turkey sandwiches and chips, driving in silence through “rich” neighborhoods west of Boston, big houses set back from the road behind tall old trees and stone walls, no one drunk, no turkeys skating across the floor, everyone happy, heads bowed before the feast, giving thanks for life’s riches.

They’re calling a flight to Honolulu. They’re calling a flight to Tokyo. They’re calling a flight to Sydney. They’re calling my flight to Cancún, where a car service will be waiting to whisk me an hour south to a small hotel on the beach. Twenty rooms. Clean white sheets. Highs of seventy degrees during the day, cool breezes at night. A fireplace in every room. Ocean waves lull you to sleep. Santa comes this evening bearing gifts. And I, in the great Christian tradition, head to Mexico alone. Just a few hours ago this plan seemed cool and independent and exciting. It suddenly seems pathetic, sad, and lonely. It’s time to go. But I don’t move. And it’s then I know I’m not getting on that plane. I don’t know when I decided it. It comes as a bit of a surprise to me as I stand a few yards from the gate, listen as they make the final boarding call, watch a few stragglers hustle past me, hand the gate agent their tickets. The two agents say good-bye to each other, safe flight, Merry Christmas, and one walks down the jetway while the other closes and locks the door with a key. I watch as the plane pulls back from the gate, turns, and taxis out toward the runway, to the line of waiting planes going to wonderful, exciting, exotic locations around the globe, as well as Cleveland, Minneapolis, and Muncie.

I turn to see the empty waiting area. The LCD sign above the check-in desk at the gate has changed from CANCÚN to SÃO PAULO. That flight’s not leaving for three hours, though. I picture Phoebe on the train, a camera dollying down the aisle to find her staring out the window at the Connecticut coastline. She does this thing where she bunches her hair up and pushes it back, but it falls right back to the front of her face again. I picture Ian at home with Scott, getting ready to host their big dinner tomorrow. Paulie with his wife in Mamaroneck, putting the kids down so he can put toys together. Stefano and his wife in the West Village, making dinner. He mentioned that his mother was flying in from Italy today for the holidays. Malcolm, as always, spending the holidays with Raj and his wife. I pick up my laptop bag and my knapsack and start walking. There’s a part of me that wants to go home but it would be empty and sad, too much of Amy left there in the silence. I walk hundreds of yards through the airport, past Sunglass Hut (two of them), past Cinnabon, past Sbarro, where a man looks at me for a long time, having just taken a massive bite of pizza, a comical look that says he wants to harm me, past a woman slowly mopping the floor, to the gate for the flight to Hyannis, Massachusetts, with brief layovers in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. I buy a ticket on a half-empty flight to spend Christmas with my father, a stranger I have not seen in twenty-five years.

• • •

He’s dead.

This is what I think when I look at him from the doorway of his hospital room. His eyes are closed and he’s not moving and his face and hands are an unnatural color for a human. It looks like him but it doesn’t. I can’t believe he’s dead. Except he’s not. The sheets are pulled tight around him and you can see his chest rise and fall slowly, hear the beeps and blips of the machines that signify he’s alive.

And just that quickly I wish I hadn’t come. Why am I here? It’s not for him. It’s for the idea that it seemed like the right and noble thing to do. It’s something one might see in a commercial: Open. An airport. Night. Tired businessman about to board a flight when his cell phone rings. “Hello?” Long pause. “Where? No, it’s just . . . we haven’t seen each other in a while. No. Okay. Thanks.”

He walks to the jetway, is about to hand the ticket to the attendant, when he turns and runs.

Cut to him pulling up to the hospital in a cab.

Cut to him in his father’s room.

Cut to a tight shot of him holding his father’s hand.

Cut to a nurse, buxom, leaning over the bed . . . wait . . . lose the nurse.

Cut to his father opening his eyes, the surprised look. “Fin. I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice hoarse. “Don’t leave me.”

United Airlines.

I like it. It works. It works because we can imagine it, because we’ve seen it or something like it hundreds of times. It’s emotional comfort food, a known narrative, like the ABC Sunday Night Movie or Leno jokes.

Except here, now, someone’s not following the script. My father’s not waking up to say his lines. Even if he did I wouldn’t really care. I want to leave and head as fast as possible to New York, to the Ear Inn, to the White Horse Tavern, to Corner Bistro. I want to call Ian, call Phoebe, call someone. Yes. I will do that. I do not want to be here. It’s Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake. I want to be home. Or at the very least on a plane to Mexico. I don’t know whether to stand or sit.

“Can I help you?”

A nurse appears beside me. She looks like a nurse. I wonder if I look like a copywriter in my blue jeans, boots, and $300 James Perse sweater that Ian and Phoebe made me buy.

“I’m Fin Dolan.”

“His son. Of course. I’m Margaret Nash.”

His son? Legally, I guess.

We shake hands and I think of the proximity her hands have to death and disease. Where does anatomical waste go? (According to an article in Harper’s some time ago, it goes primarily to one of three places: New Jersey, Staten Island, or Delaware. What is it, exactly, about these places that willingly accept ill-functioning kidneys, spleens, and bloody, viscous tissue?)

“I’m so sorry,” Margaret Nash says. “This must be very difficult for you.”

“It is, yes,” I say with a pained look, as if I’m a character on a soap opera.

“He’s stable now. It’s a matter of time, of course, until we know something. The doctor should be around shortly.”

“Thank you,” I say to Margaret, who may be forty-eight or may be sixty-two. She has short, shiny silver hair. She’s a healthy woman, if her clear eyes and high coloring are any indication.

“You must be very close,” she says.

“Actually, no. I haven’t really seen much of him in twenty-five years.”

“Oh . . .”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” I say. “He left when I was twelve.” I shrug, fake a smile.

“It’s good of you to come.”

We both look at him, not quite sure what to say.

The hospital is quiet, almost no one in the hallways. A machine beeps, then hisses. My mother taught me to dance. She taught me the fox trot, the waltz, the rumba. I got quite good at it, a natural, she said. I could take hold of Margaret right now, sweep her into a nice, long-striding, three-step waltz. Bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum, bum-ba-bum . . .

“They say it helps to talk to them,” Margaret says, looking at my father, arms crossed tight across her chest. “They hear your voice, somewhere inside.”

What about stabbing them?

She looks at me now, the benevolent nurse’s smile. “You could read him a story or a book. Music helps.” Now she shrugs. We’re shruggers. We know nothing, really. We’re all just guessing.

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll give it a try.”

“Cafeteria’s open until nine. It’s not much but it’s about the only thing you’ll find open tonight.”

She smiles and walks away.

There is a window that looks out onto the back of the hospital, a small power plant of some kind, steam coming from one of the buildings, hospital vehicles parked, two men, janitors, smoking in the distance. I’m glad that I don’t have to wear a uniform to work.

It seems to me that I must look exactly like a man should look in his dying father’s room, standing by the window, pensively. It’s the never-ending commercial again. You wouldn’t even need to light this room. There’s gorgeous light coming in from the powerful sodium streetlight in the back parking lot, light coming in through the door. I want to share this idea with sturdy Margaret. But what’s the product? How about Hallmark cards? A caring son visiting his douchebag father. Daddy’s in a coma. The caring son reads the card aloud. The father wakes, brought back from the walk toward the light by his loving son’s voice. The son then smothers the helpless father to death with a pillow.

Advertising often attempts the structure and devices of drama and film. And yet for the most part we are, I think, wildly disappointed when, after twenty-three deeply moving seconds of footage showing a grandmother trying to climb the stairs alone with her grocery bags, we see a Hallmark card awaiting her. Happy Thursday, Nana. Just thinking of you. Love, Petey!

I believe that if the story could somehow continue, in thirty-second installments, it would be more interesting. Not merely another Hallmark commercial, but another product. In the next spot, say, we might see Nana open the door and collapse, the victim of a massive heart attack (pharmaceutical industry). Where’s the adorable grandson now?

Imagine it. Several advertisers, we’d never know which one until the end, pooling money, a kind of rolling, continuous TV commercial that never ends. The drama is constant. You don’t ever know what it’s for because it’s constantly changing!

Death. It is one reality we refuse to face head-on in advertising. I think it’s time to change that. The question is, can you move product with it? I broached this very topic with Boeing some years ago, late one evening after a day of shooting interior shots of a mock-up of a new 777-400 (their roomiest passenger jet) on a lot at Universal.

“What do you mean the plane crashes?” the client asked, his drink suddenly frozen midway to his lips. Hal? Herb? I could never remember.

“I mean it crashes, Hal,” I’d said, three-too-many scotches in. “And we see it crash. We see all of it.”

“Let me see if I understand you,” he’d said, rather slowly if memory serves. “You are proposing to make a television commercial wherein you crash one of our planes. One of our $400 million planes. On television.”

“That is exactly what I’m proposing,” I’d said, feeling the rush of the scotch, the heat of the gas fire in the lobby of the elegant Shutters hotel in Santa Monica, that heady feeling of power from talking to the client about an idea that, in this moment, seems to me genuinely brilliant.

“Let’s take the gloves off of advertising. Let’s see the luggage strewn on the runway. Let’s see the random shoe, the eyeglasses that somehow survived the superheated flames. I want to do for advertising what Brando did for theater. Wake people up. Make them feel again. And, to a great extent, horrify them. There’s no sound in the commercial. But then, a voice-over. Alan Rickman, maybe. English. Americans love the English. ‘No one can guarantee your safety when you step onto an aircraft. But at Boeing, we’re working harder than ever to make sure that you’re as safe as you can be.’ Something like that. We can tweak it. Herb? Your thoughts?”

Six weeks later we lost the account. I never mentioned the conversation to anyone.

• • •

Margaret returns with a doctor and another nurse.

“This is Dr. Benjamin, your father’s doctor.”

He shakes my hand and winks at me.

“Mr. Dolan,” he says. “I’m sorry I was unable to speak with you yesterday.”

“I didn’t call yesterday,” I say, looking at Margaret and the other nurse for some reason. The other nurse is perhaps twenty-five and strikingly beautiful.

The doctor says, “Your father is in what we call serious but stable condition.” Which makes me wonder if others call it something else. “He’s had a myocardial infarction.” He winks at me again. He enunciates these last two words, saying them slowly.

“Is that a real word?”

“Is what a real word?”

“Infarction,” I say.

“In common parlance, it means a heart attack,” Dr. Wink says. Double wink. Which is when I realize that it’s not a wink, it’s a tic. It’s a tic that makes it difficult to concentrate on what he is saying about my dying father because it’s like a video game, where you’re waiting for the next wink. I have an expression on my face that suggests I am listening intently. I watch myself act intense. I think my look is the right one for this situation.

“. . . motor skills and speech,” he continues. Wink. I want to react, to pre-guess when the winks are going to come.

I nod slowly, as if understanding. Heather. The other nurse’s name, according to her tag.

“So we wait,” he says. “We watch.” Wink, wink. “So often medicine is a matter of waiting for the body to heal itself.”

“Yes,” I say.

“You might want to try reading to him,” he says, and I look to Margaret, who smiles. “It’s been known to help.”

“Thank you,” I say.

He nods, with crisp, military precision, then winks twice and walks away.

Margaret, Heather, and I smile at one another and then they turn to leave.

I stand there looking at him. The change from what I remember is extraordinary and disturbing. He is smaller. His cheeks are hollowed and the skin appears thin, blue veins visible underneath. Were he to shave, blood would burst forth from his face. He is an old man.

But then, he was always old to me. He waited to get married. Perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps he never really wanted any of it. Who waited to get married back then, home from the war, aged by what they had done and seen? They were eager to get on with life, to marry and start a family. Not him. He waited almost ten years. And then they had trouble having children, my mother suffering two miscarriages before finally having Eddie in 1960. Kevin followed two years later. Maura four years after that. And that’s how it was supposed to stay. Except I happened. The little mistake, he once called me. He was forty-four, an older dad back then.

There were times, after he left, when I would find my mother standing at the kitchen sink, water running, staring at a dish or the wall or the faucet. I wondered what she was thinking about in those long moments. Sometimes she’d be crying. People leave. People die. The secret no one tells us is that we don’t get over it, ever.

When Kevin was sixteen and obviously gay, some neighborhood children caught him and another boy kissing in the woods near our home. My father heard the story—everyone in the neighborhood did—and he walked into Kevin’s room that evening, the room Kevin shared with Eddie, and began beating him. My mother ran up from the kitchen, wondering what had crashed to the floor. Which is when she saw her husband beating her child, her sweet, kind son who helped her in the kitchen and with laundry and who liked to cook. I’d never heard her scream like that before. Kevin cowered on the floor. I don’t know where Eddie came from—I just remember thinking he was moving very fast. And maybe he didn’t realize that the person he was grabbing and throwing against the wall was our father. He probably knew when he grabbed fistfuls of my father’s shirt, tearing it, pushing him against the wall so hard that my father’s head bounced off the wall and for many years after there was an impression in the plaster. I was standing in the hallway, just outside the room. I had been on my way to go hang out with Kevin when my father marched by me and told me to stay out. I stood there and saw the whole thing. I saw as Kevin took his hands away from his face that they were bleeding. He must have cut his hands, I thought. And for just a moment I thought he’d put something in his mouth, some Halloween-like thing to make it seem like blood, only it wasn’t a Halloween thing, and he spit up real blood on the floor, and he was shaking, and my mother went to him, held him, took the sleeve of her shirt and held it to his nose and she looked up, at me and Maura, and shouted for Maura to take me away. Only Maura couldn’t pull me away. She stayed behind me and put her arms around me while Eddie’s hand went to my father’s throat and clutched it and squeezed it, so that my father winced in pain. Eddie was almost as big as my father then—not as wide, maybe, but strong and fit and angry. He and Kevin are two years apart in age. They rarely got along, rarely even spoke. And it was common knowledge in the neighborhood and at school, at the skating rink and the parks, that Kevin was a sissy and a fag and a homo and all the other words people used. But God help the person who dared harm Eddie Dolan’s brother.

My father’s hands went to his own throat. He couldn’t breathe. Eddie’s face was contorted in rage and he was biting his own tongue so hard that he had blood on his lips. He was throwing punches now, at my father’s head and neck and chest, hitting his own hand holding my father’s throat. My mother looked up from the floor, from Kevin, holding him still, and screamed, “Stop it!” Only Eddie didn’t hear her. I think perhaps Eddie meant to kill our father, to finally stop him, stop the rage and outbursts—Eddie, even when he was smaller, standing up for my mother, taking the slapping and beatings because of it. The fear we all felt every moment our father was home.

Eddie pulled his hand away from my father’s neck, which was pink and red. My father slumped a bit, breathing erratically. He looked around and must have seen the horror on my face and Maura’s, too, and his bleeding, scrawny, harmless, lovely gay son, and his small wife crying, and his oldest boy, standing at the ready, sideways, right fist clenched so tight his knuckles were white, prepared to go again, wanting to go again, to beat him to death if need be.

My father left the next day for work and did not come home again.

• • •

I measure time in memories, fixed points, a street corner where a thing happened, where I will sometimes wonder, years later, why that same thing doesn’t still exist every time I pass that street corner. Where did the event go?

Right now I am sitting in the kitchen of our house on Willow Road, eating a fried bologna sandwich because I have a slight fever and stayed home from school. Mostly I think my mother wanted the company. The table is Formica-topped with stainless steel legs, one of which wobbles, so we keep a folded napkin under it. There is a picture window looking out onto the backyard and the Carneys’ house beyond. There’s a radio tuned to a station that plays swing music, and my mother is smiling. And then it’s gone. I run out of film.

We would hear about him from time to time. Occasionally we’d get a visit from one of the cops in his precinct. They’d take a collection and give my mother an envelope. Kevin told me that Eddie went looking for him after he left, waited for him outside the precinct house one night. There was a scuffle, some punches thrown. My mother heard about it. Kevin said she sat Eddie down and begged him to stop what he was doing. She said, “You’re becoming like him.”

It was strange after he left. We never spoke of it, but it hung in the air. His clothes remained in her closet, his coats on the hallway pegs. Until one day my mother gathered them up, with Maura’s help, and drove them to Goodwill.

I thought she’d be happy with him gone. I thought things would get better. But they didn’t. She changed. She spoke less, smiled rarely. I would walk in the back door and find her sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the window, a cigarette between her fingers, a long ash about to fall. As much as she wanted him to leave, something happened to her that day that I never fully understood. I didn’t see what was so terrible. I didn’t miss him. She died a little when he left. She went to church more. Maura and I would go with her on Sundays. But then she started going on weekdays, too, early morning masses. In the evening, after dinner, the occasional Pall Mall and an Irish coffee, she’d retreat into her room, close the door. But after she died, it was different.

My father showed up at the wake. He walked in, knelt at the casket, his face a few feet from his dead ex-wife, her powdered lips sewn shut, the fluids drained out of her, pumped full of formaldehyde, bearing little resemblance to a living, breathing human being. That’s how I saw it, anyway. I simply didn’t believe that it was her, lying there. I wondered then, and sometimes now, what went through his mind during those few moments when everyone in the room at the James Gormley & Sons Funeral Home in Charlestown, Massachusetts, watched him walk in, felt the air leave the room, the hush that came over the place, looked to Eddie, watched him flush, saw the anger in his eyes. We all watched him as he blessed himself again, after maybe a minute, then he stood up and walked over to us. I stopped watching him because I turned to look at Eddie. And what I saw, as my father stood in front of his children, as we looked at him, was Kevin reach for Eddie’s hand, palm open, as if to say, Don’t.

He didn’t speak for a time, and when he did, he spoke to a silent room. The booming, angry voice was gone.

“Your mother was a fine woman. She . . . she loved her children very much.”

He was looking down at a point on the carpet as he spoke.

“I’m terribly . . .”

The pants of his suit were too short. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. The four of us in a line. Eddie, Kevin, Maura, and me. I was looking at Maura and Maura was looking at the ceiling and Eddie was fast-breathing and I wondered if he was going to hit him.

The thing is that there were inconsistencies. That’s what the police said. There was nothing wrong mechanically with her car, an old cream-colored Chevy Nova. No brake-line problem, no steering problem, none of the tires blew. A man from the life insurance company came to our house and asked if she’d been feeling depressed lately. That struck me as an odd question. Her husband walked out on her eighteen months earlier. It’s a myth that time heals wounds. Not all wounds. Chemicals play a role. Then a nothing thing happens. You might look at, say, a Boston Bruins ashtray in the living room that he once used while watching the games. The sound of a lawn mower on a Saturday. The smell of aftershave on the man in front of you at the post office. A husband and wife in the distance laughing about something. The memories of the shouting recede. The early years return. One plans a life, writes a script, an outline at the very least. We will be different. We all think this. We shall deftly avoid the cancers and the premature death, the car accidents and job loss, the miscarriages and affairs. What was it like for her at night, late, alone, in bed?

I’d gotten home early from school. That day. April 14. Our class had taken a field trip to the aquarium. She was on her way out to the car. We were standing outside.

I said, “Where are you going?”

She looked at me for a time and then said, “You’re not supposed to be home.”

“We got back early. They let us go.”

“Petersen’s,” she said. “For milk. We need some things.” Petersen’s Market. It was just down the street. Spring Street.

I turned to go into the house. She said, “Finny.”

I stopped and looked back.

She reached her hand out, touched my face, my cheek, smoothed my hair. She looked like she wanted to say something. She looked tired. I watched her get in her car and back out, drive up the street. And I saw my bike, this crappy green bike that I had, lying on the grass next to the back stairs. I thought about moving it to the shed out back in case it rained but I didn’t.

There are things you should never write down. For example, I think that it is not a good idea, for anyone involved, to get a large manila envelope in the mail a month or so after your mother’s funeral addressed to The Dolan Children from your mother’s best friend, Mary Downey. I think it is a mistake for Mary to write a short note: Your mother asked me to send this to you. I am so sorry. Mary. And I think that it is dangerous to send a one-page letter to your children telling them how much you loved them, talking of the hole in your heart, the joy that had gone out of your life, the mistakes and sins and guilt, the prayers you had said for all of us, yet never saying the words I am now going to drive my cream-colored Chevy Nova directly into the large elm tree at the bend in the road on Spring Street, the too-sharp bend, the site of so many accidents over the years, the tree just beyond the entrance to St. Joseph Cemetery.

Eddie had told us to come to the kitchen. He read the letter. I don’t remember much of it. I do remember that Maura held a dishtowel in her balled-up fists, her eyes wide, as if she were going insane. Kevin sobbed and said, “Oh Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus.” The muscles in Eddie’s jaw moving, reading the letter with his teeth together, his voice cold and angry. As for myself, just as when my father left, I remember thinking that it wasn’t real. I remember feeling as if it weren’t happening to me. What I do remember very clearly is thinking this: What was going through her mind as she accelerated and turned the wheel toward the tree? I wondered if she was crying or mildly excited about doing something so dangerous or if she was scared. Was she smoking, as she often did in the car? Was the radio on? I remember watching them, my sister and brothers, that day. There was a tree in the backyard, the long, thin branches of which would scrape against the window when it was windy. It drove my father nuts. It scraped now, in the wind. They seemed far away and sad. I watched them, all four of them, me included. How could I tell them that it was okay, that it would be fine, that it wasn’t true. That it couldn’t be true.

I know that Eddie made a copy of her letter and mailed it to my father. I wonder what it was like to receive that.

Standing in front of his children, at his wife’s wake, my father finally looked up.

He said, “She deserved better than me. You all did.”

I stood closest to him. He seemed to be in so much pain. He seemed a stranger to me, a sad man in a bad suit. Someone should help him, I thought. I was going to say “Dad.” I was going to put my arm out, touch him. That’s what I thought. I could see it in my mind. But then he turned and walked out.

In the evenings, long before, when it was good, he would sit with a cup of tea, alone, after dinner, and leaf through the Sears catalog, humming.

My cell phone rings. I don’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Dolan?” I realize that I’m toying with my father’s IV tube, flicking it with my index finger, causing small bubbles to form, which I don’t think is a good thing.

“Mr. Dolan, Dwayne Nevis from American Express. Great news about your account. You’re now Executive Platinum. Would you have a moment to talk about the benefits?”