I had nothing then, especially not pretension. At GW, my well-heeled friends would talk of going to dinner at one of their favorite DC restaurants, Lonny Swa’s. “The guy’s name is Lonny Swa?” I asked. “What kind of name is that?” After cracking up at my expense, they headed over to La Ni?oise. No eating fried rice on the curb of the strip mall for this crowd. A few years later, when I was sitting with David O’Brien and his coterie at the East Five Three, someone would make a crack that everyone was in on but me. While they were all chuckling, O’Brien would turn to me and quietly explain what a codpiece was. So funny and kind, a rare combination. I loved him. I was in love with him. I was never sexually attracted to men, but who knows? If I was braver, less hung up by what I was raised to believe about sex. “Just be yourself,” he seemed to say. I remember him like it was yesterday.
Before Ireland was born, I would lie on the floor of a house in the San Fernando Valley, assuming that my first marriage was over, sleeping on the floor by the fire with ten dogs. Ten little dogs who became my friends and who gave me some of the only real love I had in my life then. I had some of the best nights of sleep in my life with those dogs on that floor. I had learned to love animals by Kim’s example. I learned to love them even more when she pulled away.
When Beth and I sat in Ethel Kennedy’s living room on the Cape watching the 1988 debate, my dad was another man whose spirit was in that house, if only for one night, twenty years after our trip to St. Pat’s. My dad did everything he could to make me happy. Will I ever see him again? Do some parents seek their children beyond this life? That bond, that cord, that bloodline that pulls and pushes. Where did he go? What has he been doing with himself all of this time? Can he see and hear me?
When I met Tony Hopkins, Meryl, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews, De Niro, Pacino, Peter Shaffer, and Scorsese, those moments made me happy because I was meeting Hannibal Lecter, Karen Blixen, Atticus Finch, Mary Poppins, Jake La Motta, Michael Corleone, and the man who wrote Amadeus. And the man who made Raging Bull. I was a fan. I still am. That never goes away.
I want to end this book contemplating happiness and renewal. In my life, I have seen a number of people get a second chance. My mother has had that wonderful opportunity, and I’m extremely proud of what she’s done with it. After my father died, my mother sold our home to my sister Beth, who proceeded to move in and begin raising her family, which would grow to six children. Eventually, my mom and that whole gang packed up and moved to Syracuse in search of cleaner air, less density, and lower costs. After a while, they found a very pretty area that I love to visit. In Syracuse, you are never more than a twenty minutes’ drive from the farm belt, with its open land and silos and cows. We call it “Sibera-cuse” because of all the snow, but I love it there.
But before they moved up north, my mother was approached by a coalition of Long Island breast cancer support groups to spearhead a project at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, not too far from where we grew up. Long Island is often the focus of intense debates about breast cancer statistics. One group there is named 1 in 9, based on the assertion that, statistically, one in nine women on Long Island will be diagnosed with the disease over the course of her life. My mother, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, had been working with the Susan G. Komen organization, and in 1996, doctors and administrators from SUNY Stony Brook asked her to lend her name, and her children, to a breast cancer research facility.
The Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund was dedicated in 1996, with a ribbon cutting attended by SUNY and New York–area elected officials and my mother and siblings. Shirley Strum Kenny, the president at SUNY Stony Brook at the time, was overwhelmingly supportive of my mother’s organization and their fund-raising. The ongoing goal is to raise money so that the SUNY medical team can find a cure. Among all the talk about numbers and statistics, however, I focused in on one thing. My mother was transformed.
The SUNY facility and the eventual opening of an upstate chapter, once my mother and sister had relocated to Syracuse, were not things I would have envisioned in my mother’s future. Born in 1929, raised in Syracuse during World War II, she gave up her early work as a teacher to have a family. She struggled for much of her adult life with the burden of raising six kids with no money. There were times she was, literally, about to go insane. Then, when she was fifty and her children were out the door—either in school, playing ball, or getting into some manageable degree of trouble—she went to work. Her job as a supervisor of a marketing research firm, operating on the floor of a local shopping mall, was just right.
But while my father’s death in 1983 floored my mother, it also freed her. Gone from her life, permanently, were the haunting questions of what would become of them, as a couple, and of her as a woman in middle age if their marriage finally died. Instead, it was he who died. And with him went the fear, the mystery, and the fantasy of her own future. In the years after his death, my brothers and I had some success, and that certainly helped launch my mother’s fund, as it was understood that we would share certain duties to raise money for my mom. My sister Beth has made the quest for a breast cancer cure her life’s work as well. Over the years, we began to joke about how my mother had become a bigger celebrity than any of her sons. We joked that she’d push any of us off a cliff for a photo op, now that she was the “celebrity.”
Over the years, the fund has matured. My brothers and I are middle-aged men ourselves now. Perhaps, up in Syracuse, we can still pull in a crowd to the charity’s banquet or golf match, but my family’s name, in terms of its celebrity quotient on Long Island, has waned. However, the Carol M. Baldwin Breast Cancer Research Fund is, to me, a great second act. Although my mother appreciated not only my father’s role as a pillar of our community but also his place in the hearts of his children, I think that she wanted something to be remembered for, too, just as we had dedicated the Massapequa High School auditorium for my dad. I am close to shedding tears as I write this: he never could have done all that he did if it weren’t for her. Never. None of her children could have achieved what they achieved without her contribution as well. All men want some degree of accomplishment. Women do, too.
The tense relationship I had with my mother throughout much of my childhood cast a shadow over many of my relationships over the years. But since my father’s death and the organization of “The Fund,” as we call it, I have enjoyed a far better rapport with her. She wanted to be on an equal footing with him in the eyes of her children. Once that was realized, she actually became happy again. And seeing her change, watching her become so purposeful and fulfilled, made me very happy as well. I love you, Mom. And I am so proud of you.