I dipped my head in greeting and slipped into the back row and took a seat.
Too soon, Dr. Fitzgerald snapped out the assignment for the next day and reminded the students of an upcoming test.
“Every test is an opportunity to fail,” he said. When there were no questions, he said, “Get out.”
The room emptied quickly, the students grabbing a look at the bald woman in the back row as they streamed past.
My father stood across from and below me with a pointer in his hand. The look on his face was as cold as a blizzard in January. As if I had come here so that I could do him harm.
He spoke to me across the eighteen rows of seats.
“Well. You look bad, Brigid. Why did you shave your head and dress like a monk? What have you done now?”
“I want to stay with you for a week or so. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
“The hot water is out. Your room is all file storage now.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said. “I’ll call a plumber.”
“If you must,” said my father.
He left the classroom, and I followed him. He didn’t look behind him once as he walked through the parking lot, located the very old, baby-blue BMW that had belonged to my mother. Without being invited, I got into the front seat and sat with my hands in my lap as my father maneuvered the car out to Quincy.
“Have you been well?” I asked him.
“I had my gallbladder removed. I have arthritis. And my arteries are clogged. All that keeps me alive is pure meanness,” he said.
“Whatever works,” I said.
I knew that what worked for him was going to kill him, and that was a good reason to spend time with him while it was possible. I asked him about his medications, his exercise program, if he was writing his memoirs, as he had sworn he would do.
“Who are you? Barbara Walters?” he growled.
We were in our old neighborhood. The asphalt was still potholed. The shabby houses still needed paint, and the overhead lines sagged over the last nongentrified neighborhood in Cambridge. I remembered whipping around the potholes on my bike, staying out as long and as late as I could before going home to the angry house where I lived.
My father jerked the wheel into the driveway and drove the car up to the garage door and braked it a few inches before the hood went through the rotten wood.
I knew the signs.
My father needed his fix. And, as usual, I was getting in the way.
Chapter 66
ON THE inside, the old house where I had lived with my parents now looked a lot like the stacks in a college library or maybe a secondhand bookstore.
My father hadn’t been lying about my room. Books were piled on the single bed, and the walls were lined with banker’s boxes filled with papers. He was famous for flunking up to a third of his students, and it looked as though he had saved their records, possibly to amuse himself.
I found a pillow and a blanket in the hall closet and tossed them onto the sofa. My father was in the filthy kitchen making tea. For himself.
“Yes, I would like some tea,” I said. “I just flew in from Jerusalem. Eleven hours direct flight.”
He got a cup and saucer out of the cupboard and poured tea for me. “Anything else?” he said. He pulled out a chair, sat down at the table, and stared at me.
“My husband died. My baby, too. Your granddaughter.”
He reared back a little in his chair, then settled back down.
“I never had a granddaughter,” he said.
“I sent you a card.”
“Goody. But she wasn’t my granddaughter.”
“I should know,” I said. “I remember quite well that I gave birth to her.”
“How about the DNA test? Did you get that?”
“How’s your mind, Dad?”
“Still as sharp as ever. Want to test me?”
He grabbed a book off the toaster oven and dropped it on the table in front of me. Dante’s Inferno. He said, “Open it to any page. I’ll quote from it.”
“I trust you,” I said. That was a lie.
“You don’t,” he said. “You’ve hated me for most of your life, and I have no love for you, either. You can blame that on Dorothy.”
“My mother, your wife, was a decent and loving person. I don’t have to defend her. But isn’t it bad enough that you killed her? You have to insult her memory, too?”
“I didn’t kill her, Brigid. She killed herself.”
“You were there when she OD’d. Why didn’t you get her to the hospital? Were you so stoned yourself that you couldn’t use a phone?”
He was drumming his fingers, looking past me. He got up from the table and went into the next room, returning a minute later with a framed family photo of the three of us with my paternal grandparents, taken when I was ten. George and Dorothy looked pretty good. Maybe they hadn’t been using then.
My father cleared the table with his forearm, knocking tea out of cups and the book to the floor.
“Look at this picture.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I see it.”
“Look at you. Do you see any resemblance to the Fitzgeralds in your face or your ears or anything else?”