Dear Mom, I wrote.
I wish you had told me about my real father. I guess you had your reasons. Maybe you were protecting me from G.S.F. or from the man you’d been with. Maybe you thought that I’d never find out, but I have found out. And now I have a lifetime of questions that will never be answered.
I will never know if I look like my father, if he was good or bad, if he knew that he had a daughter, and if he would have loved me. I wonder if I have half siblings and a whole other family right here in Cambridge. That hurts, Mom, very badly.
I continued writing, but the secret of my conception made it very hard to close the book on my past. Still, I wanted to forgive my mother for her many poor choices.
I knew that she had loved me.
I had proof.
I made a list of the good stuff: the birthday parties with helium balloons tied to the shrubs in the backyard, and frosted carrot cupcakes, my favorite treat. I added racing skates to the list, the ones I had pined for that my mom gave me for Christmas when I was ten. Sometimes I had even slept with them. I wrote that one of her choices had been to live with a man who hated her. Maybe she had thought she was doing that for me.
I balanced off her high anxiety, inattention, sugar mania, and long zombie absences with the coziness of watching The Late Show under a blanket with her on Friday nights, falling asleep in a hug. And I loved when she braided my hair, as she did before we went to St. Paul’s on Sunday mornings.
All those years of Sunday Mass with my mother had instilled in me the love of God.
I would always be grateful to her for that.
Chapter 71
PRISM WAS a drug-and-alcohol rehab center on Putnam Avenue, only two blocks from St. Paul’s. The director, Dr. Robert Dweck, had run a help-wanted ad for a part-time doctor, and I made an appointment to meet with him.
Prism’s storefront had a rainbow painted on the plate-glass window, and bells chimed when I opened the door.
A psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Dweck was a tall, bearded man in his mid-fifties, with thick glasses and a generous smile. He offered me a seat in his small office, read my résumé, whistled, then asked me, “You sure you want to work for a low-rent, city-funded operation like this?”
“Absolutely. I’m putting down new roots.”
Dr. Dweck said, “You should know what you’d be getting into. Many of our clients are triple-whammied: physical disabilities, mental disorders, and drug or alcohol dependencies. You want to feel needed, Dr. Fitzgerald? This is the job for you. But I need you to know you’d make more money flipping burgers.”
“Not a problem,” I told him.
He said, “Okay, Dr. Fitzgerald. If your references check out, you’ve got yourself a job. Can you start on Monday?”
We shook hands, and I filled out some forms.
When I handed them back, Dr. Dweck smiled. “Is it Monday yet?”
“I’ll see you then,” I said.
After leaving the clinic, I called ahead to the real-estate company that had lined up a few properties for me to see. The agent said, “I don’t know if you’d be interested in a handyman special. It’s a good, old house, very cheap and in a great location. It needs tons of TLC.”
The agent showed me the house, a narrow, two-story redbrick town house, built in the late eighteen hundreds. It hadn’t been cared for in many years. The ceilings in the bathroom and kitchen were falling down. The doors were askew, and the floors sloped toward the street. But the bones were good, and the mechanicals were good enough.
It was equidistant between my church and new workplace. It honestly felt as though the house was calling to me.
I opened a bank account, and while I was still standing in the cool, marble lobby of Boston Private Bank and Trust, I phoned Heinrich Schmidt, Karl’s lawyer in Berlin, and arranged for a fairly hefty wire transfer.
By the end of that week, I was a home owner.
It felt good. I was truly home.
The next three months went by fast.
I ran Prism’s in-house clinic along with Louise Lindenmeyr, a top-notch nurse practitioner who had just returned from a stint of emergency care in hurricane-ravaged Haiti.
It was immediately clear to me that the staff at Prism did whatever was needed, no matter what their job titles. Dr. Dweck, “Call me Rob,” was also a clinical psychologist. He ran group therapy sessions and also refilled the copier’s paper tray and took out the trash. I became proficient at fund-raising, administration, and making soup-and-sandwich lunches for forty people at a time.
When I told Rob about the falling plaster ceilings and iffy wiring in my house, he recruited skilled labor from among the clients at Prism. After that, my weekends were often spent making pasta lunches for the pickup painters and carpenters who buttoned up my little house.