Chapter Thirty-One

From the Donovan Fitzgerald Journals

The Family Fitzgerald house on Haymarket Hill had once been my home, forever teeming, forever driven, forever purposeful, equal parts laughter and tears; piano and whiskey and tenors and setters and bagpipes and soda bread, or so childhood recollections cinematically rolled by on the flapping family movie reel projector.

Fuck me, we are officially off to the races in a maudlin Irish start. What am I thinking, do movie reels exist anymore?

Sorry, that’s the way it goes sometimes with us Fitzgeralds.

Let us have a minute to gather our thoughts, Donovan, and while we’re at it, reclaim our self-respect.

Anything for you, boyo, anything. (Movie reel flapping, my God, embarrassing.)

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Give it another go, shall we?

After I swooped off to college, I essentially never returned to Haymarket. I wasn’t psychically wounded or disappointed or consumed by postadolescent rage, and I wasn’t dismissing or repudiating anybody. I had no scores to settle, and no unpaid debts to collect. I was not confused.

I mean, I was confused, by which I mean I was fucked-up in, to me, a healthy way. Because, you see, the Fitzgeralds are my people and always will be, without whom I wouldn’t begin to understand myself, assuming somebody like me ever had the capacity.

Was it as simple as that, someday we all have no choice but to move along? Nostalgia, that homecoming urge, does not seem to be in my genes, certainly not the way it seems for the rest of my relations, as you’ll see. If this deficit constitutes a character flaw of mine, it is merely one of many, which you would discover should you foolishly survey my legion of exes.

Which reminds me, here’s as good a place as any to make the first of what’s bound to be a series of personal disclosures, or confessions, because what else is a journal for?

When I was much younger I suffered from Romantic Arrested Development Attention Span (RADAS), though not as much as my exes suffered from the syndrome—the term for which I invented—when I tormented them. Perhaps this boutique diagnosis signals a terminal condition, though it’s premature to tell (this journal is still being written, after all, as you can see to your mortification). Nonetheless, back in college I richly earned my nickname: Donovan One Month, the significance of which must be self-explanatory. But one month is an eternity when you’re nineteen or twenty or so, at least it was for me, when there continued to mystically appear one after another knee-knockingly gorgeous lassie in Irish Fiction Seminar or Honors Philosophy or Modern Poets or Byzantine Civ, and she offered up to me an enthralling new body of stories I desired to hear and probe and colonize. On second thought, please don’t bother tracking down and afflicting my exes, I gave you all the sterilized instruments required to operate in this surgical theater, otherwise called my life, and besides, there’s no need for you to reopen old wounds. That’s my job.

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Now I’m not saying Haymarket Hill was an ordinary home, and maybe nobody’s is, but neither am I implying that I ever endured a moment of emotional deprivation, much less abuse. Just the opposite. At some point early on, as early as five or six, I became conscious that I had, in a way, a multiplicity of moms: Aunt Frankie, Aunt Colleen, and Caitlin, all of whom lived on Haymarket alongside me and my mother, Ruth. I guess I could call her my birth mom, or my biological mother, but don’t such terms sound awkward or downright antiquated these days? And I should toss into the mix the name Hilda, the kindly housekeeper and furnisher of secretive sweets, who was almost as closely involved with me till the day she left and returned to Chile blessed with, so I heard, a generous retirement package from my grandfather. I liked them all—no, I loved each of them, and almost as much as my own mom, and each of them I loved differently.

Let’s indefinitely postpone consideration of my candidacy for beatification, however. Beginning when I turned ten or so and carrying into my protracted adolescence, I wouldn’t say that I consciously played them off each other. But I will say this, that I knew if I strategically played my cards, I could arrange for whatever I wanted by appealing to the appropriate one for permission—the green light to go to the movies, for keys to the car, for spending money, for the answer to a tough test question, for some insight (invariably into a girl). But as Catholics say, you have a choice: you can ask for permission or you can ask for forgiveness. I know, wretched cliché. But guess which was my go-to. To be honest, I don’t recall asking for much in the way of advice, and none of them were forthcoming in that department anyway. They were old school, like Paddy Fitzgerald, my ass-kicking grandpa who believed experience was the best if not the only teacher, particularly the experience of pain and failure and slip-ups. But I seemed to osmotically soak in what amounted to their counsel, all of it good and useful, though my childhood was not the typical one, or so I concluded when I observed how other kids lived. Aunt Colleen was the most permissive and free-spirited; Aunt Frankie, the most skeptical and analytic; and Caitlin, the one who might have had the biggest heart, the softest touch. My mother—that is, the one who gave birth to me—was a rock, a bulwark of unconditional love. She was also the most predictable. What I mean is, every subject for her seemed to require extensive conversation, deliberation, examination. So if I went to her, I knew it was going to take a while. That was OK, it was the price I paid for her once having been a psychotherapist—and I’m not complaining. If I may testify thus: I was remarkably sane and emotionally balanced, at least in the eyes of the girls I fell for who didn’t fall for me, which explains why they didn’t belly up to the bar and ultimately rehearse for the role of exes in the long-running hit Netflix series titled Donovan Fitzgerald. I count at least two lies in the previous sentence. Can you circle them?

I would be remiss if I didn’t add in here that, for the most part, three of these four women were serially unattached to any romantic partner, at least as far as I was aware. I’m not implying I lived in a kind of convent, and I’m also not saying that I was an interloper in some Amazonian women’s tribe. If they were embittered or despondent over this development, I must have missed it, as they never appeared to be lacking, emotionally, or thwarted or disenchanted. All I’m saying is that such relationships seemed to them by and large, well, irrelevant—or so it appeared. They had each other. They also had me, for what that was worth, and I guess there were moments when it couldn’t have been worth much. (Consult the never-to-see-the-light-of-day self-help book D. Fitzgerald’s Adolescent Years: More Fun with Irish Reaction Formation.) (The things you learn being the child of a psychotherapist!)

It might be inappropriate on my part to mention that Caitlin and my grandpa supposedly formed, according to Haymarket lore, at some point a tender, impassioned romantic partnership, something verging on coupledom or a type of unconventional marriage, loosely defined, but from my early days I never sensed anything but a profound friendship between her and him. Neither of them seemed dissatisfied, I have to say. And he slowly metamorphosed into what he is now: a very, very old man. He along with the women who lived alongside him seemed relieved, or resigned, to be done with the romantic phase of their lives. There are worse developments, I suppose, and not many better ones, if you ask me. But given my current frame of mind, I wouldn’t recommend you try.

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I have no choice but to own up to this: I was to the manner and to the Fitzgerald manor born. There, that’s my first and perhaps last Shakespeare allusion, as well as a lousy pun, but no promises. Being a Richie Rich manchild, the wealthiest kid in town—a factor that dawned slowly and then irremediably, like so many of my hardest lessons in life—I never lacked for company from the outside world. I was as curious about other kids’ lives as they were about what they presumed mine to be. When my friends (I had a few of those) visited my house as I was growing up, real friends as well as the other kind, I would occasionally be asked, “Which one is your mom?” Sometimes I’d make clear it was Ruth, and sometimes, if I was in a mood, I’d say any or all of them. And any and all of those positions were true, as I said. None of my friends believed this made for an awful situation for me, and neither did I. I was lucky. You could speculate that a boy might resist, or at least tire of, so much female attention. Most boys would push back. I didn’t. I was a pretty good son most of the time, and this was the family I was given. That was plenty for me. If I take a longer view, did my upbringing facilitate or complicate my adolescent or my later adult romantic relationships? How would I possibly know? And if I knew, I would not be in a position to say so. Not even in this journal of mine (which I cannot believe I am writing). The last name on my driver’s license is Fitzgerald, after all. Which reminds me, I need to deal with my expired license—as soon as I figure out, what am I going to do with a car in Williamsburg?

Funny how coming back here now has brought back all these memories—and sent me to this journal to consider what they all mean.

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There was more than enough room for everybody on Haymarket Hill. I forget if I ever counted, but there were something like thirty rooms and ten bedrooms spread out on three floors. You would think it would be uncomplicated to locate a zone of solitude inside the capacious environs, and you would be mostly correct. There were long stretches of my teenage years when I barely exited my own room, and when I spoke up, neither the Gettysburg Address nor the Sermon on the Mount ushered forth. Monosyllables became my default mode of discourse.

With so much space to roam the halls and the grounds outside, my grandpa began to do more and more often what he called “taking the sun.” This was an image that I rolled around in my mind. If anybody could legitimately claim to take the sun, it would have been Paddy Fitzgerald, master of the universe. That is, he spent most of the nicer days outside, under the grand gazebo by the olive trees, blanket over his legs in his wicker chair, his head shaded by a nice straw fedora. This change occurred around the time of my graduation from Holy Family High School, at which point he seemed to lose interest in conversation, a big turn given how I remember him holding forth, center stage, at every opportunity when I was little. Only now he gave off the sense that he had already said whatever needed to be said. To be fair, it would have been tough for him to get a word in edgewise, I suppose, because all of the women—especially my mom—were big talkers. I have fond recollections of hanging around with him, letting the hours pass by, the silence being a relief. In his occasional voluble moods, he taught me how to play (and cheat at) cards and study the Racing Form. He wasn’t the boastful type, but early on I picked up—from him or from all my moms—that he had been a very big player in his day, and later on I could confirm that was certainly true. The Fitzgerald name was plastered all over my high school buildings and fields, for one thing, and all over town, too. It wasn’t much earlier before then when he and I would go have lunch at Noah’s Boat House, where everybody seemed to regard him as a celebrity and I felt wildly lucky to be in his company, fantastically fortunate to be a Fitzgerald. That was the restaurant where when I was sixteen I had my first vodka martini at his earnest suggestion served up by his favorite waiter, an arthritic sprite by the name of Seany. And in due order my fourth martini, served up by the same now blurry white waiter’s coat. And after that, my first sickness-unto-near-death hangover. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t destined to be my last hangover. Since then, vodka has been my friend, the special sort of friend you’re not so sure you ought to keep around, like the kind who always needs at-the-last-minute help moving and whose calls you let go to voicemail.

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About this journal of mine: a part of me feels self-conscious about the whole shaky memoir-ish enterprise. I have never kept one before, and who knows if I will continue to do so, or if this will be the last sentence I write.

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Consider yourself formally shit out of luck, my friend. I guess that wasn’t going to be my final utterance.

I never understood the audience for such a thing as a journal, unless it was the writer himself. But you know what, Donovan? You overthink everything, including overthinking. A journal seems a fitting occupation all of a sudden. I’m not the first novelist who ever said that, fashioning my fiction, I can more confidently and candidly tell the truth. And I’ll likely not be the last to claim that writing a journal, on the other hand, by virtue of revealing the so-called truth, is also a way to lie, if by lie I mean pretend I understand the supposed unvarnished reality that is my self-appointed task alone to illuminate myself. And I can prove that contention right here and now. The ultimate purpose of the no-holds-barred journal relies upon the illusion of somebody else reading the words composed solely for myself. And that makes you, not-so-gentle reader, a co-conspirator, if not my voyeur. I admire you, or maybe it’s that I’m fascinated by somebody who secretly peers from the shadows into other people’s lives.

Shall we continue? Seems I have nothing better to do, and apparently neither do you, because here you are, going toe to toe with me. Be advised that I am heretofore operating under the impression nobody will read this, while in my mind I require you to be present and not quite accounted for, figuratively standing outside my bedroom window. It is a room bathed by the luminescence of my incandescent prose, and somebody please shoot me for invoking that ornamental image, and ham-handed enough in a plagiarized A Room of One’s Own sort of way.

I take that point, and I think I’ll have to agree with myself.

Besides, what can possibly go wrong at this point? I guess we both shall see.

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The day I arrived the house was bustling as ever—Mom playing piano, Aunt Colleen working the garden, Caitlin and Aunt Frankie cooking up wonders in the kitchen with Hilda. I sought refuge from the buzz and the ravages of my jet lag and from not having slept for twenty-four hours or so. I went out to the olive grove and sat on the bench close to my grandfather.

“Grandpa, want to come back inside, watch a game?”

He shook his head no. I guessed he had watched enough games in his lifetime. Instead he preferred for me to keep him company. Not a lot to ask of his only grandson, and I was happy to comply. I never once considered asking him if he liked living with so many women, back when he and I were the only males, and he the uncontested alpha. I figured this arrangement wouldn’t have happened in the first place if he hadn’t given a thumbs-up. And now that he had come this far, I couldn’t imagine his instituting any radical alterations to his domestic arrangements. Caitlin would always stand by him. And he seemed, in his own way, content enough, as content as a Fitzgerald permitted himself to be. Sometimes I felt remorseful that I had abandoned him to all these women when I went to college and afterward moved into my own apartment far, far away.

The birds were especially raucous that afternoon, signaling to each other, perhaps because the hawks were soaring overhead before dive-bombing and gliding too close to the ground, and the terrified squirrels were frantically darting here and there, seeking safe haven. Caitlin came out with a tray of Irish breakfast tea and scones, situating it between us. Growing up, I could hardly have failed to sense the tremendous age difference between her and my grandfather, even when she was a young woman and he already an old man. But in the instant it felt different, now that she herself was no longer young. She was always tender toward him, and he toward her, and I could grasp that the passing years had made her kinder and more considerate to him—but let’s get this on the record right this instant: not in some caregiver-ish sort of way. It was much more intimate and knowing and loving than that. They may have never married, but that was nothing but a technicality; they were going to be together forevermore, and that forevermore was beckoning faster and closer on the horizon each day. I am sentimentalizing her or him or possibly myself, forgive me; long flight, no shut-eye, watching the Family Fitzgerald withering before my eyes.

Then Aunt Frankie and my mom ambled outside—they were distinguished amblers, as in stylish sashaying walkers, all swiveling hip and shoulder and fashion-forward footwear. We hadn’t talked much since I got in late last night from JFK. Those two women always seemed to have a special sort of connection, which, though I never quite understood how deeply extraordinary that was, mesmerized me. They seemed closer to each other than to the rest of the family. I used to think they were conjoined on some primitive level by virtue of the fact that Fitzgerald blood was not coursing through either of them, but of course that was also true of Caitlin. I concluded the obvious, that Aunt Frankie and my mom may have felt a special kind of intimacy via the memory of my late Uncle Anthony, who was Aunt Frankie’s husband and the older brother to my dad. In any case, those two seemed merged in some unspoken pact.

Yes, I made a point of telling everybody I flew from John Fitzgerald Kennedy Airport, which never failed to please my grandfather or any other Fitzgerald extant.

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“Good flight?” Aunt Frankie asked.

“Give thanks to a Valium ten and two gin sodas, extra limes to battle the scurvy.” I would regret the report. In my defense, they had irresponsibly run out of vodka, but of course that is no defense in this house.

“Gin, my God, don’t upset your grandfather with your mongrel British concoction. Gin!”

In the moment, I realized all over again I had serious unfinished business with Aunt Frankie, and always would have. Shortly after I began college, her dad keeled over, dead, a man whom she loved, and I couldn’t trouble my sorry ass to come home for the services. I wish I could explain the reasoning behind such a stupid, callow judgment, but that would be a flight into science fiction. Of course, nobody insisted I be there, but I should have put that together on my own, insofar as I owed Aunt Frankie that much—and more. Only now, it was too late to make things right. There’s a terrible lesson contained therein, but that’s the thing about some terrible lessons, that you never learn them in time in order to act upon them, which is the functional definition of a terrible lesson, I suppose. She was so important to me, throughout my life. I should have done the right thing then, but I didn’t. All that’s left is for me to be sorry, and to find a way someday to tell her so. You, yourself, dear imaginary reader and friend, have memories of mistakes you made during your younger years. Maybe you too are filled with regret, as I am, to this day, about one thing or another if not everything. But the older I get, I find the appeal of regretfulness diminishing. I intend that notion in both senses, according to the fancy-pants ambiguous syntax of that previous sentence: the appeal diminishes and/or the appeal diminishes me. Both are veracious propositions. And the older I get, I find it more appealing (and therefore less unappealing) to accept that I was indeed an asshole and that there’s nothing I can do to rectify what I did wrong, except in one very limited way. That is, I can honestly report what I did if not why. That does sound self-serving, but it’s also chastening to acknowledge the unpleasant truths about my own personal past. I can linger in the black-hole recollection of my rash, impulsive words and decisions, or I can do something about it. Not to go all like friggin’ Montaigne on you, but it’s not in my power to revise history, though it is absolutely in my power (and nobody else’s) to give (quoting the French, sorry, genius) an “accurate accounting” of my life, which is shorthand for the uninterrupted series of fuck-ups I refer to as my once-upon-a-time so-called youth. Hey, did I, being the dumbass I obviously am, just stumble upon a sound rationale for writing these diary entries? One of us will have to get back to each other on that question. Fair warning: Don’t even think about texting me.

But to return to the subject of Aunt Frankie, if I may: as a teenager I had the appreciation (not adequately enough expressed) that it was she who taught me how to operate a car, my dad being fairly totally out of the picture, but then again, the less said about my driver’s education the better, because when I was in high school, it was I who totaled Caitlin’s famous and beautiful Maz.

Long story, though not really anything but a predictable one: beer, babe, bong, the boring usual, and I was unbelievably fortunate to walk away alive. My mother cried for two days out of abject horror alternating with outbursts of fury, and I endured the baleful infinite anxious stares of Aunt Frankie and Caitlin and Aunt Colly and Hilda, all of whose painful attention left me no room for feeling anything but awful and not fearful for myself. Of course, my grandfather had a different take on the near catastrophe, not that he explained. He was most likely making a connection to my own father’s/his own son’s legendary car crash when he was roughly my age: like father, like son? God, I hoped not. My grandfather gave the assignment to his man, Jonesy O’Dell, who was always good to me.

“Oh, Donovan Boy, the pipes the pipes are calling.” He took me out for a long walk.

“Mr. O’Dell, what can I do?”

“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be servant to the wise in heart. Proverbs 11, Donovan, Proverbs 11, look to it.”

“You must be talking to my dad.”

“He was—and maybe he still is a Catholic priest, of the order of Melchizedek, true.” Then Mr. O’Dell gave me a look that only in retrospect I understood was meant to convey incredulity as to the chances he would ever be freely consulting with the likes of my old man. “Please, for your own sake and your granddad,” he said, “please do not troubleth his house.” I didn’t know what he was saying, yet I knew what he meant. “And you take better care of yourself from now on, your mother and your entire family love you too much to lose you.”

The car—the beautiful car Caitlin and everybody loved—was junked, and not to be replaced, because, I guess, there was no point. The Maz was in every sense irreplaceable. Just like, from that day forward, illusions of my own immortality.

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“Wish you could stay awhile, baby,” my mother said the afternoon I arrived, but not in a critical way, because she wasn’t like that to me. I had informed her when I booked my flight reservation that it would be only for a couple of days, that my book tour was taking me to Los Angeles, some readings and a few local cable television and public radio interviews, where I would ummm my way through one unanswerable question after another ventured by interviewers impressed by themselves and not me.

“How come no readings around here?” my other mom, Aunt Frankie, wanted to know. “We would all love to hear you.”

“I listen to my agent and dutifully obey my publicist and my publisher’s instructions. They tell me where to go, I have no clout.” This was my first novel, and though apparently trade reviews were pretty good, so I was told, and some were starred and therefore deemed raves by my overjoyed publishing house, I had no juice. But the truth is, and I should be candid here, when we planned the tour I specifically requested not to do any readings around here. I didn’t think I could, or should, read in front of my family. Writers are a strange breed, as everybody knows, and I am no exception. I didn’t think that anybody would feel hurt by my story, or feel in any way assailed or criticized, it wasn’t like that. My writing wasn’t motivated by resentment, I had no axe to grind with my family, I had no hostile agenda, and I didn’t feel sheepish about any racy, proprietary disclosures. I told the story I wanted to tell, and it was fiction. So no, the book was not exactly autobiographical, what they call autofiction these days, but if it were, it was only so to the extent that any first book is bound to be indirectly or allusively autobiographical. I was fairly confident I alone would be able to identify those subverted if not completely buried preoccupations. I rewrote the whole book, I don’t know, twenty times over five years (I lost count to be honest and so did my computer), and if I ever reflected on the question, I was confident I had erased all traces of my personal past before it appeared in print. And if you are gullible enough to regard authors as trustworthy, then you should take that immediately to the bank. But me? I was not so sure.

Caitlin and Aunt Colly had sent me a photo of the book as it appeared featured in their Floozy’s window. They had prominently arranged a looming stack. I had guessed that all of the family had read it, but I wasn’t going to pursue the subject. As I said, writers are a strange breed. A peculiar tribe. Each of them a band of exactly one. We talked for a while, then the women headed back into the house.

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My grandpa turned to me, lifted up his hand as if he were about to administer a sort of blessing, and then waved it through the air, encompassing the land and all the trees and flowers and all the memories and all the family history. He hadn’t said more than two words since I had been back, and I sensed he had been awaiting his opportunity to be alone with me. If I knew anything about my family, I knew we were about to have a moment.

“I’m getting old, Donovan, my boy.” His voice was strong and piercing, surprising as a nocturnal bird calling out, hidden by the night in the darkened trees. “Man my age, he takes stock. I think I must be how old, don’t know, what?” He needed my help. Or more like he wanted me to think as much.

I knew how old he was and I told him.

“So it is. How did I manage to live so long?” It was less a rhetorical position than an actual query.

I told him I was glad he did manage, and I always would be.

“Well, I’m living proof only the good die young. But hear me out. Someday I’ll be gone, fifty years give or take.”

“At least.”

“And this, this will all be yours. Yours and Caitlin’s. I know you’ll take care of your mother.”

I wasn’t ungrateful. If I am honest with myself, I might admit I was not shocked. My take on this development, which you likely won’t believe: I didn’t want this. Haymarket Hill rightfully belonged to the women, Caitlin especially, and my mom and Aunt Colly, not me. Aunt Frankie didn’t have financial need, we all knew that. I would take up the subject with him later, because now didn’t seem right. I wondered all over again if my wishes ever counted in this family. It wasn’t always clear. That’s maybe why I was a writer: my imaginary world was always mine and mine alone.

“Let’s talk about it, Grandpa.”

“Talk? You are your dear loving mother’s only child, no doubt, with the glorious gift of the gab.”

Now that the prospect of my inheritance was broached, funny how I connected it to that unforgettable conversation post-car-wreck debacle with Mr. O’Dell. I could not forget the phrase “inherit the wind,” which I was still unsure I understood. Nonetheless I took the plain point: one cannot keep hold on the wind, and the troublemaker will end up with nothing.

“I was thinking about Mr. O’Dell, your old friend.”

“Jonesy? Jonesy, man, haven’t thought about him in ages. I guess we were, in a manner of speaking you might say, friends. Long ago Jonesy moved to Ireland, to the splendid rolling meadows of Dingle, God, cannot remember when. He wed a barmaid, a teenage mortal beauty to tell by the snapshots, had a slew of black Irish children and raised sheepdogs and lived in a hillside cottage he built himself. He wrote me a letter once to tell me how happy he was, that he remembered fondly the past, which makes one of us.”

“Think he’ll ever come back?”

“If he does, it’ll be at the final trumpet. His wife sent me the announcement card for his funeral. Time moves on, like they say, Donovan.”

“Never been to Ireland,” I said, apropos of who knows what.

“I almost wish I had gone myself.”

This revelation astonished me. “Wait. You’ve never been?” Wasn’t such an excursion tantamount to sacred obligation for every proud Irish American?

“When I was your age, couldn’t be bothered with the old country. It wasn’t my country. Caitlin and I talked about making the grand tour someday, but we kept putting it off, what with this and that, the bookstore, my business, the school construction, everything, and now, now, doesn’t look like it’s going to be in the cards.”

“Inherit the wind,” I said, illogically enough, but then I feared, hurtfully.

“Funny. Jonesy used to say that all the time. But that won’t apply in your case, I’ll see to it. Your inheritance will be a little more substantial than that.” But he had clearly entered into another zone. “I read something in the paper. Old people, or people who are heading toward the great divide, which is, guess you gotta say, the same thing. Anyway, these people choose to write their last letter. To sort of speak your piece while you’re still kicking. Settle up, make amends, explain, forgive, get the record straight, solve any mystery, that sort of thing. Then you can set it aside for after you’re gone or hand it over before. It doesn’t have to be a letter, you can send it computer message-type thing.”

“Nothing wrong with email.”

“I don’t know how, the computer message thing, but I was thinking. There’s stuff I could say, so maybe I should write my last letter. I’m not too good a writer, not like you, Donovan, my boy. I was thinking, you could write it for me, or we can write it together, like one of those ‘as told to’ kind of books, like you see in supermarkets.”

I told him of course, whatever he wanted.

“If there’s anybody in the family who could, it’s you who can help me say what I want to say about how I feel about the Family Fitzgerald.”

And with any luck, I added to myself, about how he felt about his own life. At the same time, I caught myself wondering if I hadn’t done something along those lines, in the story I told in my own book, which I didn’t think he needed to read, because he had already lived it. We’d revisit the last letter at another time.

“Your father loves you, Donovan, my boy, only he doesn’t know how to show it. Hell, he might not understand how much he loves you.”

I almost wanted to argue with him, but decided no.

“My own father, he hated me, and I hated him. That’s why I killed him.”

My head seemed to combust, and it took me a minute to ask him to explain.

“I killed him. You heard me. Not hard to understand. I’d had enough of the belt, the teeth he knocked out, my mother and me, both of us had enough. And there he was that day, it was a Sunday, and my mother was in church, and he was hitting the bottle all morning, and then he stood up, stumbling, whirling and then he dropped, his head smashing against the potbelly stove, blood everywhere. And he lay there, unconscious. I could have run to get help, but you know what I did? I went outside and walked and walked, and hours later, when my mother came home, there he was dead on the floor. I was a fifteen-year-old boy that day. But that was the day I became a man. I never told anybody before. I suppose it doesn’t matter much to anybody but me—and now you.”

I reached out to touch his hand, the paper-thin skin, because I didn’t know what else to do after hearing his revelation. Did I think less of him, for his confession? I cannot say that I did. He didn’t literally kill his father, but then again, he didn’t really not kill him. Looking back, I ask myself why I didn’t press for details, ask questions, probe into his motivation. I guess I didn’t because I didn’t want to be lied to by him.

“This memory of mine dies with me. It’s time for telling truths. It has always been time to tell truths, I suppose.”

I knew it would be a long while before I could find a place to keep his story. And now I see that I have found a place: inside the journal that is inside of me. At the same time, I didn’t have adequate language to thank him for all he had done for, and all he meant to, me. He clutched my hand and held it tight for a long time, as if he were losing his balance and about to tip over. He had never been one for physical affection—at least for me, so this gesture carried strange, important weight. His grip loosened and he turned inward and silent, resuming the journey on his own private funicular train of thought. This didn’t amount to his last letter, but he’d said his piece, for now, and for now is all we can ever do. Letter or no, he may have been communicating that Paddy Fitzgerald’s lifetime work was almost finished.

“One other thing, Donovan, my boy.” He pointed toward the olive grove he loved so much. “Day comes, plant me over there, under those pretty trees. And also, I’m warning you, no fucking bagpipes.”

“Grandpa, what do you say we have lunch tomorrow at Noah’s? Seany the waiter? You still like that place?”

“Ah, Donny, Donny, Seany and the old Boat House, they’re both long gone.”

╬

I’m no hotshot baller of a publicity maven, all big black rectangulated glasses and suited up Chanel to my Fifth Avenue office. Yet I’d say that giving a reading on no notice is not the surefire method of guaranteeing turnout. I didn’t see any way to avoid agreeing to Caitlin’s ask. But the women in the family must have pinged everybody, because Floozy’s Books was flash-mob packed. Are there still flash mobs? Seems unlikely, but I am out of touch with all things contemporary. Yes, this is my subtle way of indicating to you that I truck exclusively with the immortals, and the immorals, the eternal verities. In any case, the Fitzgerald name, while it did not resonate in the hood as it once did, still tolled like a church bell beckoning the worshipful locals to services. Not that it mattered to me how many showed up. On the tour, I had given readings to a “crowd” of two, and once to a hundred. Felt pretty much same same to me. This is going to sound awful and entitled of me, and don’t sell me out to my publisher, but I’m not sure I get why people flock to readings in the first place. It might be a function of their endeavoring to gain a glimpse of the flesh-and-blood author in their podcast- and NPR-loving hopes of understanding the story behind the book, as if there were such a thing, and if there were such a thing that it ultimately mattered. You know what’s behind a book? No, really, tell me. What do you think is behind a book, and what does it mean, to be behind a book, because hell if I know. Confession: I myself hardly ever go to readings. Please keep that between us. I think books—and also please don’t let on to my hardworking, kind, resourceful marketing, sales, and publicity people—I think books should, and can, stand on their own without my hawking them. That is an old-fashioned, ridiculous, and vain point of view, I realize, in this day and age, and an especially odd position to take for a novice novelist like me, a few years to go before turning thirty, a so-called emerging writer, and yeah, I know how lucky a submerging writer like me is. To help me and the book out, for instance, the publishing house staff constructed a supposedly super-duper website for me. I cannot tell you much about it, as I was too above-it-all to take a close look.

My grandpa was there at Floozy’s, too, ensconced in his wheelchair. My mom said this was the first time he had come to one of these events, which made sense, insofar as a ninety-plus-year-old so-called supposed onetime loosely defined mobster wasn’t their target demo (poor word choice, target). I heard he was the one responsible (well, it was his idea, but who knows who made it happen?) for setting out a table laden with Irish whiskey bottles and a rack of shiny clean shot glasses (shot, another problem). He and I ceremoniously clinked and wordlessly toasted each other before I headed toward the back of the store, where all the chairs were laid out, the warmth from my mouth oonching deep down into my belly. I knew I should have eaten something, but I can’t when I cannot avoid reading in public. The Irish know a thing or thousand about their whiskey. If I was going to read, that wouldn’t be the worst preparation. I swear I detected a droning hum in the room, which should reasonably be ascribed to the buzz of the Jameson-fueled audience.

Caitlin stood at the podium and instantaneously earned everybody’s attention. She couldn’t help it. As pretty as she is, she could stop traffic if she wanted to—something I would testify that I’d witnessed with my own startled eyes as an impressionable child—and I am confident she could accomplish this result, if not cause a minor car pileup of gawkers, even in her current condition. Her brilliant red hair existed exclusively in my memory and in vintage photographs, the chemo and radiation over the past few months having stolen hers away, and her head was proudly, defiantly wrapped in a sparkly, ruby-studded gold scarf. Treatment was going to give her, we all hoped, one or two more good years. But her voice was clarion and strong. She opened by saying that Floozy’s was celebrating its anniversary, and she hoped to be here for years to come. She also said that opening the bookstore and keeping it going may have had its challenges, but it had been worth everything to her and Colleen in order to introduce tonight her favorite boy, now grown up and a writer, referencing, well, me. Then she delivered a touching introduction that you can imagine: local boy makes good in the big city, that kind of thing. Her testimonial amounted to an exaggeration, but well-intended and generous, as she never failed to be.

Caitlin was somebody you could not help but love, trust me.

╬

Prior to my big homecoming, I had been living in an undoubtedly illegally sublet studio apartment in Brooklyn, and I was paying the rent on time though I was not on the A List of up-and-coming authors automatically invited to hipster parties. When I go out and see all those man-bun guys with Civil War beards streaming down to their sternum and the dazzling women rappelling alongside them while they’re sipping on the IPA, I wonder where I went wrong, because that look must be the equivalent of Brooklyn babe catnip. Actually, I don’t wonder where I went wrong, I know, and if you’ve been paying attention and if you read my book, so must you by now. Body ink would be advisable as well and ratchet up my desirability coefficient, though tattoos would raise all sorts of decision-making issues (like where and what and by whom and who cares?), but I’m not in the market for elective suffering or staph infection or extra-corporeal branding. Or it could be a lot simpler: that is, my body is a hallowed temple. You bet. Some kind of sacred site of worship. More like a bare ruined choir, which phrase everybody in the pub can now Google up on their phone, part of a line from a genius poet named Shakespeare (a second allusion to the Bard, and more proof not to trust me). But it always sounded to me like out of Keats, dead by the age of twenty-five, who didn’t have a man-bun or a Civil War beard and passed over to the other side while pining fruitlessly for the love of his life. You know, there’s an upside to everything. But enough with my whining. Those Brooklyn guys must have it all figured out, and I don’t begrudge them, more power to them. Did I mention that one of them illegitimately sublet me his apartment? (Thanks and respect, Vinnie.)

In any case (pathetic transition, almost as horrible as “by the way,” for which my brilliant editor would kick my lazy ass if she comes across this journal), my publisher expressed high hopes to sell the movie rights at a premium, and there is evidently a good deal of chatter in LA and New York. But as everybody knows, when it comes to the entertainment industry, it’s all bullshit till it ain’t—that is, till money changes hands. I do not enjoy what anybody would term a rabid following, but I did have a cross-eyed raccoon hiss at me outside a bar on Metropolitan Avenue, and I did have one energetic stalker slash troller on Facebook who may or may not actually have rabies. I did delete my account, which I never should have opened in the first place. Funny, I almost missed him or her or them or it.

╬

As Caitlin celebrated me, I was feeling—I don’t want to say embarrassed, but ill at ease, like a kid at graduation with cameras clicking and flash bulbs popping. I was thinking something else: as it goes in the Bible, a prophet is without honor in his own country. And you know what, I was good with that, either way. And then she waxed very personal, and she spoke about how she and everybody in the family knew I would turn out much more than all right, and about how they were all proud. She didn’t give up family secrets. If she ever decided to do that, her introduction might conceivably have concluded a week later in the grand jury. I’m not so sure how much Grandpa Paddy was taking in, but he would have put a stop right away to an excess of sentimentality or disclosure—unless he was the source. She did speak about how much she loved the book—the first direct indication she had read it. “I could tell stories,” she said, “about how Donny as a little boy would read and write till he dropped to sleep at his desk in his room. We’d have to wake him up and put him to bed.” But she didn’t go on too long, thankfully. I would never fault Caitlin, who had a good heart and was always better to me than I and all the rest of us deserved. I didn’t even mind the Donny. It had been a long time since anybody outside my family called me anything but Donovan—with one important, to me, exception, as you’ll see.

Here’s when the image of my Uncle Matty unexpectedly crossed my mind: like a slow armadillo on the Texas highways, splat, reek forever. So not in a pleasant way. I was glad he was not there in the bookshop. Nobody had seen this lost soul for many years, and he had attained a sort of legendary status since my youth. Last anybody heard he was in Santiago, Chile, making a living as an English language instructor. It could have been Buenos Aires, as with everything involving him, it was unclear. He and his wife (what was her name?) had long ago divorced, and there were rumors he had taken up with that crazy high school student of his who caused all that trouble. I didn’t entirely credit the speculation. My vague memories of Uncle Matty indicate that he was beleaguered and damaged, but he wasn’t insane, which is what it would require to have settled down with somebody like that girl—if the stories my mom told me were half true. Girl? She must be approaching fifty now. Besides, some people like him seem incapable of settling down anytime, anywhere—though I hear you: I should talk. I think her name might have been Tracey, something like that, but I cannot confirm, and nobody has mentioned her name in decades—identifying her as that nutjob runaway. I wish him well, but he and I have nothing to do with each other. Aunt Colly herself wrote off the poor guy. Thus it was that it occurred to me all over again that my grandfather had in some profound and final sense lost every single one of his sons: Anthony, Matty, and Philip, my father.

When the polite applause died down, I stood there. I don’t know how to explain what happened, but I couldn’t find my voice at first. I could see my mom proudly fighting off a tear, and Aunt Frankie staring at her fancy shoes so as to keep herself composed. Usually under these book-reading circumstances I can make a few lame jokes and, clearing my throat, just launch, trusting my book to do what it had done already, right there on the page, for better or worse, and so be it. If you’re born a Fitzgerald, I guess, you are hard-wired to be self-assured or appear to be, or simply not give a flying fuck what anybody else thinks. Or at least to be adept at pretending not to give a flying fuck.

Only then, only then, only then it was not so simple. The problem was that I looked across the packed room of people in their folding chairs, and cast my eyes toward the people spilling out onto the street and standing near the store entrance. That’s where he positioned himself, hands in pockets, wearing sunglasses to guard against the twilight’s angling sun, my father.

╬

It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. Couple of times, true, he came to visit me in college. He didn’t make my graduation, for reasons he never deemed essential to explain. That was fine. It wasn’t like I was the valedictorian or anything. (OK, I was the valedictorian, which surprises me, too. I’m no JFK, no relation, so he didn’t miss much of an oration. As I recall, I was ten cups of coffee into ironing out the creases of the hydrogen-powered hangover caused by excesses of the night before.) My mom was relieved not to see him at the commencement, but she never said as much, or if she did, I didn’t register, having been shitface drunk or in bed with one girl after another all the conga-line weekend long. Fun times for the college boyo. If you may say so.

He and I had connected in the city a few times since the humid day of pomp and circumstance, spending a couple of hours together tops. Once over dinner, he did something pretty spectacular, I have to admit. He took this watch off his wrist and showboatingly handed it to me, a graduation gift, he said.

“Dad, get out of here, this is a goddamn fucking Rolex.”

“Take it.”

“Come on, this cost a fortune.”

“Not really. This old parishioner friend of mine, named Slip McGrady, nice guy in the watch business, he gave me a deal. Put it on.”

So I did. It was a beauty. At the time, I had no idea where, or if, I could wear such a flamboyant piece of jewelry. But you know, it was worth a try.

“You sure?”

He said he was. “You deserve it.”

“Ever change your mind, you can have it back. This is a nice watch, Dad, and a fabulous gift, thanks.”

For your information, it’s on my wrist right now as I write. But after everything that would happen later, I would never again offer to give it back.

╬

He was perennially on his way, elsewhere, somewhere, seemingly anywhere. Israel, Sicily, Ireland, Scandinavia, Malibu, Morocco, Bali, Tokyo, always tracking something I would not be made to understand. He had grown more and more restless, it seemed to me over the years, searching for who knows what or whom.

He had reminded me more than a couple of times he was still in his mind a priest, as if I could ever forget, and that he refused for a long time to accept being laicized despite being ostracized by the Catholic equivalent of the CIA. According to canon law, so he advised me, once a priest, always a priest. You might be shocked to learn how many priests have children, how many are married, have families on the side. They number in the thousands. Trust me. I didn’t believe it, either, at first. He and my mom had lived together a while, partnered after their own fashion, till I was three or four or so, and one day he moved out, I guess—and as far as I knew, back into a parish, where he resumed his life as a priest for a while. Until, that is, one day he was no longer there in his rectory, putting on vestments for Mass, and was gone into the wind for a long time. Here’s when I could show you my PowerPoint display of family photos, if I cared, or if I had them. That was when my mom and I moved to Haymarket Hill with my grandpa’s urgent, sincere blessing, and there we joined Colleen and Caitlin and later on Frankie—our little tribe, the last living remnants of the Family Fitzgerald. Then later he took up residence nearby and we would intermittently see each other, throw the ball around, go to games, grab a pizza or burger, catch a movie, that sort of thing. My mother and he one day stopped battling, which was bad, and then stopped talking to each other, which was worse. My father was upset that she and I moved into his family home, but at the same time he was elated that I was there. The contradiction neatly summarizes my dad, and now that I think about it, every single Fitzgerald, living and dead.

╬

Always a priest as he may have been, he was no longer permitted to dispense the sacraments, or wear the Roman collar, or to perform any priestly offices, of course, but they couldn’t take away his priest identity. “A priest,” he said, “is a priest for life.” I have no reason to believe he considered himself a Catholic radical with a political agenda, pushing for reformation of the priesthood, making celibacy an option, urging for women to be welcomed into the ranks, that sort of liberationist agenda. At least he never talked along those lines to me. As a teenager I argued with him about Catholicism a few times, and it was unsatisfying. He vaguely defended the religion, to my irritated mystification. I railed against the hypocrisy and the hierarchy, with all the passion of the know-it-all I was, and doubtless am to this day. He listened, and wouldn’t debate with me. As a result, I assumed he conceded I was ultimately right. I haven’t been to Mass since high school, and I have no plans to start up again anytime soon. I was, and I am, done with the Church. And somehow he would never be anybody other than Father Philip. That he was also my father always made for complications, some obvious, some not so much.

Such as when we had an unexpected exchange about what amounted to what he characterized as his ultimate experiences as a priest.

I cannot reliably quote him wholesale and verbatim, but I vividly recall many of the details he narrated and certainly the gist. He explained that his most lasting lesson about faith and the religious life was taught him by his onetime bishop, a man by the name of Mackey. I cannot recall the man’s first name. In any case, it was Bishop Mackey, you see, who was personally responsible for ushering my dad out of his clerical life. The word for that, and a funny word it is, is laicization—to depart the clerical life and become part of the laity, the people. Not that the bishop was a great spiritual leader or mentor, and not that he was a particularly effective diocesan leader, according to my father, who said he was actually a pretty flawed bishop—until, that is, the night something unfortunate, or maybe it was fortunate, happened.

Nobody knows, my dad said, what happened to the bishop after some big churchy shindig. Not me, he said, not even him, but he was never the same afterward.

Mackey’s personal transformation took place that night, when he suffered a type of breakdown, when he was confronted in his limo in the middle of the night by someone he had supposedly betrayed. Details blurred in my dad’s account and they blur to this day in my recollection of what I was told. I do have a vague recollection that my aunt, Uncle Matty’s wife, whose name I have somehow misplaced, was somehow involved, and she played a crucial, mysterious part. According to my dad, Bishop Mackey came to Jesus. I knew what he meant, and who doesn’t? He was never the same after. From that time forward, Mackey was both more and less himself. Before then he was ill-equipped to naturally inspire the faithful. But later, he could inspire the faithless, my father said, referring to himself. And I know I said a minute ago he might have been a poor excuse for a bishop, but he did guide the new high school, which became my sorry high school, into existence, when nobody had justification to believe it would ever happen. He got my grandfather to bend on his real estate deal, so legend has it, and if he hadn’t done that—no new school.

Good or gutsy or imperfect man the bishop may have been, my dad considered him a worthy human being in the end, to him a kind of hero or saint. When he transcended his mantles of power and authority. When he went beyond his role and accepted his defects, affirmed his weaknesses—and my father’s, too. In the end, Mackey was all about forgiveness. My father said that the bishop began to talk incessantly about, and with, the angels, which mystified my dad, but not Mackey. When he pushed my father to face up to the consequences of his choices, which revolved ultimately around me, his son, and his being—and failing to be—a father to me and a husband to my mother. He couldn’t keep living the lie of embracing the priesthood—his clerical life. But he made my dad understand he could start to live the truth of being a father—which he tried and often failed to do with me. The two of them grew close, years after my dad no longer maintained his formal priestly life.

So when the bishop lay on his hospital deathbed he sent word to my father, pleading with him to visit. And that’s when he asked him to dispense last rites. This was what they used to call the sacrament of Extreme Unction. Strictly speaking, according to dogma and canon law, he always retained the ability to exercise such sacramental authority, dealing with one in extremis, Latin for dire straits.

“I granted him absolution, Donovan. I told him, ‘Excellence, your sins are now forgiven.’”

“You absolved him,” I said.

He got what I implied, and to his credit, he didn’t defend himself, and he didn’t explain, probably because where would he begin with me?

Then he performed the sacrament upon Bishop Mackey, praying and ritually administering the sacred balms. This occasion served as the opportunity for the bishop to underscore for my dad that he would always be a priest, for a priest is a disciple of Jesus, and therefore a man always in the desert following Jesus. Don’t ask me to elucidate, because I cannot. The image of my dad walking in a desert feels all too right, however. And it seems it was then that the bishop thanked him again. And the man who used to be Father—I mean Monsignor—Philip Fitzgerald thanked the bishop for letting him be by his side at this hour, and they both gave thanks for the angels in their forever connected lives—whatever that could possibly mean.

My dad also reported that, as the sun was setting a few hours later, the bishop, palpably weakening by the minute, found the strength to utter one last thing, which was this: “Now what?” Then he crossed over to the other side, or at least that’s how my dad characterized his parting.

Now what? As last utterances go, that strikes me as right on the damn money. It’s a question and it’s an assertion at the same time, a testament of disappointment and the declaration of wonderment, and an indictment, too, equal parts futility, anger, and expectation: all of which sums up many a man’s existence. As my dad’s favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, used to say, “Preach the gospel; if necessary, use words.” To tell the truth, if I had a favorite saint, Francis would be mine, too. Then again, sometimes I feel like I have nothing but words.

“Why are you telling me all this, Dad?”

“So I will never forget and you will always remember.”

There were many things my father told me over the years that I did not believe, and many more things he never said that I subscribed to more adamantly, but that last statement was a crucial one I did not contest. No hard feelings, I almost wanted to say to him and almost wanted to believe myself. But what he wanted me to understand was something he could not articulate, which was that he, with all his failures and despite every single one of his monumental fuck-ups, loved me, who was his son. You know, in the moment, I believe he believed that. But does he earn a pass? A participation trophy? Does anybody finally?

Talking with him that day, I couldn’t shake the subject of the angels, thanks to the old bishop’s tale told by my dad.

“You believe in angels, Dad?”

“I used to.”

“I believe in them. I’ve seen them myself.”

You know, when I opened my mouth there, part of me was messing with him. But then, once I said it out loud, I caught myself badly wanting to believe in them. And wanting to believe, I bet, is as close as we Fitzgeralds get to believing anything. That may be the working definition of belief. This goes along with that Now what? moment. More I think about it, nobody asks a question like that on the edge of the abyss, without half-knowing the unknowable and half-yearning for a confirming response. Now what? For the bishop, for my dad, for me, I don’t think it’s a rhetorical question. It’s more like a dare. Go on, God, if you exist and especially if you do not, take your best fucking shot.

╬

There was the time I told my father I had begun to meditate and was growing more and more interested, after my own ignorant fashion, in Zen Buddhism. I’d read some books. Who knows, in the moment I might have meant it.

He laughed. No, really, he laughed at me, the suave condescending bastard. He went: “You know when a Fitzgerald will go Zen? When Jameson goes belly up, or in other words, never.”

He moved again and again, taking up residence far-flung here and far-flung there, not that I had been to any home of his since before college. What did he do for a living? No idea. Not that I didn’t occasionally inquire, and not that he ever directly answered me. He could have been an adjunct professor, he could have been an ad hoc preacher at some Protestant outpost—but I have no idea what I am talking about. One day it dawned on me, being slow on the draw, that undoubtedly his own father was financially sustaining him, which would have been no burden to my grandpa. If he had a romantic life, for a long time I was thankfully spared the details, until, you’ll see, the day arrived when I wasn’t—and my mom had no information she wanted to share, either. Prior to that moment, I never heard a name, and certainly never met anybody, but if I ever reflected on the issue, I had to assume he was never quite indefinitely, perfectly alone. Some men, seems to me, cannot manage that trick. Once I was enrolled in college, he remained in communication with me almost entirely via email, and every few months he’d shoot me a long involved message about what he was reading (philosophy, history, nonfiction, memoirs) and the exotic locales he had visited and the books and movies he recommended. I answered immediately. And he never followed up. I guess I easily exhausted the attention quota assigned me.

╬

Once we were having dinner at a cool bistro on the East Side, autumn in New York, let’s all join in the old Frank Sinatra song, he and I and Darcy, to whom I was engaged. And with fanfare he announced he was working hard…writing a book (you guessed it). I didn’t know how to take this news, or if it qualified as such, or if he was living, as I might have suspected, in yet another fantasy. No genuine writer would ask another writer to tell him about the book he is working on, certainly not before it’s finished. One, it’s bad luck. And two, talking about a book peels the magic away. And three, it’s terrible luck. These are the views I held because I am a writer who happens to be a Fitzgerald—or that’s the other way around. But if I didn’t ask for details, that didn’t stop him from telling me.

“It’s a memoir. I am enjoying writing about what happened to me back then, those crazy times, the me I was, you know? I do worry about how your mother, and Frankie, and my dad, and my sister and brother will feel when the book hits the shelves. Everybody probably has a memoir bubbling up inside them. But if you cannot be brutally honest in a memoir, you shouldn’t write it. You agree?”

First of all, he made the rash assumption anybody would rush out to buy and then by chance read such a book of his, much less my mother and the others he had identified. Second, and more to the point, I had no confidence he was writing that sort of book, or attempting to. Not that I thought he was lying, not really. He was trying to connect symbolically to my life, and in his fantasy life he was one of those people who think you can write a book in your mind before putting down a word on the page. Beyond all that, only a unicorn of a writer “enjoys” writing a book. Certainly there are good days, or I should say good minutes, sometimes stretching into an enchanted page or chapter, and that is something in the zip code of enjoyable, but it’s not at the top of my list of descriptors of the writer’s life. For another thing, delving into one’s personal narrative is not for the faint of heart. Or to put that another way, the dickless. But I’m not disparaging women writers by summoning up crude boundary-riddled out-of-date psychosexual immature terminology, no way. Because that would be dumb. It would also lead to people attacking me for being insensitive and clueless, which is a waste of bandwidth, because there’s a solid chance I am. Bandwidth: haven’t heard that term for a while, either. There was one more thing about my dad’s announcement. He didn’t mention any anxiety about the book’s reception relative to his son, me. How come he didn’t care how I would take it? I’m reluctant to admit that my feelings were hurt. Then he surprised me all over again.

“Would you be willing to take a look, when I’m further along, close to finishing, before I send it to my agent? There’s nobody’s opinion I regard higher than yours.” I doubted his veracity (no way he had a literary agent) and said to myself You have a funny way of showing how you regard my opinion. I had published a few stories, won a little prize and then a fancy so-called “emerging writer” fellowship, and maybe he had by some accident actually read some of my work, though I didn’t know for a fact.

“That’s so exciting,” said Darcy. “I would love to read the family story.”

I wasn’t so sure I shared that bright perspective, but I agreed to take a look. Did I have a choice?

“Wouldn’t that be incredible,” said Darcy, “if the handsome father-and-son team both published books? Isn’t it fabulous, Philip, Donny signed his first book deal?”

First of all, team? Darcy never could hold her liquor, a problem I never had after college, where drinking had been practically my major. Second of all, he didn’t know about the book deal because I hadn’t told him, and I wasn’t sure if, or how, I should break the news. Well, Darcy rendered moot an important decision on my part, and it wasn’t the last time she would, as it would turn out.

My dad rocked back in his chair, as if he had taken a bullet, his mouth grimacing in a rictus-like smile. Something told me he was both pleased and downcast, and dinner proceeded to go on for what felt like a February in New York winter. He looked like a man who had been betrayed, and in a way I suppose he was. Betrayed by me, betrayed more by himself and his own illusions. I knew the feeling. If I were smarter I should have immediately carved out plenty of time in the future for paying a price.

╬

To this day, you may or may not be surprised, he never did show a manuscript draft to me (whose opinion was regarded so highly) and to my knowledge, his book hasn’t seen the light of day. It would be perplexing for me to read his memoir, if it were ever produced, so I didn’t relish the prospect, even if I might learn more about him than I already knew, which would be easy to imagine, given that in many respects he remained opaque. I don’t completely understand what I am saying, so you may be frustrated, probably not as much as I am, I’d lay odds. As I studied him across the table that night at dinner, Darcy—poor lovely Darcy who had had one too many—reached for my arm and squeezed gently, lovingly.

“When did you grow that?” I asked him because I had been waiting to pounce, so I pointed at his bearded face, and he preened by way of reply.

Darcy intervened and addressed him, because she never could resist any intervention: “I once tried to get Donny to grow a goatee. It’s such a jaunty and sophisticated look.” She’d had two too many. Jaunty. Still thinking about that sad defunct word.

My father looked like a lion, yes, though indeed more thick-waisted with each passing year, his face progressively more grizzled, yet the metrosexual, closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard was, to me, a recent, dashing, miserable touch. Facial hair, the stylized sort I guess, always strikes me as a cry for help. So yes, aging lion he may have been, but a lion is a lion nonetheless. For some reason this reminds me of when my mom and Aunt Frankie took me on a South African safari, a fantastic high school graduation, pre-college present. It was an amazing trip. The two of them were so close, it was very moving to observe their bond during our travels together. And South African wine is world-class, I hear, not that I’ll ever approach connoisseur status, but I know what I like, and therefore endorse how beautifully that wine works its magic under the open starry night skies stretched out across the savannah. As for the safari, now that was quite an eye-opening experience. From the jungle-savvy guide, for instance, I learned that leopards are the reigning kings of the hunt. They go out looking for prey ten times—nine times they return with warm-blooded dinner in their jaws. Lions? No competition. Ten times out—nine times they slink back dejected to their den. This appalling batting average is likely no consolation to the single antelope or baby giraffe or hobbled zebra they drag down to the veldt for a feast. Please hold that thought.

╬

About six months after the bistro, as my book was fast heading into print, I got a call from Darcy. She and I had broken up. We pretended to be civil and to stay (cue the ominous background music) always friends. Nonetheless, her call registered as something of a shock. She was ten years older than I, and there might have been some generational tension between us—but I doubt that was the determining factor in the split. I can’t say which of us had initiated termination of mission, but I do know I didn’t fight hard to keep us together. She was, and is, a lovely human being, and even then I realized there was a very good chance I would always regret losing her and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Your father wrote me an email, Donny. You have an idea how he got my address?”

Her tone was both accusatory and quizzical—but I decoded her self-consciousness, and detected beneath it all her susceptibility to his all-star flattery. I could speculate there must have been some rogue cc’d email with both their addresses, and he had kept track—but I just work here so I don’t know.

“He says he is heartbroken about us, guess he only recently heard, maybe you told him.” I had done no such thing, so I had no idea as to his information source, unless he maintained provisional access to Family Fitzgerald news services. “And he wanted to get together to talk about putting us back together.”

That sounded vaguely wishful on her part, as well as utterly strange to me as it pertained to his mission of mercy, a point which I made to her.

“But you know?” she said in a tone that indicated she was now about to reveal the true reason for calling. “Maybe I’m crazy, but I picked up a funny vibe, asking me out for a glass of wine when he was in town. Which maybe you knew about already.”

I almost said, Jesus, be serious. With Fitzgeralds, everything is on a need-not-to-be-out-of-the-loop basis.

Instead I said: “Funny vibe how?”

“Do I have to spell it out? He’s still a handsome man, a handsome man who knows he is handsome, and something tells me he didn’t really want to talk about helping you and me get back together. Are you tracking what I’m saying, Donny?”

Let’s assume she was being candid. Let’s assume she was not trying to upset me. Let’s assume good intentions for as long as we can—because we won’t be able to do so forever.

My mom and Darcy had become close for a time after she visited us in Brooklyn, and my then fiancée was beginning her clinically supervised hours as a psychotherapist. Narcissist that I am, I wondered if the two of them could ultimately shed some diagnostic light on me, or compare their fascinating individual notes. Somebody should be able to do so someday. So Darcy’s psychological training may have equipped her to suss out the undertones in my father’s invitation. I would trust her when it came to her intuition.

But I wouldn’t trust my father on anything in this realm. And by realm, I mean anything pertaining to a woman, or to his own son.

“Are you asking me what you should do? Or what you think I want you to do?”

“I don’t want to be impolite. He is your father, and once upon a time you and I were planning to get married, if you recall.”

I could have flipped a coin. I knew my opinion didn’t matter to her or anybody, including my father, anymore. “I don’t think you should go out with him.”

“OK then. I won’t. You miss me, Donny?”

“Like water.” In the moment I meant that. There’s no question in my mind I will always mean that.

“Same here. I guess we weren’t meant to be.”

I wish I knew why, but it was true.

She and my father did meet for that drink. At some point, I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she was dating again, and she was amazed to discover that Darcy had grown serious about a much older man.

Do I need to say who it was?

╬

OK, if I must and if you insist, Donovan. It’s obvious anyway.

I can fake being rational, if I have to. Their considerable age difference would have been hard to bridge, I suppose, and that bridge collapsed before long under the weight of—who knows what if not everything? Under the crushing weight of sleeping with the son’s ex? That sounds pathetic, and I am punishing myself. I would bet anything that in the end he broke up with her, once his curiosity was satisfied, and after his desirability was confirmed by her in the usual way: in bed. Her friend told me she was devastated. Take a number, my dejected, tenderhearted Darcy. No one should be flabbergasted over this course of events. But now it was all over, they were done with each other, and by extension done with me, and part of me, I have to confess, was bitterly satisfied. Those two deserved each other. I am not being totally cynical, either. It never crossed my mind at the time to think about poor lions on the mostly futile hunt. One out of ten. Not bad odds, till they were yours.

Recently my mom mentioned that Aunt Frankie heard he had moved back to the town where we Fitzgeralds had resided forever, or somewhere nearby, on the outskirts, though she hadn’t seen him. I wouldn’t have been stunned to hear that he and Frankie were in conversation. They were once close friends, it seems, and she may well have been the only woman who loved him who, I had to presume, never slept with him. I guess even he had high enough standards not to sleep with his older brother Anthony’s widow. He probably never called his own father or visited the house, even if he was still cashing my grandfather’s checks. Some wreckages on the family shoals are unavoidable.

As I said, you can ask for permission or you can ask for forgiveness. But guess what? My father asked for neither.

My life can feel like a Russian novel. I detest Russian novels. All those unmanageable feelings and cummerbunds and revolutions and firing squads and snow. Steam trains chugging across the tundra. The gulags. Cameo appearances of the devil incarnate. The vodka. The duels in the meadow, the casualties bleeding out among the wildflowers. More vodka still. The box seats at the opera. The country homes, the dachas, going up in flames. The little boys in white sailor suits. The little ballerinas with gold ringletted hair. The French wines swirling in crystal goblets. Poached poisson and caviar and Dom Perignon. And squab, count on the squab. Black velvet drawing rooms. Roaring fire in the hearth and candles in the chandeliers and wolfhounds lounging on Persian carpets. The plunging knife. When nobody’s looking, the gleam of the plunging knife.

╬

At the Floozy podium, I gathered myself. It was a balmy spring night, and he was standing by the opened bookstore door to the street, half in, half out, a perfect metaphor for his relationship with me. Not sure he should stay, not sure he should leave. I met my father’s gaze, simultaneously mirthless and inquisitive, defiant and vulnerable. Of course in the instant I helplessly imagined him with Darcy and her with him. I used to wonder what they said about me, because I doubted the subject of me was out-of-bounds. Some lesions can never be sutured. I used to hate the two of them, in other words.

╬

As for my book, in case you haven’t bought it yet (and Jesus Mary and Joseph, what is holding you back? The hardback beauty costs less than two rounds of craft brews in Williamsburg, come on, big spender), I had dedicated it this way:

To the Good Family Fitzgerald

I wouldn’t take that back, either. But in that moment, standing in front of my family and the people in my town, I realized, despite all my worst intentions, I had ultimately written the book for my father—or I could say against my father or on account of him, as if that amounted to a difference. It didn’t feel like revenge, it didn’t feel like justification, it didn’t feel like victory. I didn’t think: Dad, here’s something you’ll never produce in your miserable life, a fucking book. But it was your miserable son who produced it instead. And you know why I felt that way? Because I didn’t have it in me to savage him. Because Darcy was the concluding episode of his inflicting himself upon me. When I had the chance, I had listened hard to him all my life, especially when he wasn’t there, even when he wasn’t talking to me. I’ve lived long enough to understand that fathers and sons—for all their familiarity and genetic similarity—remain mysteries to each other, which is both a blessing and a curse. But now he had reached that hazardous stage of life, when in spite everything that had happened between us I felt almost sorry for him. As everyone knows, nobody’s more dangerous than a man who senses he is being pitied, and especially when he is pitied by his own son. There’s no satisfaction to be gleaned by anybody here. But I wouldn’t be me without him. Maybe that’s his ultimate achievement, bringing into the world a son he does not know, all the while being a father who does not know himself.

I loved my mom, let’s be clear, without qualification, and always will. In a moment of weakness or of indignation, I don’t know which, I told her about him and Darcy. I shouldn’t have; she was crushed for me, and for herself, too. That was when she said she regretted the day she first met him, because then our pain, hers and mine, wouldn’t exist. But then I wouldn’t exist and she and I wouldn’t exist, either.

I couldn’t tell if he and his father had made contact that night in the bookstore, because my grandfather was stock still, eyes closed, the Irish having taken its toll. I would never understand who Philip Fitzgerald is and what drove him to do the things he had done, but he was my father. Some wreckages keep replaying over and over again in our imagination. And we all know how it goes: that we cannot look away from them.

╬

“I wrote this book, A Love I Can Use, and this is how my story begins,” I said—and as near as I could tell, I said this out loud. I opened to the first chapter and, pretty much without prefatory remarks, I read. Some hotshot reviewer had lavished praise on the opening, but that was nothing other than a setup for skewering my ass: “The promising novel spiraled out of control by the end as the protagonist devolved into grievance and high literary, mannered incoherence.” This was her phrasing, which imprinted itself in my brain. Too much anger, too much violence, she complained. If she only knew.

Hers was the first and last review I would ever read about my book, and you have no idea how much self-control that vow required. My streetwise editor explained it was no big deal, and if anything it would only increase sales, so don’t take it to heart. More pointedly, she said, in general, authors who paid too close attention to reviews were doomed. “You don’t write to please somebody else. That’s a losing proposition. You wrote the book you needed to, so fuck anybody who can’t take a joke.” She added that the Hollywood A-lister they were negotiating with for film rights would not be discouraged by the gratuitous violence accusation if he ever learned of it; if anything, the opposite. And not that the violence was in fact gratuitous. I wished I could believe her. I also wished I could imagine an alternative. She and I have begun sleeping together, who knows where this will go, if anywhere. We should be careful, but we aren’t. An acquisitions editor hooking up with a writer she had “acquired” would have her professional credibility called into question. My unprofessional incredibility is continually called into question, so I can relate. And questioned all over the place, by my dad, by Darcy, by that fucking reviewer, and especially by me here in this journal, which I should never have begun and which I should burn right now. No chance of this drama queen doing that.

I finished my fifteen minutes of reading at Floozy’s that night, and I registered as if from far, far away the tender but sustained patter of applause, like raindrops on the roof. But I could not register approval, if that’s what it was. Instead, I was feeling something else, something sadder: my family and I would never gather together ever again. My grandfather was losing hold on his life, his beloved Caitlin was facing down stalking demons, and I wouldn’t presume either would survive the next twelve months. Aunt Frankie was seeking whatever it was she desired, and my hunch was she would find it. Uncle Matty was a continent away, but then again he always was, and now he would likely never return. Uncle Anthony was also here, ever present, if only as an inexorable, ethereal memory. Aunt Colly was nearby, too, situated behind the cash register, head down, pawing her eyes with the back of her hands. My mom was forlornly smiling, looking I suppose proud. I always loved her smile—I mean I always especially loved her when she smiled—even if I never once told her that. That’s the moment I decided I would correct my oversight and tell her tonight when we all got home, as soon I found the opening to be honest with her for a change. After all, trite as it may be to say, it was true there was no time to waste.

I looked out across and over the gathering, and I could see my father, only now Aunt Frankie was by his side, and he bent his head down when she seemed to be speaking to him. I wondered what they were saying to each other, I wondered if I would ever inquire, I wondered why I should care as much as I did. In any case, that was my good Family Fitzgerald, the parts that never quite made a whole. And apparently I was there as well, the one Fitzgerald who told a story about a love I wished I could use, a story that it took my whole life to tell.

Don’t get me wrong. I published a book, and that’s not much to justify a life, assuming a life requires justification and who’s to say it does not? More important than publishing a book, I think, is writing the book—well, important solely to someone like me. But I have no illusions. The world will not be better for what I wrote. But probably safe to say, it will also not be a whole lot worse, despite that reviewer’s take. It will make no net difference, in other words, to anybody but me. Books die, writers die, readers die. Sell two copies, sell two million, makes no diff. But please go back, reread this paragraph from the top. You know what? I don’t believe one single word of it. Spoiler alert, the last one in my journal: only an idiot believes a writer. So don’t trust a thing I say, including this sentence.

That’s all you got, boyo?

With respect, piss off.

About that last-letter concept my grandfather endorsed: We should jump on that right away. And now that I think about it, everyone—including you, whoever you are—should write their last letter immediately, while they are capable.

I’d agreed to take questions from the Floozy faithful as well as the Floozy faithless, and a few hands swayed shyly in the air, like tulips in the spring before retreating underground. Perhaps on this occasion I would have some answers for my audience, and maybe for myself.

Now what? I thought to myself, remembering those famous last words. Now what?

I looked for him on the threshold where he was lodged uncertainly before, my everlastingly liminal old man. I didn’t see him, and I didn’t see Aunt Frankie, either. He was once again gone. That is what he does. And I once again stayed. That is who I seem to be. There was nowhere else for me but right where I was. This was where, and maybe even why and maybe even how, I could look for love I someday could use.