NINE

One day in May of 1993, a few months before I turn thirteen, Dad says to me, “Ann-Marie is having a baby.” It isn’t totally unexpected. Months before, Ann-Marie had purchased a home fertility test, and for a while there were a bunch of negative pregnancy test sticks in the bathroom trash, but then we’d heard nothing else about having a baby. I’m excited by the idea of a baby. I think a baby might be able to fix our family.

We aren’t allowed to tell anyone for another month—until after Ann-Marie has passed her first trimester. It’s possible, she tells us, that she can lose the baby during that time so it’s better to wait. I’m anxious every day, counting down on my wall calendar, terrified to say anything lest I jinx the pregnancy and make Ann-Marie have a miscarriage. Finally, in June, she says it’s safe.

I call Aunty Sandy, and tell her the news. “Oh,” she says.

“Isn’t it exciting?” I ask.

“Mm-hm.”

Aunty Sandy is married now with a little girl, but she lives just down the street from my grandparents. Her response makes my stomach sink, and I’m worried my grandma will also act like it’s bad news. I don’t want to press Sandy on her real feelings because I’m worried she’ll say something I don’t want to hear. The summer is coming and seventh grade is ending and I am going to have a real family with a baby. I decide that if I can be happy enough about it then it will all work out perfectly. I’ll prove to my grandparents and to Aunty Sandy that I can make everything okay.

TAYLOR IS BORN in December. Ann-Marie’s water breaks in the middle of the night a few days after Christmas and she and Dad grab the overnight bag she packed a few days before and take off for Women & Infants Hospital in Providence. I pace around the house and go to the basement to try to get Derek to stay up with me.

“Just wake me up when the baby’s born.” He pulls a pillow over his head.

I turn the TV off and on and think about calling someone but it’s too late at night. Dad comes back home just as the sun is rising. From my room I hear him come inside and when I walk into the kitchen he’s talking on the cordless phone sitting at the table. He has on sweatpants and shiny leather loafers and I can smell alcohol on him. He looks up at me but continues his conversation.

“Well,” he says into the phone. “Taylor’s here. The umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck so they had to give Ann-Marie an emergency C-section but everything’s okay now.”

My eyes widen and Dad winks at me. “Yup,” he says. I can tell he’s trying to wind down the conversation and guess that he’s talking to Ann-Marie’s parents. “We’ll see you in the morning,” he says clicking the OFF button of the phone and putting it down between us on the table.

“She’s okay?” I ask.

“They are both okay,” says Dad. His words are thick, not slurred, but slow and laden with a kind of sadness that I hear only when he has been drinking whiskey and not beer. “Taylor is a little peanut. You’re going to love her.” He stops for a moment and looks out the window at the dull gray sky of the early winter morning. There’s something in his mustache, a brown spot, maybe gravy or ketchup, and I stare hard at it. This is not what I’d hoped for. Dad wasn’t supposed to come home drunk with food in his mustache. I wonder if Ann-Marie and Taylor are sleeping or awake in the hospital and wondering where Dad was.

“When can we go see her?”

“Visiting hours start soon,” he says. “You’re going to love her. I know you will.”

“Of course I will,” I say, my voice unintentionally sharp. Of course I will love my baby sister. I’m a normal person. Dad looks at me, surprised. Though I talk back to all my teachers and pride myself on my smart mouth, I almost never take a tone with Dad, especially if he has been drinking.

“You know when you were born,” he says, “I was in a fucking locked room in the hospital basement.” He laughs. “I guess I’ve come a long way, huh?”

I smile at him, despite myself. “You have food on your face,” I tell him. He laughs again and scratches at his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, dislodging what’s crusted there.

His eyes are bloodshot and tiny red veins creep across his nose and the top of his cheeks where they met his crinkled eyelids. He holds his hand out and I grab it across the table. He squeezes and tells me the story of when I was born and though I’ve heard it before, I listen, because it’s a good story and because I know Dad likes telling it.

My mother’s doctor, it turns out, was a raging alcoholic, and when my mom went into labor with me, he’d been on a bender for days and the nurses, who were terrified of him, tried to buy some time to sober him up and kept coming up with excuses for why they couldn’t call him. My family, unaware of the doctor’s state, grew increasingly agitated as the hours went by. I was a big baby, almost eight pounds, and my mom was a tiny lady, not just short but built with the same kind of small bones as me.

“And so your mom is in labor for nine, ten, eleven hours,” Dad says. “And the nurses won’t call the doctor and your grandmother is freaking out and I’m yelling for someone to help her out. And then finally they send in this security guard, this fucking rent-a-cop, who’s telling me ‘calm down, calm down’ and he’s about five foot five and I pick up the chair I’m sitting in and wing it across the room and ask him if I’m calm enough and the next thing there are nine guys wrestling me down and your grandma is screaming and your mom, at this point, probably doesn’t even notice, and then I’m in a locked room when you’re finally born. And my God, you were an ugly baby!” Dad says that by the time the doctor finally came, it was too late for a C-section and they had to pull me out with high forceps and I was covered in bruises, jaundiced, and had a malformed head.

“But you got better,” says Dad. “Wait till you see her. She’s a little peanut.” He swallows the rest of his glass and kicks off his loafers. “We’ll go in a few hours,” he says. “Just wake me up in a few hours.” He walks out of the kitchen, headed for his bedroom, leaving a trail of clothes in his wake.

I DO, OF course, love Taylor. Even during the first few months when she does little more than ball her hands into tiny fists and scream, I’m captivated. I hold her in the gliding chair in her nursery and watch as she squeezes her eyes open and closed and tenses all her muscles. I listen carefully as Ann-Marie explains how to change her diaper, how to wipe the folds of her chubby thighs so she doesn’t get a rash, how to walk her around bopping up and down and patting rhythmically at her back until she burps or throws up all over the cloth Ann-Marie places on my shoulder.

From the start, Taylor is more mine than Dad’s. After her three months of maternity leave are over, Ann-Marie reluctantly goes back to work and Taylor goes to daycare. The first week, Dad says he’ll take care of getting the baby ready and driving her to daycare, because he’s working nights at the Journal. When I go with Ann-Marie that first afternoon to pick Taylor up, Denise, the babysitter, hands over Taylor and her heavily packed diaper bag.

“Men!” she says and laughs nervously. Dad had dropped Taylor off that morning with poop all over her stomach and legs. He’d seemingly put a new diaper on her but had not bothered to clean any of the mess from the old one before snapping her clothes together. Denise tries to act like Dad is just a typical sitcom male, unaware of how to change a diaper, but we all know better. That same week I’d asked Dad if he could drive Derek and me to school. Ann-Marie had left for work and he sat in the living room, Taylor asleep at his feet in her bassinet.

“I guess so,” he said, and walked to the hook in the kitchen where he hung his car keys. I reached for the sleeping baby, ready to carry her out and buckle her into the car seat myself.

“Just leave her,” said Dad. “That whole thing with the car seat will take too long.”

My heart seized up in my chest and beside me Derek stiffened.

“We’ll just walk then,” I said.

“I said she’ll be fine,” Dad said. His look was menacing as he loomed over us. “Do you think I’ve never done this before?”

Derek and I trudged out to the car, with Taylor asleep on the living room floor. As Dad dropped us off and Derek and I walked through the front doors, Derek turned to me and said, “That was really fucked up, right? Like that’s normally not what you do with a baby, right?”

“Don’t tell Ann-Marie,” I said. Derek shrugged.

“Seriously,” I said. “You can’t tell her.”

THAT APRIL, WHEN I’m in eighth grade and Taylor learns how to crawl around the house, Kurt Cobain kills himself. I watch the coverage on MTV obsessively—the footage of his Converse-clad feet seen from the window of the tiny shed in which he’d shot himself, the interviews with friends, acquaintances, and experts who opine about what this means for music, the memorial service in Seattle where Courtney Love reads from sections of his suicide note, her voice cracking with grief over the loudspeakers as she speaks of the “burning, nauseous, pit” inside Kurt’s stomach.

I collect all the magazines I can get my hands on: Spin, Rolling Stone, even People, and pore over the articles trying to figure out how it could have happened. Everyone talks about how young he was. I can’t get over the pictures of his young daughter with her bright blue eyes, so much like Kurt’s. And the nature of it—shooting yourself in the head with a shotgun. I understand that a person only does that when they truly want out, truly don’t want to live anymore. I think there’s something courageous about it—the finality.

That year my best friend and I think we’re the only ones in school who really understand Kurt Cobain and his music. I spend hours in the TV room of her split-level house listening to all of his albums and watching videos. We become obsessed with Courtney Love and want to be just like her. We read every interview we can find and cut out every picture, modeling our clothes on hers. We go to Thayer Street, by Brown University, and buy vintage baby-doll dresses and fishnet stockings. I find a pair of deeply discounted Mary Jane-style Doc Martens and beg Dad to buy them for me. I wear them with everything I own.

We troll the CD stores for the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, and the Sex Pistols, too. We rent Sid and Nancy at the video store because Courtney Love has a bit part and we watch it so many times we know every line. That Christmas, Derek gives it to me on VHS and when I unwrap it, I’m so thrilled by the gift that I hug him. He pushes me away. “Whatever,” he says. “I just know you like the stupid movie.” I squeeze him again, extra hard.

In Barrington, the bands of choice are Phish and the Dave Matthews Band, and I set myself in direct opposition to the boat shoes and white baseball hats of the soccer-playing, Grateful Dead–loving popular kids. That summer as eighth grade ends and my friend and I look forward to high school I imagine all the drama that awaits me. We dye our hair pink and talk about how different things will be. Every book and every movie I’ve ever seen about high school says this will be the most important time of my life and I’m sure it will. I plan all my outfits with the notion that Courtney Love will come to my school and pick out the coolest person. If that happens, I want to be that girl.

That summer I come across an article where someone mentions the book A Clockwork Orange. The next time Dad and I are at the library I check it out. On the drive home he looks at my book and slaps his knee.

“This is one of the few cases,” he says, “where the movie is just as good as the book. Maybe even better. Your mom and I saw it in the theater when we were first dating.”

“Really?” I ask. “Can we rent it?”

I watch the movie as soon as I got home and then start on the book. Dad and I talk about the British ending versus the American ending and at dinner we drive Ann-Marie crazy by calling all of our food eggy-weggs and doing our best Malcolm McDowell impersonations.

Eventually, she has had enough. “What is it with this movie? It’s just some idiot with a stick!”

“Ann-Mo,” Dad says, “that is the most salient piece of film criticism I may have ever heard.”

By the time high school starts in the fall, I’ve worked my way through all the counterculture and dystopian literature I can find, starting, of course, with Brave New World and 1984.

“Dad,” I say, after finishing the Orwell. “At the end, when he’s crying and saying he loves Big Brother? Oh my God. It was so good. It was so sad.” Dad nods from the leather chair in the living room. He has a giant telephoto lens trained on Taylor, who looks up at both of us drooling and smiling.

“Taylor-Ann!” I say, “Show us your buddies!” Taylor proudly displays her collection of pacifiers—two in each hand. Dad snaps pictures of her. I hold up an issue of Shutterbug magazine with a giant thirty-five-millimeter camera on the cover and point at the image.

“Taylor, who’s this?”

She focuses on the magazine cover and crawls over to me. “Dada!” she says, punching the image of the camera with her moistened buddy, leaving a smudge. “It’s Dada!” Dad and I both clap wildly and Taylor giggles, shoving two of the pacifiers into her mouth.

I spend hours in my bedroom in front of the mirror trying on outfits for school. I like small vintage dresses and ripped fishnet stockings layered over colored tights. I scour the Salvation Army for the perfect old-lady cardigans. I use Manic Panic to dye my hair every few weeks. My favorite thing is to walk through the corridors and hear people whisper (seniors even) about my clothes and hair. I delight in making a spectacle of myself—writing song lyrics on my arms and jeans and talking in a loud British accent. Derek and I hang out at the Dairy Mart up the street from our house and ask older teenagers to buy us cigarettes. At school, I prefer brooding in the girls’ room, reading poetry by the Beats, and smoking Camel Lights to going to class. I have detention almost every day.

At home, nobody seems to really notice my bad behavior at school. I want Dad to know what a rebel I was but I can never seem to get his attention.

RECENTLY THE PROVIDENCE Journal had been bought out by Belo Corp., a big national conglomerate that owns papers and news stations across the country. Dad starts to get more night shifts. He leaves for work around five at night and comes home at two or three in the morning. He’s always slept for hours on end, but now we almost never see him awake during the day.

One night when I can’t sleep, which is often, I get out of bed and make myself a cup of chamomile tea. I curl up into my position on the living room sofa drinking my tea and reading Interview with the Vampire. Dad’s car pulls into the driveway. When he walks into the living room, he slumps into the chair across from me.

It’s the smell of him that makes me look up. He smells like something rotting. Beneath the Polo cologne, and the Italian grinder bits all over his suit, and even under the scent of alcohol, there’s something else. Something not right. He smells sick in the way hospitals smell sick, or… I can’t quite explain it. He has immediately fallen asleep in the chair, his suit jacket slung over the back, his jaw slack. Something has truly changed in him. He has given up trying to impress us. He doesn’t talk anymore about “getting better.” He doesn’t sit with us while we watch movies and crack jokes that we tell to our friends the next day. When he’s home he puts the TV on mute and sleeps, all the time, day or night. We live in the same tiny house but I rarely see him.

YEARS BEFORE ON Sunday, September 15, 1987, the unconscious and bleeding body of Michael P. Metcalf, chairman, chief executive officer, and publisher of the Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin lay sprawled alongside his bicycle on the road near his summer home in Westport, Massachusetts. One week later, he died from serious head injuries sustained in the apparent freak accident. There were no witnesses to the incident and while the Bristol County medical examiner’s autopsy report showed “nothing startling,” murmurs of foul play rippled through the state of Rhode Island, pooling at the feet of the usual suspects: the corrupt courts and state officials, and the powerful Patriarca crime family.

His death marked the beginning of the end of an era for the Providence Journal and coincided generally with a decline in print journalism nationwide. The Metcalfs had made their fortune in mills and helped endow the esteemed Rhode Island School of Design, but it was with their ownership of the Providence Journal that they became a Rhode Island dynasty. On the paper’s centennial in 1929, then-publisher Stephen Metcalf declared the paper would last another century if “the emblems of independence and honesty still fly at the masthead, and if no man or group of men permit themselves to sully her honor or integrity for their own personal ends.”

With Michael Metcalf at the helm, it seemed the Journal would continue not only as a beacon of courageous, locally focused journalism but also as a trusted institution employing hundreds of loyal Rhode Islanders. Indeed, the day of his mysterious accident was an auspicious one for Metcalf: It was the first day the paper would be printed at the new production facility—a gleaming, state-of-the-art project of which he was particularly proud—and the building where my father worked for many years. Having found no paper in his mailbox to inspect, Metcalf biked off down the road to purchase one. What happened next is the stuff of conjecture but one thing is clear: He would never see the Providence Journal again.

At its height, the newspaper had seven local bureaus, an astonishing number for a state that can be traversed by car in under an hour. Joel Rawson, who began his career at the Journal as a copy editor, rose through the ranks to become editor in chief due in large part to a series of fascinating long-form stories that were often a year or more in the making. The paper implemented intensive writing workshops and “Story of the Week” contests. In 1986, then-editor Charles Hauser was sentenced to an eighteen-month suspended prison term and the paper was fined a hundred thousand dollars for publishing a story about Raymond L. S. Patriarca, based on FBI documents being held under a temporary restraining order. Metcalf stood by the story and his editor, stating that his was a decision “that was made by the newspaper in good faith and in the reasonable belief that the First Amendment justified the publication.” It was not the first or last time the Metcalfs butted heads with the mafia and the courts.

It was precisely this type of stubborn rectitude that set the Journal apart from other Rhode Island institutions. Criminal exploits and entrenched governmental corruption are hallmarks of this tiny state that bears certain monolithic qualities. Overwhelmingly Catholic, unabashedly corrupt, and with a flair for extravagant provincialism, the state nonetheless came to accept the Providence Journal as a kind of moral steward. With a hyperfocus on local journalism, its wealthy Protestant owners—exemplified by Michael Metcalf—demanded honesty and honored public service, paid fair wages, and rewarded loyalty. The Journal’s almost priggish commitment to integrity saw returns in the form of prestige, with four Pulitzer Prizes, and financial success. While still under private ownership the paper operated at a healthy profit, which Metcalf used to invest in forward-thinking technologies such as cell towers and the purchase of television stations.

The Journal today is a shadow of its formal self. The Evening Bulletin edition was cut decades ago. The story of the paper’s demise is familiar to most people who have followed the decline of print journalism in the era of the Internet. In 1996, Metcalf’s successor took the company public. The initial Providence Journal Company valuation was one hundred million dollars. Just six months later, the majority shareholders elected to sell the company to media conglomerate Belo Corp., based in Dallas, Texas, for a billion and a half dollars. Like most large-scale ventures, Belo was concerned less with the paper itself than with its many assets, including those television stations purchased by Michael Metcalf. On the day of the sale, Elise Metcalf Mauran and Pauline C. Metcalf spoke for the Metcalf family with a full-page ad in the paper that read, “We mourn the sale of the Providence Journal Company to A. H. Belo… we are saddened by the loss of independence of the newspaper and what that has meant for well over 100 years to the citizens of Providence and the State of Rhode Island.”

IN 2009, I contact the journalist, Dean Starkman, who’d been part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering corruption in Rhode Island. He’d also exposed Peter Gilbert’s deal with the state. He was a young reporter at the time and he remembers well a line from the grand jury testimony that he quotes in one of his articles, and that shocked me when I first read it: Gerald Mastracchio choking the life out of my mother and saying, “Come on you rat, give me the death rattle.” To him that utterance encapsulates the evil of these men. He can’t understand, as an outsider, Rhode Islanders’ fascination with organized criminals; he’d wanted to show them for the brutal thugs they were. To him, the Journal was one of the only non-corrupt organizations in the state.

For men like my dad, the Journal was their whole life. He was exceptionally proud of his job.

As an adult, I write about my conversation with Dean Starkman and about how his stories help me finally approach the truth about my mother. A day after my article is published in the New York Times I receive this email:

Ms. Carroll, it was actually the description of your father’s death, not your mother’s, that sent a chill down my spine. I was the Chief Financial Officer responsible for negotiating the sale of the Providence Journal. Just after announcing the deal I was kicked out of the house, the 31-year-old father of two babies, for being a drunk. I didn’t see my kids that Christmas of 1996 and, as a result, decided to try to get sober rather than commit suicide. I have been clean for the 13 years since and, like you, have become a writer obsessed with telling the truth no matter how painful. If my actions as CFO at the Journal in any way contributed to your hardship I am deeply and sincerely sorry.

Thomas Matlack

I’m stunned by the message. I wonder what my dad would have made of it. Because in a way, through no malice on his part, Matlack’s actions did contribute to my dad’s death. The Journal was the one place my dad completely belonged, completely fit, and the sale changed all that. Reading the email, I feel it again, the same feeling I’d had in college going through the Journal’s online archives: that “lonely impulse of delight.”