PRAISE FOR JESUS, MY FATHER, THE CIA, AND ME

“Ian Cron walks us through the drama of his life, making us laugh and cry with him every step of the way. His memoir is filled with everything from boyhood stories of celebrating communion in the woods with chipmunks and blue jays, to poignant reflections about growing up with an alcoholic father. Ian’s honesty, vulnerability, and humor will bring a measure of healing to all who go on the journey with him.”

JIM WALLIS, president of Sojourners,

best-selling author of God’s Politics

and Rediscovering Values

“I like stories. And this is a good one. Ian Cron has a ton to teach the world, and he’s gentle as he does it. Here it is: The Gospel of Ian … not in the top four gospels, but it’s pretty magnificent. And it’s sure evidence that God continues to tell the extraordinary story of grace through the lives of ordinary people.”

SHANE CLAIBORNE, author, activist,

and co-compiler of Common Prayer

“Ian Cron writes with astonishing energy and freshness; his metaphors stick fast in the imagination. This is neither a simple memoir of hurt endured, nor a tidy story of reconciliation and resolution. It is— rather like Augustine’s Confessions—a testimony to the unfinished business of grace. The deeply painful reality of trying to discover how to love a parent who has hidden away, in a number of ways, from responsibility and vulnerability is not softened but explored with clear-sighted empathy. And somehow, the new possibility comes into focus—the possibility of offering to another the grace received, and of finding both love and truthfulness in that moment.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury,

DR. ROWAN WILLIAMS

“Ian Cron has the gift of making his human journey a parable for all of our journeys. Read this profound book and be well fed, and freed.”

FR. RICHARD ROHR, author of

Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

“Ian Morgan Cron’s story is a compelling one… . Each turn of the page will draw you closer to God.”

CRAIG GROESCHEL,

author of The Christian Atheist

“Ian Morgan Cron is a brilliant writer. This is the kind of book that you don’t just read. It reads you.”

MARK BATTERSON, author of

In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day:

How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

“Ian Morgan Cron’s daring writing lays bare the human journey with grace and wit. His confessional words combat despair and illuminate the path toward forgiveness and redemption we are all searching for.”

MAKOTO FUJIMURA,

artist, author, and founder of

International Arts Movement

“Simply the best memoir I have read in years. It is engaging, clever, heartbreaking, and God-drenched in all the right ways.”

PHYLLIS TICKLE, author of The Great Emergence:

How Christianity Is Changing and Why

“There are some books you have to read—they’re important for your work or required so you can be ‘up’ on what’s happening. There are other books you want to read. These books humanize you, deepen your soul and your insight, help you see the world through the eyes of another. They move you to tears and to smiles and delight you with the craft of the author. This is one of those want-to-read books, a portal that transports you into the struggles of childhood, the agony of alcoholism, the joys of coming of age, the terror and hope of parenthood, and the mystery of faith. Enthusiastically recommended.”

BRIAN MCLAREN, author of

Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words

“At once touching and profound, poignant and full of grace, this is compelling writing of the highest order. I can’t imagine anyone not being drawn deeper into the momentum of God’s healing Spirit.”

JEREMY BEGBIE, musician and

Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology,

Duke University Divinity School; author of

Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music

JESUS,

MY FATHER,

THE CIA,

AND ME

a memoir … of sorts

JESUS,

MY FATHER,

THE CIA,

AND ME

a memoir … of sorts

IAN MORGAN CRON

© 2011 by Ian Morgan Cron

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Published in association with the literary agency of Alive Communications, Inc., 7680 Goddard Street, Suite 200, Colorado Springs, CO 80920. www.alivecommunications.com

Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.

In some instances, names, dates, locations, and other details have been purposely changed to protect the identities and privacy of those discussed in this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cron, Ian Morgan, 1960-

Jesus, my father, the CIA, and me : a memoir—of sorts / Ian Morgan Cron.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8499-4610-3 (pbk.)

1. Cron, Ian Morgan, 1960–2. Episcopal Church—Clergy—Biography. I. Title.

BX5995.C74A3 2011

283.092—dc22 [B]

2011003723

Printed in the United States of America

11 12 13 14 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother

CONTENTS

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

When going back makes sense, you are going ahead.

—WENDELL BERRY

1

Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning.

—ROBERT LAX

I was rummaging around for a pen in my mother’s apartment when I found a grainy black-and-white photo stuck to the back of a drawer in her desk. It was taken of me as a toddler at the beach near our home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Stamped on the white, decoratively scalloped border is the year, 1962. That year, riots broke out when African-American student Phillip Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, two members of the high-wire circus act the Flying Wallendas were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, and the United States and the Soviet Union came within a cat’s whisker of incinerating each other when our military discovered that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles ninety miles off the coast of Florida in Cuba. It was also the year in which an unsuspecting black bear named Yogi was volunteered by the air force to participate in an escape capsule test. He was ejected from a supersonic aircraft flying at 870 mph at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, landing safely on the earth seven minutes and forty-nine seconds later.

It was a stressful year for everybody.

The photo of me at the beach suggests that young children are more conscious of what’s happening in their environment than developmental psychologists once believed. I knew that civilization was teetering on the precipice of annihilation, and I was ready.

I am sitting in a lifeboat.

The picture was taken with my mother’s camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a perfect cube of black plastic with a gray knob on the side that you wound to advance the film. To take a picture, you had to hunch over the camera, looking at your subject through a small square viewfinder. The owner’s manual claimed the lens could take sharp pictures from “5 feet to infinity.” That’s a whole lot of camera for five dollars and fifty cents. Later, when my mother bought a new camera, the Brownie ended up in my toy chest. The knob made an awful grinding noise when I turned it because of the grit and sand lodged in the gears of the film spool. For a year it went with me everywhere.

My mother told me that if I removed the back of the camera and shook it hard enough, the countless memories hiding inside might tumble out. I gave it all I had, but not even one fell out. I would pay much more than five dollars and fifty cents to hold that Brownie in my hands again today.

So here I am in the photo, a towheaded two-year-old sitting in what I remember was a salmon-orange-stained lifeboat, waving and laughing at the photographer, whose identity is a mystery to me even now. Behind me, classic wood motorboats with elegant lines bob in the waves. I imagine men sauntering by off-camera in Ray-Bans and wearing short, skintight bathing suits only a Canadian could love.

When I first discovered the picture in my mother’s desk, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the boy in the boat was not waving and laughing at the person snapping the photo as much as he was frantically trying to get the attention of the man I am today. He was beckoning me to get into the boat.

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.” That’s what John Edward Pearce said. But what if your childhood was a train wreck? What if your memories of home are more akin to The Shining than The Waltons? It doesn’t matter. Home is not just a place; it’s a knowing in the soul, a vague premonition of a far-off country that we know exists but haven’t seen yet. Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t. The boy was calling me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. This book is the record of that expedition.

By now, the attentive reader is wondering what I mean when I say this book is “a memoir of sorts.” I set out to write a conventional memoir, but after weeks of writing I discovered a vexing paradox: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t tell the whole truth about my childhood by rigidly sticking to the facts.

John Irving describes the problem in his memoir, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. “This is a memoir,” he writes, “but please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are false … we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened, or what should have.”

This work dances on the hyphen between memoir and autobiographical fiction. Many of the stories in this book are more than forty years old. They are told as “through a glass, darkly.” They include approximations of conversations that actually occurred or ones I believe could have reasonably taken place, given my knowledge of the people and the events at the time.

In places I have conflated stories. I have compressed timelines. I borrowed from the memories and experiences of my siblings. I changed the names of people who did not sign up to be in my book. (For example, my childhood dog’s real name was Tigger, but I changed it to Waldo. He was very private.)

Some accounts are based on stories I’ve heard family members tell, even though none of us can agree on the details. These differences in opinion about what happened to whom nearly lead to bloodshed when family stories are recounted at holiday meals.

Memoirists work with bones. Like paleontologists, we dig up enough of them to make intelligent guesses about what a creature looked like a million years ago. But here and there a femur or rib is missing, so by faith, with imagination, we fill in those gaps with details we believe are consistent with the nature and character of our upbringing.

So what’s really true in this account of my life, you ask? If while reading you become uncertain about where the line between fact and fiction lies in my history, then welcome to my childhood. I felt that same uncertainty as a kid growing up, and even now as I try to relay it to you.

If you have a low tolerance for ambiguity, and these earnest attempts at transparency make you wonder if I’m to be trusted, then know that this book is true, either in fact or in essence, and most of the time—both.

This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it.

2

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

—ANNE SEXTON

Afriend of Wild Bill Donovan’s recruited me to work for the Company after the war,” my father whispered.

I pulled my chair closer to the side of the grand four-poster bed where my father lay. As a boy, I’d hidden a hundred times under that imposing mahogany antique during games of hide-and-seek. Six weeks of intense radiation therapy on my father’s face and throat had seared his vocal cords. The voice that during my childhood could make me cringe in fear was now thin and reedy. Tabs of white, pasty spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, and he winced when he swallowed. A cup of ice chips sat on his bedside table, surrounded by a forest of amber-colored prescription bottles in a variety of sizes.

My fiancée, Anne, sat frozen in a Queen Anne armchair at the end of the bed, listening, her eyes darting back and forth between my father and me. She knew he never spoke with his children—or even with his wife, for that matter—about his work with the CIA. I had known since I was a teenager that he’d worked on and off in the clandestine intelligence services, but we were forbidden to talk about it. The Cron clan lived by the don’t ask, don’t tell rule long before the government employed the phrase to describe its policy toward gays and lesbians in the military. Our version was simple: don’t ask dad about his work, past or present, and whatever you do, don’t tell anyone about his drinking.

“My work at a motion-picture company gave your mother and me access to all the big society events in London,” my father continued. “We were invited to parties at embassies where we rubbed elbows with foreign leaders, military brass, and ambassadors. We became good friends with people close to the royal family as well. I would listen to conversations and report back to the London station.”

“Did Mom know?” I asked.

“Not until much later.”

“How is that possible?”

“Wives in the fifties didn’t ask questions,” he said, smiling faintly.

I imagined my mother sitting in the living room of our home in London, addressing invitations to a garden party while my father plotted coups in the study. Not exactly Ozzie and Harriet.

“So all you did was listen in on important people’s conversations and report back?” I asked.

My father arched one eyebrow and studied me as though he were performing an X-ray on my motive for asking the question. This was his trademark facial expression. When it was soft and accompanied by an impish grin, it was his way of expressing incredulity. If it was dark and seemed to be drilling a hole in your forehead, it meant he was trying to decide if you were toying with him. I think in this case, he wanted to know if my question was sardonic or just naive. It was definitely the latter.

“It was the Cold War. We were fighting to keep our country safe,” he said.

“What does that mean exactly?”

He shrugged. “In the fifties and sixties, the Agency wasn’t the monolithic bureaucracy it is today. We didn’t have the kinds of constraints people in the field have now. In the early days we were more …” He paused and smiled. “More independent.”

As crazy as the story sounded, I knew my father was telling the truth, or at least his version of it. My father was describing our family’s Camelot years. My two older brothers and older sister remembered those halcyon days much better than I did. They spoke with wistful reverence of the days when my father was managing director of Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures in the 1950s, in the United Kingdom and Europe, when they attended the finest private schools in London, when our home was filled with cooks, maids, and nannies, when the sky was blue and cloudless as far as the eye could see.

My boyhood was filled with the retelling of legendary stories from that era—like the night Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner spontaneously performed their famous sketch “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man” at a party in the living room of our home on Eaton Place, or the time Art Buchwald entertained a Thanksgiving party by standing on a chair and taking off his clothes to the song “The Stripper.” There were tales of our next-door neighbor, the author James Jones, meandering over to our house in his dressing gown to sit in our kitchen and have coffee with my mother after he had finished writing for the day. On the title page of his masterpiece From Here to Eternity, he scrawled a personal note to my father beginning with the words, “To Jack, last of the great big spenders.”

If you delved headfirst into the fifty-five-gallon cardboard moving barrel that stood next to the half-round eyebrow window vent in our attic, or if you were strong enough to heave open the big hidden drawer in the bottom of the lift-top blanket chest in the downstairs hall, you would find a treasure trove of pictures of my parents posing with celebrities—as well as glossy black-and-whites of my father with men my mother swears she never met. But it was the big green steamer trunk with brass rivets along its seams that contained the really cool stuff. It bore a Cunard Lines first-class sticker on its side, a reminder of a journey made between New York and London on the Queen Mary. Many of the photos were yellow, their corners crimped, leaving craggy, white fault lines that couldn’t be repaired. The photos were filled with dashing men in black tie and women in shimmering satin evening gowns, sitting at round tables at Sardi’s or 21 in New York or Maxim’s in Paris. The tables were covered with white tablecloths with sharp pleats, strewn with champagne flutes and Scotch tumblers, packs of Chesterfields, and small, beaded cocktail purses with gold chains.

There were shots of my parents mugging gaily for the camera with stars like William Holden, Judy Garland, Donna Reed, Roger Moore, and Terry-Thomas. They all looked so sophisticated and elegant, but they were still willing to scrunch up like giddy kids on prom night so no one would be left out of the picture. There were photos of our home on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, snapshots taken of my parents on business trips to out-of-the-way European cities—business trips that my mother said she knew at the time had nothing to do with my father’s job at Screen Gems—or of my sister being pushed by a uniformed nanny in a fancy pram with a blue canvas sun canopy and oversized white rubber wheels with wire spokes.

None of these photographs ever made it into well-organized photo albums, the tobacco-colored leather ones with the year the pictures were taken embossed on the bindings. Nor were they placed into sterling-silver frames and displayed on coffee tables or mantels, as happy reminiscences to be shared with guests. Shortly after I was born, our boom years went bust. My father’s descent into the madness of alcoholism made riding a yo-yo look easy. One minute we were wealthy, the next we were broke, and years later we were reasonably comfortable again. When people ask about my childhood, I say it’s shaped like a J. There were the really high years, the really low years, and finally, in the words of the prophet Joel, the years when God restored to us what the locusts had eaten—or at least some of what they’d eaten.

But for all of my years growing up, I was haunted by this vague feeling that we must have committed some terrible offense against the gods to have such a charmed life taken away from us. The pictures from those glamour years were orphaned souvenirs from a previous life, proof that once upon a time the Fates really did smile on us.

My father was handsome and always impeccably dressed. I still have a picture of him taken by the famous Bruno of Hollywood, the photographer who took the headshots of A-list actors in those days. My father looked like a movie star himself. He was a man’s man, hard as Errol Flynn and charming as Cary Grant. Today, we’d say he was a cross between Daniel Craig and George Clooney. He wasn’t tall, maybe 5‘7”, but he was barrel-chested, with jet-black hair, curly at the edges, and swarthy skin. My father was a force of nature. When he made an entrance into a crowded room, the balance of power shifted. Men would feel it first and look fleetingly in his direction, then feign disinterest before returning to conversation with women who couldn’t take their eyes off him. My father couldn’t walk through a door without colonizing the space.

The sad thing about the Bruno of Hollywood picture is that my father looks so happy, so hopeful, unaware that he was speeding into an ice storm with no chains on his tires. Every time I see that photo I’m reminded that we’re all one decision away from disaster.

“I was trained to drink milk and then swish whiskey around my mouth before we went out for the night,” my father continued. “They said the milk would make the smell of the Scotch stick to my breath.”

“What was the point?” I asked.

“The Agency wanted people to think of me as the harmless, shallow American who drank too much. That way people wouldn’t be as careful about what they said around me.” He looked away. “One day I became the person I was pretending to be.”

My heart was pounding. There was something I’d waited my entire life to hear him say, words that I was convinced could change everything, past, present, and future.

I could tell he knew what I was hoping for when his faced darkened. He fixed me with a gelid gaze. “That’s what happened,” he said, folding his arms across his chest.

I took a deep breath and forced a steady stream of air through pursed lips. It made the sensation of drowning go away. “Okay,” I said.

My father picked up the copy of the National Review that had been lying facedown on his chest and resumed reading. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but of the more intellectual school of thought. He would have considered Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity shrill and uncultured, nothing more than bad theater. He was a Richard John Neuhaus or Bill Buckley man. Even in the years when his alcoholism and depression were at their worst, stacks of history books, biographies, newspapers, and magazines would surround his chair. We could always tell when he was reading the New York Times. We’d hear him throw the paper to the floor and yell, “Communist sympathizers!”

I once asked him why he insisted on reading something that made him so angry. He winked and said, “Always know what your enemy is doing.”

When he picked up his magazine and resumed reading, I knew that my audience with the grand patriarch was over. He had made his deathbed mea culpa. Even frail and dying, he was imperious.

Anne and I left the room and paused on the other side of the door.

“Wow,” she mouthed.

I shook my head. “That was an explanation. I was hoping for an apology.”

Anne took my hand. “It was as close to an apology as he could get,” she replied.

We walked into the living room. Nat King Cole’s perfect voice warbled on the stereo. He was singing his classic song “Unforgettable,” only the stereo made it sound like he had recorded it underwater. My parents had bought their eight-track stereo system in 1975, and despite my pleas, they refused to upgrade to a CD player. People from Greenwich, Connecticut, are frugal in an odd sort of way. My mother wouldn’t dream of throwing away old string, used Christmas wrapping paper, or rubber bands, but when I was in high school, she and my father would spend a small fortune staying at the Breakers in Palm Beach or shooting sporting clays at Casa del Campo in the Dominican Republic for a few weeks every January. They were members of a tribe who thought the word winter was a verb.

“Ian,” my father called, beckoning me back to his room.

I turned to Anne. “Go be with Mom. I’ll be right there,” I said.

I opened the door and stuck my head into the room. My father was still sitting up, leaning back against a mound of down pillows.

“Yes?” I asked.

“Nothing’s perfect, son,” he said, fanning the pages of his magazine, pretending to look for an article he had started but never finished.

I squinted at him. Maybe I thought narrowing my visual field might provide the clarity I needed to decode this cryptic aside. It didn’t. That’s all you have to say? Couldn’t you admit you were a drunk who wrecked my childhood? Couldn’t you ask my forgiveness?

Not likely.

I closed the door and leaned against it. This was a man who made fortunes and squandered them, a man who possessed the insouciant charm of Peter O’Toole and the menacing aura of Humphrey Bogart. He could slice you into ribbons with a lacerating vocabulary or make you laugh so hard you had to leave the room so you wouldn’t pass out from oxygen deprivation. He kept his life compartmentalized and in the shadows, no one knowing who he really was or what he actually did. There were so many lies, half-truths, and missing pieces of information about him that didn’t add up. But just when you thought everything he ever said about himself might be symptomatic of psychosis, some amazing claim he’d made would be verified by a reputable source, making you wonder if it was you who was completely crazy. Trying to crack the code of my father’s history was enough to give you vertigo.

Then there were the other memories. A nine-year-old waiting in a car to leave for a fishing trip until he was told that it was called off because of his father’s coming down with “the flu,” a condition suspiciously similar to a paralyzing hangover. The nights restaurant owners would call and ask me to collect him because he was too drunk to drive. The serrating silences that cried out to be filled with words only fathers can give their boys.

“‘Nothing’s perfect’? What on earth is that supposed to mean?” I muttered to no one in particular.

Six weeks later my father was dead.

3

Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.

—ELBERT HUBBARD

My mother opened the small ashtray in the door of our black Cadillac DeVille and extinguished her Pall Mall. She was one of the few people I knew who could still make smoking look elegant. Despite thirty-five years of smoking, her long, manicured fingernails were still unstained by the yellow residue of nicotine. Nor did she have that spooky smoker’s hack or a gravelly voice like Joan Rivers. When I told her that smoking was going to catch up to her one day, she held up her Pall Mall and said, “Don’t worry, sweetheart; it’s the ones with the filters that’ll kill you.”

That’s moxie.

My mother snapped the collar on her raincoat and collected herself before facing what would be a long and difficult night. Grief was etched on her face, but she was still a knockout. My friends used to say my mother looked like a gracefully aging movie star from the 1950s. She had bright red hair, wore fashionable but sensible clothes, and as my sister once opined, she was blessed with legs that a twenty-year-old would kill for. She didn’t wear the Lilly Pulitzer floral shorts or bright green skirts with espadrilles so popular in the 1970s. She was all woman, not “one of the girls.”

“Where on earth did all these cars come from?” she asked as we drove up to the front door of the understated red brick exterior of the funeral home.

I peered out the window. “Maybe there’s more than one memorial service here tonight.” This had to be the case. My father didn’t have many friends. I assumed that most of the people who would attend the memorial would be friends of my mother’s.

“More than one memorial service?” she asked. “One would think the funeral home director would have said something to me as a matter of courtesy.” She stuffed her chamois gloves into her purse.

I like to think that if you put Lucille Ball, Grace Kelly, and Margaret Thatcher into a supercollider, my mother would pop out the other end. She could be steely, disarmingly ditzy, effortlessly elegant, or some combination of all three. She could warm a new acquaintance with her graciousness or silence a fool with glacial good manners. The funeral home director had just been designated the latter. The man was in peril.

As it turned out, there was no other memorial service being held at the funeral home. There was, however, a puzzling number of people who had come there to pay their respects to my father whom neither my mother nor I nor any of my three siblings had ever met. You expect four or five strangers to show up to your father’s memorial service, but fifty? They were all men, gathered in tight circles in the reception area, talking in hushed tones, punctuated now and then by muted laughter. They all wore the same uniform. Blue blazers with their initials engraved on gold buttons, Turnbull & Asser shirts, cuffed gray flannels, and expensive English shoes.

My older brother Connor and I stood in the entryway and surveyed the room. Who were these people? If we hadn’t seen the framed photo of my father on the table at the front of the room, we would have concluded that we had accidentally stumbled into the wrong service.

Connor is ten years older than I am. As a boy, I worshipped the ground he walked on. He was hipper than Paul Newman in the movie Cool Hand Luke.

I arrived at a new school in the fourth grade with a Scottish first name American kids had never heard in those days. On my first day I learned that if kids can’t pronounce your name, they give you a new one, like buttface, for example. Once a week, Connor would ask me if I wanted a ride to school on the back of his Norton 750, a coveted British motorcycle. The jaws of my tormentors would go slack when they saw me arrive on the back of that bike with the lipstick-red gas tank and tailpipes that sounded like .50-caliber machine guns. For two minutes a week, I was a ten-year-old member of the Hell’s Angels.

It was Connor who introduced me to music. My grandmother bought him a record player for his nineteenth birthday. It was covered in mustard-colored vinyl and designed to look like a small suitcase. There was a latch on the top that allowed the turntable to fold down. The speakers on the sides could be detached from their hinges so you could strategically place them in the room to optimize your listening experience. It’s easy to get snarky about how archaic this sounds, but if you think you’re going to be hip forever, don’t blink. One day your kids will find your old iPad and use it as a drink coaster.

One afternoon Connor let me into his room, a rare privilege. The two of us sat on the floor, and he played me “Penny Lane” by the Beatles. The piccolo trumpet solo at the end of that song blasted a hole in the wall of my heart through which an unending parade of great artists marched in. By the time I was twelve, I was listening to artists like Bob Dylan, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Band, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and Janis Joplin. They provided the first soundtrack to my childhood. At the time, my friends were listening to the Jackson Five. When they came to my house, I played them Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Lots of them didn’t come back.

“This is crazy,” Connor said. “You don’t think Dad knew all these people from …”

“Who else could they be?” I asked, scanning the crowd.

Connor shook his head. “Amazing.”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Do you think these people knew Dad better than we did?”

“I don’t think anyone really knew Dad,” Connor replied.

I nodded. “Did you see the guys at the door?”

“You mean the ones who look like bodyguards?” Connor said, nodding his head in the direction of two men standing in the foyer with their hands in the “fig leaf” position.

“I wonder who they’re here to watch over,” I said, searching the room for a well-known face. “We may never see these people again. I’m going to mingle.”

I saw a man who looked familiar. I remember my father introducing him to my mom; my fiancée, Anne; and me at the Metropolitan Club in New York City, where my family went for Thanksgiving dinner a few times during my college years. J. P. Morgan founded the Metropolitan Club in 1891, and along with the Knickerbocker Club and the Union Club, it’s a mainstay of old-world society. Years later, I discovered it was also a notorious haunt for heavyweights in the CIA. The club directory reads like a who’s who of people who run the universe. Even God would be placed on the waiting list for membership.

I wedged my way into a tight circle of men standing by the wall of memorial wreaths on easels.

“Hi, I’m Ian, Jack’s son,” I said, extending my hand. “I think we’ve met before.”

He was about fifty, sporting a tie with Yale bulldogs on it and an American flag pin on the lapel of his blue blazer. He hesitated, then smiled. “Perhaps we did. I’m Bill,” he replied. Apparently Bill didn’t want to offer his last name.

“So, Bill,” I said, “how’d you know my dad?”

No one in the circle said a word. A few looked down into their glasses and swirled their ice. Bill scrutinized me carefully. He knew I was being a wise guy.

“We were friends from work,” he said.

I looked around the group. “You’re all stockbrokers?” In the last years of his life, my father had worked at a financial services firm. I think.

“Yes,” another said. The others nodded. Not exactly convincing.

Bill cleared his throat. He knew this twenty-six-year-old kid was about to make an idiot out of himself. My playing cat-and-mouse with a bunch of guys in the intelligence business is like your little sister trying to play nose tackle for the New York Giants. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“They don’t make men like your dad anymore. He was a patriot. We’re going to miss him,” he said.

“A real American,” another man said.

I was surprised by the sudden emergence of a knot in my throat. I took a deep breath.

“Thanks,” I said.

My attempt at being a wise guy had been outgunned by old-fashioned sincerity and graciousness. Bill squeezed my shoulder and walked away. The others melted into other groups.

The room quieted as the priest from St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church stood and began to speak. “Over the past two years, Jack attended Mass nearly every morning. He hated missing the Eucharist. Sometimes the two of us would go to the rectory afterward for coffee and to speak about the authors he was reading, like G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and Fulton Sheen.”

My father attended Mass every morning? He hated to miss the Eucharist? He was reading Chesterton and Lewis?

“Last winter, Jack saw a mentally handicapped boy working at the local gas station who didn’t have a winter coat or gloves,” the priest continued. “The kid was shivering to death. It broke Jack’s heart. So he asked me to deliver a down jacket to the boy with five hundred dollars in cash in one of the pockets. He insisted that it be done anonymously.”

Broke his heart? What heart is he talking about? This wasn’t the father I knew.

The priest told a few more stories about my father, each more inspiring and heartwarming than the one before. The men in the room nodded as though they recognized in these tales the man they knew. But with each anecdote, I grew angrier and angrier. How was it possible that all these strangers knew a side of my father that I didn’t? How is it possible that he was kinder to people he didn’t know than he was to his own children?

I was so lost in my own dark thoughts that I barely heard the priest reminding the group that the funeral would be the following day at 11 a.m. at St Agnes’s. “I would like to conclude with a prayer to St. Jude that became Jack’s favorite. The Lord be with you,” the priest said.

“And also with you,” everyone else responded.

“Let us pray.

“Most holy apostle St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the Church honors and invokes you universally as the patron of hopeless cases, of things almost despaired of. Pray for me, I am so helpless and alone. Make use, I implore you, of that particular privilege given to you, to bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in this great need that I may receive the consolation and help of heaven in all my necessities, tribulations, and sufferings, particularly that I may praise God with you and all the elect forever. I promise, O blessed St. Jude, to be ever mindful of this great favor, to always honor you as my special and powerful patron, and to gratefully encourage devotion to you. Amen.”

“Bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of”? Had my father actually admitted to himself that he was a hopeless case, despairing, and alone?

I knew that in the last year of his life, my father had begun to ask spiritual questions. Several months before he died he had called and asked me to come see him and bring my Bible. I was twenty-five and in full-time youth ministry. With great fear and trembling, I walked him through the Four Spiritual Laws, the only way I knew in those days to introduce someone to Christ.

“But what about Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust?” he asked. “Is Anne Frank burning in hell because she didn’t believe in Jesus?”

“Well, the Bible says—”

He sat up. “And what about Hindus and Buddhists? Are you saying Jesus didn’t let Gandhi into heaven?”

My mouth was so dry my tongue made that telltale clicking sound when I spoke. “I don’t know, Dad,” I said. “I believe that God’s first instinct is mercy. And I believe that Jesus wants everyone to be with him for eternity. But …”

My father’s famous eyebrow popped up, signaling my failure as an apologist. I had done my best, but trying to get my father to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior was like trying to convince Richard Dawkins to say grace at a dinner party.

I was making my way over to the priest to invite him to lunch to talk about where my father’s spiritual journey had led him when my mother touched my arm.

“We need to leave,” she whispered in my ear. “I’m not feeling well.”

I went outside and hailed our car. My father’s driver, Marcus, had been waiting in the parking lot, leaving the car running to keep it warm. In the last years of my father’s life, my mother’s business success had made it possible for my father to have a driver. Marcus pulled up to the front of the funeral home, nearly taking out one of the columns that held up the portico.

My father and Marcus were a study in chaos theory. Cardiovascular disease and poorly regulated diabetes had forced doctors to amputate my dad’s leg below the knee, so he wore a prosthesis and used a cane. Marcus was a seventy-year-old, navigationally challenged African American who adored my father.

One time my father had Marcus drive him to an expensive restaurant for lunch—and asked Marcus to join him. Marcus was hesitant, but my father insisted. After half an hour of being ignored by the waitstaff, my father realized they were being snubbed. He was dining with a man whose unfashionable attire and race were distressing to the rest of the clientele. I never once remember my father expressing interest, much less concern, for the plight of the black man in America, but given his fury, you would have thought he and Dr. King cowrote the “I Have a Dream” speech. He shouted for the manager. He slammed the table with his cane. He told the maître d’ he was going to take off his prosthesis and beat him with it. Terrified customers called for their checks. The stuttering owner apologized to Marcus and my father and gave them a premium bottle of wine on the house. I can see my father expertly tilting the glass toward his face, twirling the wine to funnel the aroma to his nose, while the anxious owner awaited his decision to keep or reject the bottle. Trust me, my father sent it back for something better.

That wasn’t the first time my father had exploded in a five-star restaurant. To him, expensive eateries were potential theaters of war. In the 1950s, my father and mother and a group of friends entered a restaurant in London. At the time, my mother was nine months pregnant with my brother Connor and self-conscious about how she looked. En route to their table, my father overheard a wise guy at another table say, “Man, is that lady knocked up.”

By the time the fight ended and the dust settled, the restaurant was a wreck. The bill to replace the broken furniture, windows, mirrors, and china was three thousand pounds. That kind of money could put a kid through college today.

In the later years of his life, my father couldn’t tear a restaurant apart anymore, but he could still put the fear of God into restaurateurs, even with one leg. I was scared to go through the drive-through at McDonald’s with him.

Behind the wheel, Marcus was like a retired stuntman with dementia. The mayhem they left in their wake entertained my father to no end. With Marcus driving down the interstate at ninety miles per hour, my father would bang the back of the front seat with his cane, yelling, “That’s the spirit, Marcus!” It was like a Quentin Tarantino version of Driving Miss Daisy.

“Marcus, I have to go back in,” my mother said, motioning for the car door. “I left the name cards on the wreaths. I need them to send thank-you notes.”

“I’ll get them,” I said, opening my door before she could get out.

It had started to rain, so I pulled my suit coat over my head and ran back inside. In the room next to where my father’s photo was, there was a wall of floral wreaths. I had read a few of the cards earlier in the evening, but I didn’t recognize many of the names.

“To Jack, my mentor. Phil”

“To the man who taught me all I know. George”

“In memory of an American hero. Roger”

The same two men who had stood guard during the memorial service were standing in front of the wreaths, picking message cards off selected wreaths and putting them in their pockets. I would see those same two men the next day at the funeral service, standing discreetly at the entrance to the church during the funeral Mass.

“You guys mind if I take those? My mother needs them to write thank-you notes,” I said, holding out my hand.

The men glanced at each other and then at me. “Sorry,” one of them said. “We need to hold on to this set,” he said, showing me a small handful of cards.

“You can have these,” the other one said, handing me a stack of what I presumed were the “okay to give to the grieving family” cards.

“Tell your mother we’ll pass along her thanks to everyone else,” he added.

I stood still and watched as the men went back to removing the cards. It’s remarkable what some people do for a living. Where does one apply for these positions?

“Where are the rest of the cards?” my mother asked, looking at the short stack in my hand as I settled back into the seat next to her.

“A couple of guys were collecting them,” I said.

“And?” she said.

“They wouldn’t give all of them to me,” I said.

“Why on earth wouldn’t—?” My mother stopped mid sentence. She turned away and stared out her window. Silver droplets of water were streaming down the tinted glass of her window. I wondered if she was thinking about the strange journey of being married to a man who had worked on and off for the CIA for thirty-five years.

She sighed. “Of course.”

It’s been said that Homer’s Odyssey stands at the headwaters of Western literature. This 2,500-year-old epic poem tells the story of young Telemachus, who leaves home on a perilous journey over the “wine-dark sea” in search of his missing father, Odysseus. What does it say about us that our literary canon begins with a story of a kid looking for his dad? I’m not an expert in ancient Greek literature, but I know what it’s like to be Telemachus. Maybe this is what moves me about the picture of me as a toddler in the rowboat at the beach. It is a visual record of the beginning of my lifelong search for my father. Twenty-three years after his death, I am still the boy in the boat, scanning the horizon for him. Many of my achievements have been a way of calling to him over the roar of an ocean that only widens with the years. I am embarrassed to admit that the question I call across the waves never changes: “Did you love me?”

It would be nice if prayer or counseling could resolve this question or lessen its intensity. They haven’t. It would also be helpful if I could keep the effect of it contained to one or two areas of my life. I can’t. The question won’t rest until it’s answered, which—unless my father rises from the dead and tells me himself—isn’t likely to happen. So I’ve come up with alternative strategies to fill the empty space in my heart where my father’s love is supposed to be found.

I carry an invisible box of jerseys with me that say “Team Ian” on the front. My goal is to convince everyone I meet to become my fan and prove it by putting on my “Team Ian” jersey. If they do, then for at least ten minutes I feel like I’ve won their approval and love. If I have a run of people who don’t put it on, I can fall into a rut I have visited so often I should have it decorated and furnished. For me, life is like one long job interview in which I’m trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me. The routine is exhausting, mostly for everyone else.

I confessed this nutty practice to my spiritual director. He smiled, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “I never trust a man without a limp.”

God bless him.

4

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

—G. K. CHESTERTON

My boyhood is autumn. The sky is snap cool and azurite blue. My boyhood is elm-lined streets. Every house was white with dark green shutters, American flags affixed to wooden poles waving from their porches. It is riding my ten-speed Raleigh down Ridge Street so fast that it left small tornadoes of dried leaves twisting in the wake of my rear tire. My boyhood is Saturday mornings, standing across the street from the barbershop, spying fathers playfully mussing their sons’ hair to get the last remnants of stubble off their heads. Most of all, my childhood is Irish Catholic.

It’s difficult to explain to the uninitiated the experience of going to Catholic grammar school in the 1960s. A veteran asked to describe storming the beaches of Normandy probably faces a similar dilemma. For a minute or two, you forage for words; you stammer and whiffle; finally, you shrug and say, “You had to be there.” Whenever I meet someone and we discover that we both went to parochial school, we shake hands firmly, nod, and lock eyes for two seconds longer than we would with normal people. We survived the Big House.

When I see St. Mary’s Grammar School in my mind, it’s always September. I can’t recall the copper gutters dripping with winter ice or the front lawn of the rectory dappled with April crocuses, as they must often have been. It’s always September, the air hazy blue from the smoke coming from the neighbors’ humpy pyres of grass clippings and dead leaves burning in their backyards. There were two maples on the front lawn of the three-story, red-brick schoolhouse. The lower branches of those trees were never pruned back. They whisked the slate roof with the sound of a great broom that could be heard through the windows of our tiny school library, each pane of glass so old that it swirled with age. It was there that I often sat cross-legged in the corner and read Roald Dahl books.

Every morning starting in first grade, my governess, whom my family called Nanny, would walk me to school, holding my hand as we crossed Greenwich Avenue. I loved Nanny’s hands. Sometimes sitting at the kitchen table, drinking afternoon tea, she would let me turn her hand over to examine her palm, tracing the lines that crisscrossed it with my index finger, as if I were a boy swami pulled from the pages of a Rudyard Kipling poem. The fleshy part just below the thumb was ruby red, smooth, and warm. Nanny’s hands were sanctuaries, and I was loath to let them go when we arrived at school.

When the great church bell rang at 8 a.m., the principal, Sister Rita Marie, would come out and stand on the front steps to greet mothers and children. With every passing year her face crumpled deeper and deeper into the shadowy recesses of her black veil held in place by a white band. My brother told me Sister Rita Marie was so old that she had been a personal friend of the Virgin Mary. It made me stop and think, How could the Virgin Mary be such a poor judge of character?

As Nanny and I walked up the sidewalk to the front door of the school, Sister Rita Marie looked down her aquiline nose through her frameless round glasses and asked Nanny, “How are things with the Cron family, Nanny?” Everyone called Nanny “Nanny.”

There was something in the way Sister Rita Marie sniffed after she asked the question that made my stomach knot. One school of psychology says that children under the age of twelve are only capable of concrete thinking; they can’t discern what’s truly happening behind an adult’s exterior. That’s true for kids under the age of twelve who don’t grow up with alcoholics. At seven years old, I could look in adults’ eyes and know immediately if they were fraud or friend. I could tell whether they were hiding some long-held sadness, whether they were lying or telling the truth, and whether they themselves could tell the difference. Maybe it was the way they kept one hand behind their back, or the way they evasively looked at their watch before answering a question. My antennae were so exquisitely attuned to atmospherics that I could walk into a roomful of adults and before my second foot crossed the threshold I knew instantly what I would need to do and say to get out of there in one piece. This isn’t talent; it’s a merciful charism God gives to kids who grow up with alcoholics. Without it, you’re an accident looking for an intersection.

All this to say I may have been seven years old, but I knew Sister Rita Marie was fishing around for smut about our family. On Saturdays when I went downtown with my mother to do errands, I would see her in front of Finch’s Drug Store, whispering to tight circles of churchwomen. They were a parliament of black owls clutching their handbags, shaking their heads, and clucking their tongues in mock horror at the latest news of some poor family’s misfortune.

Greenwich was a small town in those days. It was probably the most affluent community in America, though we would have thought it tasteless to brag about this sort of thing. Greenwich is where you moved when you’d finally “made it” or if you had inherited a fortune from someone who had “made it” but then croaked. It is home to a staggering concentration of power and influence. You didn’t blink when you met Wall Street barons or people whose family names would be recognized almost anywhere in the world. It was home to America’s aristocracy.

Greenwich was a community where old money and pedigree were valued. The nouveau riche were held in contempt. When I was ten years old, I remember my mother and me pulling up to a light when a man in a Ferrari convertible, smoking a big cigar, pulled up next to us. The car was pristine, as if he had just driven it off the lot. Looking very pleased with himself, he glanced around to see if other motorists or passersby were taking notice of him.

“Mom, look at that cool car,” I said, gawking.

My mother looked over and quickly returned her attention to the view out of the front windshield. “Don’t look at that man,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He’s being ostentatious,’” she replied.

“What’s wrong with that?” I said, still gaping at the car.

“He’s uncouth. Our people don’t do that sort of thing,” she said.

This was a strange remark, given that it was hard to figure out who “our people” were, considering our circumstances at the time. We were seven people living in a three-bedroom apartment in the least desirable apartment building in town. We had a professionally schooled, uniformed English nanny; an unemployed father with a spiraling drinking problem who wandered around town in handmade Savile Row suits, bragging about having discovered the actor Roger Moore; and a beautiful mother who, wherever she went, held her head high, revealing nothing of the onerous burden of trying to hold all of us together against an avalanche of problems. No doubt word had gotten out that our apartment was bulging with expensive European antiques that until a few months earlier had filled our large Tudor home on Park Drive South overlooking the golf course of Westchester Country Club.

We were low-hanging fruit for gossips.

“The family is fine, thank you, Sister,” Nanny answered, kissing me on the top of the head, then gently directing me toward the door.

“I say prayers for the Cron family every night,” Sister Rita Marie said, nodding her head and sniffing again.

Nanny smiled. “Thank you, Sister.” As she started back down the walkway, she said in a muted voice, “I’ll pray for you as well, Sister.” She did not look back to relish the sight of Sr. Rita’s face puckering with contempt.

St. Mary’s Grammar School was a parallel universe. In my second-grade classroom there were posters taped to the wall above the blackboard depicting people in different postmortem states. There was one picture of people writhing in the flames of hell, arms outstretched toward heaven, mouths agape like open graves, pleading to be forgiven and offered another chance. There were others of babies who’d died before they were baptized. They were sucking their thumbs and floating out in space somewhere. This was limbo. Then there was an illustration of purgatory, where ghostlike people shuffled around, staring at the ground like depressed patients in the lockdown ward of a psychiatric hospital. They were waiting for their families and friends to say enough prayers and Masses on their behalf so that God would finally grant them entrance into paradise.

In the picture of heaven, Jesus was a Caucasian man with shoulder-length, reddish-brown hair and unnaturally blue eyes. His arms were outstretched in a gesture of inclusion and loving welcome. He had a strawberry-red heart, from which yellow beams of light emanated in every direction. It glowed so brightly, aflame with kindness and compassion, that it was visible through his flowing white garment. White boys and girls knelt before him, heads bowed, hands folded perfectly with thumbs at their sternums, wearing their Catholic school uniforms—girls in plaid skirts and boys with white shirts and blue clip-on ties—worshipping the Good Shepherd Jesus.

Every morning we came into our classroom, placed our books into the open slot in our desks, and looked up to see something like a montage out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting: people melting in hell, infants floating in the ether, catatonics waiting to get prayed into heaven, and an all-loving Jesus who looked more like Justin Bieber than Yasser Arafat. This mixed message about God and the afterlife had the same effect on a child’s mind as putting out a cigarette in his cerebral cortex.

My teacher was Sister Margaret. Every day she warned us that the communists were going to land on the shore of Greenwich’s beaches and storm our school. It didn’t occur to us to ask Sister Margaret why the Russians would consider seventeen Catholic second graders high-value targets.

“What will you do when the communists break down the door?” she would ask.

What are eight-year-olds to make of this kind of query?

“You will leap from the windows to your death, that’s what you’ll do!” she would say, looking out the second-story windows. “Otherwise they will force you to renounce your faith, and you will lose your salvation.” I knew that Sister Margaret yearned for this to happen, so she could show those godless Reds who they were dealing with. It’s too bad Sister Margaret is gone. There isn’t a place on earth Bin Laden could hide from her. She’d kick his crying keister across those mountains in Pakistan and leave him outside Guantánamo, babbling Hail Marys in the fetal position.

Even though my education was something out of the Middle Ages, I loved the Catholic Mass. Humans are the only creatures that require pageantry and ceremony in their social diet. (Ever met a squirrel that wanted a wedding?) When it came to pomp and parade, the priests at St. Mary’s were pros. Their homilies were lethally uninteresting, but they brought their A-game when it came to bringing the presence of God into the house. This was particularly true when it came to the big rites of passage, like the Holy First Communion Mass. This is the day on which the priest placed the literal body of Jesus on your tongue, and you drink the Savior’s blood for the first time. It’s the liturgical equivalent of becoming a “made man” in the Mafia.

In the months before the big day, Sister Margaret spent hours helping us memorize the answers to the “Questions for First Communion” from the Baltimore Catechism. She warned us that during Mass, Bishop Dalrymple could randomly pick a kid to test him on one of the questions from the Catechism as a condition for giving him his First Communion. She said that if we didn’t answer correctly, he would send us to the back of the processional line, and we would have to do it over again. I was an anxious kid whose imagination was fertile soil for this sort of visual to take root. It could keep me awake for days. What if Bishop Dalrymple asked me a question and I choked? What if I couldn’t come up with one right answer and got sent to the back of the line over and over until the only two people left in front of the congregation were the bishop and me? I could see my classmates, the taste of Jesus fresh in their mouths, watching while I failed to answer even one question correctly for the bishop. Hundreds of parishioners and guests would be looking at their watches and rolling their eyes, men irritably loosening their ties and yanking at their starched collars. I could hear my siblings’ and out-of-town cousins’ throaty groans after my every wrong response. I envisioned someone’s uncle finally standing up and yelling, “For the love of God, just get one right so we can go home for supper!”

I wouldn’t wish my excitable imagination on anyone.

In addition to the Baltimore Catechism drills, Sister Margaret took us to the church and walked us through the choreography of the First Communion Mass until we could have done it in our sleep. Mistakes would not be tolerated. You would think we were rehearsing for a complicated bank heist.

My classmates whined about Sister Margaret’s insistence that we learn our parts flawlessly, but something in me understood why it mattered so much to her. It was less about perfectionism than it was about devotion. I secretly shared that feeling with her. I never told anyone how fascinated I was by the Eucharist. Even I thought my fascination was a little peculiar, since none of my friends seemed all that interested. But I had always been envious of my family at Mass, when they left me in the pew and walked down the nave to receive the Host and wine from the priests. I would stand on the kneeler to see above the heads of the people sitting in front of me, so I could watch my family. Though I could not possibly have expressed it this way, the harmonic frequency that rings at the center of the heart of God made something vibrate in mine while all this was going on. Something numinous was happening, and I felt pulled toward it, like metal filings to a magnet.

The First Communion Mass was to be held in the small chapel, downstairs from the main sanctuary. The Roman catacombs were more cheerful. But behind the altar there was a brightly illuminated mosaic made with gold-and robin’s-egg-colored tiles of the Virgin Mary looking up at Jesus on the cross. She was mesmerizing. We were instructed to fix our eyes on the face of the Virgin as we processed, not as an act of reverence but rather to keep all our heads on an even plane. We were commanded to take small, dignified steps; we were shown how to fold our hands and where to position them so we were perfectly uniform as we came down the aisle.

In the Catholic Church of my youth, only the priest could touch the consecrated Host, so it had to be placed on your extended tongue. Sister Margaret demonstrated to us the proper amount of tongue to present to the bishop so that we neither extended it too far, making us look like ornamental Chinese dragons, or offered him so little tongue surface that the Host risked not sticking to our saliva and fell off. Dropping Jesus was really, really bad. Dickie Carter told us that an entire First Communion procession in the Ukraine instantly dropped dead when one little boy let a Host fall off his tongue onto the floor of the nave. Apparently one’s First Holy Communion could be considered a success if no one got hurt.

On the morning of my First Communion, my mother announced that we were going to the Homestead Inn for breakfast. We were speechless. The Homestead was the most expensive restaurant in Greenwich, and that was saying something. We were so financially strapped in those days that we had to stuff newspaper inside our disintegrating penny loafers to keep out water and snow. Earlier, I described our economic situation as a J-curve. In England, and for a year or two after moving back to the States, we had lived at the top of the J, the height of financial and social success. Then my father’s drinking and his apparent fondness for blowing himself up plunged us into the trough of the J.

We were now living somewhere under the trough of the J.

When we returned from England, my father had gone to work for NBC. The final chapter in our demise came when he and the president of the network had a world-class argument. My father had told him that a TV show they had produced was going to be a bust, but the president disagreed and let the show air. My father was right. But after the show was yanked from the schedule, the president called my father into his office and told him that NBC needed someone to take the fall for the show’s failure, and my dad was the designated patsy. Not to worry, the president told my father—he wouldn’t cut his salary, and he would give him an even better deal in a year, if he would go under the bus quietly. My father charged out of the president’s office and paraded the hallways of NBC, giving him specific instruction regarding what he could do to himself.

Publicly giving advice of this kind to the president of the National Broadcasting Company did not enhance my father’s career. Even so, Bobby Sarnoff, the son of the founder of NBC, loved my father and asked him to work directly for him, but my father thought the assignment was beneath him. So he went under the bus after all, only permanently. Afterward, his drinking became exponentially worse. He wouldn’t work steadily again for twelve years—not in the business world, anyway. I wonder why he didn’t think that was beneath him.

How on earth can we afford a meal at the Homestead? we kids wondered. Had my mother forgotten that we were forbidden to eat anything for at least one hour before receiving the Eucharist? What if the bishop smelled bacon and eggs on my breath? But we had no choice. Once my mother set her face like flint toward Jerusalem, there was no stopping her.

A friend of my mother’s who knew that our family couldn’t afford a car had given us her old Hillman Imp, a two-door British car. The model name accurately describes its interior. The backseat of the Imp was designed to hold two svelte Europeans, not four irritable kids and a diminutive English governess. We had never tried to get the whole family into the Imp before, but my mother was determined it would be done. The five of us tried wedging ourselves into the backseat in multiple configurations until we hit on one that worked. This took ten minutes. I sat on my brother Philip’s lap on the starboard side; my sister, Caroline, sat in the middle; and Nanny perched on my brother Connor’s lap on the port side, her face pressed against the fogged rear window. God bless Nanny; she was a good sport. Most sixty-year-old British women would rather die than endure this kind of indignity.

Once we were all in the car, we sat outside our apartment building, waiting for my father to emerge. My father scored low on the compassion index. Even if he knew there were six people crushed into a tiny car, waiting for him, on a muggy spring morning, it would not hurry him along. His appearance was more important than our diminishing ability to breathe. We waited. We waited longer. We waited until our eyes began to roll back in our heads from heatstroke, and my mother leaned on the horn until the battery nearly died.

When the front door finally opened, my fully preened father appeared wearing a freshly pressed suit with a carnation in the buttonhole and a starched white shirt with a bow tie. Despite the warm weather, he wore a stone-colored Aquascutum trench coat with the belt dangling around his midsection. The tip of his upturned mustache was waxed to a point so sharp it could poke your eye out. He was carrying brown-leather driving gloves and wearing a black bowler. Yes, a black bowler. He looked like Winston Churchill, only more.

I was fast learning that incredulity was a luxury reserved for those whose lives were rarely interrupted by the abnormal. I was a young boy, but I had come to expect anything. I feel sorry for my brothers now. They were much older and knew my father’s eccentric appearance and behavior would be fodder for taunts come Monday morning at school.

This, however, was nothing compared to what was to come.

It took my father a long time to situate himself in the front seat of the car, a laborious task involving great heaves and harrumphs. Only a few years earlier, he had been driving a silver twelve-cylinder Jaguar E-Type. Now he was getting into a vehicle that was only slightly larger than the Apollo space capsule.

The Imp was outfitted with a forty-two-horsepower engine that accelerated from zero to sixty in two days. This is a matter of historical record. When bearing the weight of four children aged eight to seventeen, one governess, a mother, and a Winston Churchill impersonator, the car’s engine was sorely tested. On the one-mile drive to the Homestead, it whined. Nay, it screamed. Blue smoke spewed from the tailpipe. Despite a courageous effort on its part, the car could barely travel more than twenty miles per hour.

I would like to believe that the friend who gave my mother the car was kind, truly unaware of its condition. Yes, there were small rust bubbles visible on the outer body, but could she have known that the frame and undercarriage of the car were riddled with stage-four vehicular cancer? For her soul’s sake, I pray not.

There was one steep hill between the restaurant and us. I don’t think my mother had factored into her pre-trip flight check the kind of stress that the pitch of this hill and the weight of seven people might place on the engine, or the effect it might have on the frame of the car. We were silent. Without speaking a word, we all knew that this hill was a make-or-break proposition. If we made it to the top, we could breathe a sigh of relief, perhaps even wave flags and sing a chorus of “Rule Britannia,” since from there it was downhill to the Homestead Inn and a heavenly breakfast.

We were so preoccupied with the car’s ability to maintain forward motion, however, that we did not consider alternative threats—like the loss of structural integrity, for example. Just past the top of the hill, the seven of us were a nanosecond away from cheering when there was a loud thump, followed by my father yelling, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

This calling on the members of the Holy Family for assistance in emergencies has a long and venerable history among Catholics in extremis. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that it supplies a single ounce of protection or divine aid to the petitioner, but we believed there was no harm in trying.

It took some time for those of us in economy class to determine what had happened in the forward cabin, but it soon became clear. My father’s seat had fallen through the rusted bottom of the car. It was dragging along the pavement, shooting sparks up into the wells of the backseat, threatening to light our socks on fire. My father’s rear end was inches from the ground. The collapse of the seat had shot his legs upward, so that his kneecaps now nearly touched his face, and he was holding down his black bowler lest it be damaged. He looked like a fat kid shoved butt first into a wastepaper basket.

“Pull over, Anne! Pull over!” he demanded.

My mother faced a tactical decision. We could (a) admit defeat and pull over, (b) try to make it to the Homestead Inn, or (c) make a right at the bottom of the hill and head straight to the church and my First Communion Mass. My mother did not readily admit defeat. The Hillman had served us faithfully in our time of need, and this was clearly its last mission. It deserved a noble end.

“Jack, hold on,” she said to my father.

“Anne, stop this car immediately!” he said, trying to grab the dashboard.

At the bottom of the hill, my mother careened right. An eighth of a mile later, we lurched up in front of the church, more or less in one piece.

Mom was our Captain Sullenberger.

The seven of us, sweaty and shaken, slowly began peeling ourselves out of the smoking vehicle. It took my brothers several attempts to pull my father out of the car as bemused parishioners gawked and snickered.

Every time I thought my childhood had hit its weirdest ebb, a crazy experience like this one would come along to make me wonder if I knew what an ebb was.

The group of first graders receiving the Eucharist for the first time gathered in the narthex of the church.

“Remember,” Dickie Carter whispered as we were being lined up, “don’t let the Eucharist fall off your tongue or we’re all dead.” He dragged his index finger across his throat. This aide-mémoire did not help soothe an already quaking queue of eight-year-olds.

The procession commenced when the organ music began and the soloist started singing “Ave Maria” with a vibrato that could have been picked up on police radar. First down the nave came the thurifers carrying brass thuribles on chains. They swung them forward and back, smoke from smoldering myrrh incense pouring from their vents. After them came ministers with lighted candles, between them an acolyte bearing a cross with the broken body of Jesus still on it. Behind them was the lector, who carried the book of the gospels high above his head. Father Durcan and the other parish priests and deacons came next, and then us in our school uniforms and white dresses. Bishop Dalrymple followed in his blue and silver–embroidered cope and miter, carrying his crosier—an ornate staff hooked at one end to look like a shepherd’s crook—turning side to side, repeatedly making the sign of the cross over the congregation. As he passed, men and women—young and old, rich and poor—bowed as they received the blessing.

I remember nothing of the Mass itself, neither the prayers nor the homily. I only remember the picture of the Virgin Mary draped in her blue robe, emblazoned with gold stars. As we processed, her beatific smile and warm, brown eyes made my throat tighten, and I began to cry—I wasn’t sure why. I tried to wipe away my tears.

Dickie looked around us as if afraid my crying could somehow get him into trouble. “Why are you bawling?” he whispered.

“Shut up,” I said, wiping my runny nose with my sleeve.

The closer we came to the altar and bishop, the more difficult it became for me not to completely lose it. I looked at the aisle where my family was sitting and saw that my father was missing. I wasn’t surprised. The magician David Copperfield couldn’t compete with my dad when it came to putting on disappearing acts.

“I’m just going to pop in here to buy a pack of cigarettes. I won’t be a minute,” he would say to us, and then disappear into a restaurant that, lo and behold, had a bar. Today he had probably told my mother he was going to the bathroom and would be right back, slipped out—and wouldn’t surface for hours.

It wasn’t until I was within four or five kids of the bishop that I could really see his face. He was corpulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing like Kip Merriweather, a kid in our class who had asthma. The bishop looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game. As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing. I suspect he knew that I was one of those strange kids who “got it”—who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he’d been one of those weird kids too. He placed the Host on my tongue and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.

I have spent forty years living the result of that moment.

I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn’t find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn’t be found until spring, when the snow melted.

That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and enduring. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point or how often I would drift onto the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?

A few weeks after that first Communion, I came home from school and my mother told me that my father had gone on a last-minute business trip to Northern Ireland. This was a surprise, since I didn’t know my dad was employed. As I look back, it’s hard to believe he was employable.

He didn’t come home for six months.

I learned years later that this was the year the “troubles” broke out between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Nationalists. I’m certain he was there on assignment for the CIA.

This wasn’t the first time my father left on a trip with only a few hours’ notice. My mother told me that when news broke of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, my father rushed home from the office, threw a bunch of clothes in a bag, and raced off without explanation to Austria with a close family friend who worked at the American Embassy. My mother isn’t sure but she thinks that same friend was killed in Mexico several years later.

I wonder sometimes if my father was one of those men who couldn’t be domesticated, one of those who couldn’t return to civilian life after the war to become a reliable husband and father who mowed the lawn and changed the oil on his car every three thousand miles.

I see him, instead, like a tiger at the zoo, always pacing the cage. Perhaps he missed the rush that comes with danger and spycraft so much that he could rein in his drinking for a few months, albeit with white knuckles, if it meant getting a temporary leave from a beige suburban existence.

I have a postcard he sent me from Belfast on which he wrote, “Do you want to know a secret? I love you.”

I would have given anything for my father’s love to not be a secret. Anything. A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.

A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn’t die without having tried to make it better. Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see admiration and delight. Frederick Buechner once wrote, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”

To see delight in your father’s eyes is to see his belief that the party of life would be a bust without you. He may not know it, but from the moment he first glimpses his baby boy’s head crowning in the delivery room, a father makes a vow that with stumbling determination, he will try to get a few of these things right. Boys without fathers, or boys with fathers who for whatever reason keep their love undisclosed, begin life without a center of gravity. They float like astronauts in space, hoping to find ballast and a patch of earth where they can plant their feet and make a life. Many of us who live without these gifts that only a father can bestow go through life banging from guardrail to guardrail, trying to determine why our fathers kept their love nameless, as if ashamed.

We know each other when we meet.

5

“Keep Calm and Carry On”

—WORLD WAR II PROPAGANDA POSTER

We ran to the Underground when the Blitz began,” Nanny said, sitting on the edge of my bed.

My eyes widened. “Did you hear air-raid sirens first?”

“Oh yes,” she said, nodding. “Hundreds of them, blaring across London. We had to cover our ears when we ran.”

There was something about the sound of air-raid sirens that I loved. During the worst years of the Cold War, they would test the one on the roof of the Greenwich fire station once a week. I thought it sounded cool. Adults didn’t. If they were holding your hand, they’d squeeze a little tighter or pull you to their sides when they heard it start to whine. We lived just outside New York City, probably one of the first places they’d drop a bomb.

“The bombs exploding above us were awful,” Nanny went on. “We prayed or sang school songs so we wouldn’t think about it.”

I sat on my pillow, back to the wall, hugging my knees to my chest. Listening to Nanny tell stories about living through World War II in London was my favorite bedtime ritual. Most children go to bed hearing someone read them Winnie the Pooh or The Adventures of Peter Cottontail. Instead, I heard firsthand accounts of the vagaries of war.

Nanny was our governess, a holdover from our days living in London when my father worked for Screen Gems. When the family moved back to the United States, my mother brought Nanny with us; it turned out to be a decision that saved our lives. Her name was Ethelreda Baker, and she originally hailed from Lytham St. Annes, a small town in Lancashire.

“Once, the Jerries dropped a bomb and it landed in our backyard, but it didn’t go off,” Nanny said. “We found it in the morning when we came home from the air-raid shelter.”

“What did you do, Nanny?” I whispered, leaning forward.

“We called the Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal Unit. After a few days they came and took it away,” she said, running her hands down her thighs to smooth out the wrinkles on her dress.

This amazed me: people going about their daily lives with a bomb sticking out of the ground in their backyard like a weaponized birdbath. I assumed that if Nanny could get through the Blitz in one piece, then she could get us through our childhoods. It just wouldn’t be as easy.

In early spring, when I hear the whistling of robins in the maple tree in front of my home, I think of Nanny. She was thin boned like a small bird, maybe 5‘2”. Her upper back was slightly rounded, which I used to think was caused by hunching over and squinting at the ground to avoid tripping on furniture. When Nanny was a child, her eyes had been badly burned during an eye exam when the ophthalmologist accidentally put the wrong drops in them. One of her eyelids drooped so low it left only a small slit for her to peer through. Her other eye was glazed and rheumy, and it wandered willy-nilly around her eye socket. I felt a twinge of nostalgia for her when I saw Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter movies. She wore powder-blue cat-eye glasses with fake diamonds on the frames. The lenses were so thick and the prescription so powerful that when you put them on, they made you feel dizzy enough to throw up. To make up for Nanny being legally blind without glasses, God gave her an exquisite radar system. She had a preternatural ability for showing up during crimes in progress. Once the offender was in custody, she would bring out the dreaded hairbrush that was always mysteriously nearby and beat your butt like it was a rug that needed dusting. Running was pointless. She could throw that hairbrush with the accuracy of a knife thrower. To this day I only use a comb.

When I was nine years old, Father Durcan told my mother that I would begin serving as an altar boy at the Friday 6 a.m. Mass the following week. To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic. I performed this duty as my brothers had before me, as well as countless generations of semiconscious Catholic boys before them. One might ask what gave this priest the right to tell a young boy and his parent that this was something they had to do. In the world of my youth, God himself gave the priest that right, and unless you or your parents wanted to spend innumerable eons in purgatory, you complied.

“Ian, it’s time to get up,” I heard Nanny whisper. She turned on the light on my bedside table.

She didn’t have to ask me more than once. This was the big morning. It was my first day on duty at the early Mass.

To allow time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and arrive at the church by 5:45, Nanny woke me at 5:15. While I brushed my teeth and wet and combed my hair, she laid out my school uniform on the bed and then padded off to the kitchen to make my breakfast. Nanny was no Jamie Oliver. Her cooking was old-school English, which meant you had to wear a Hazmat suit while you ate it. British cuisine is an oxymoron. If the Brits had lobbed their blood sausages and gelatinous white gravy at the Nazis, World War II would have been over in two weeks. Nanny did, however, have one ingredient in the larder that could resurrect even the most unpalatable dish: butter. For Nanny, butter wasn’t a condiment; it was a food group. Her Brussels sprouts performed backstrokes in it. Melting squares of it could be found lurking in the substrata of one’s porridge. Even our dry cereal wasn’t safe from the reach of these saturated fat pads. For Nanny, butter could cure anything, maybe even advanced dementia. Despite her challenges in the kitchen, I relished the poached eggs she served me most mornings, placed on butter-soaked white toast and scored into twelve tiny squares.

Nine-year-olds tend to be trusting souls. They believe that their caretakers are incapable of doing anything that is not in their best interest. When the cosmic forces that hold our planet on its course go awry, however, the more vulnerable at the back of the herd get picked off first. On the morning of my inaugural Mass, Nanny failed to put on her glasses while looking at her alarm clock, and instead of waking me at 5:15, she roused me at 3:15. I suspected that something was amiss right away. It was darker outside than it should have been. I peered out the kitchen window and did not see the line of cars filled with bleary-eyed commuters driving to the station to catch the 5:52 to Manhattan that my mother had assured me would be on the roads when I walked to the church. Even so, it did not occur to me to question Nanny on the matter. She was a half century older than I, she had attended professional nanny school, and she was packing a hairbrush. At 3:30 a.m., Nanny helped me put on my winter coat and rubbers—an unfortunate word English people use for galoshes. I innocently used it once at a new school. Once. Then she sent me into the dark of night with instructions to do as Father Durcan said and serve our Lord Jesus and the Holy Family with a gladsome heart.

I made the short walk to the church under a sky lit by an incandescent winter moon. The houses on our street were dark, and I could see my breath in the sharp air of that December morning. It was a scene from the thirteenth century. I was the innocent lamb trudging across markless snowfields to an uncertain fate in the Children’s Crusades. I paint this picture in retrospect. In reality, I was just really freaking cold.

Architecturally, St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church looked Norman in design. The two square towers that abutted either side of the sanctuary were crowned with crenellated rooflines and stood majestically on Greenwich Avenue. It looked like a castle that had fallen from the sky onto one of the most expensive and desirable stretches of commercial real estate in the world. Directly to the left of the church was my grammar school. In the 1980s, that building would be torn down and the property sold to a developer. Today, a Victoria’s Secret store occupies the space where my first-grade classroom was once located. I should be morally outraged, but the irony is too sweet.

When I arrived outside the church, I stopped, confused and uneasy. Father Durcan had promised me he would be readying the altar when I got there. The medieval-looking chandeliers that hung from the ceiling on great black chains should have been illuminating the stained-glass windows. No such luck. The place was darker than the devil’s heart.

Now I faced a difficult decision: should I remain outside in the freezing cold or go inside the dark church and wait for Father Durcan, who had probably overslept and would no doubt appear in a few minutes? I looked up and down Greenwich Avenue, but there was not a light to be found. This is what Gandalf and the Fellowship of the Ring must have felt when they stood at the gates of the Mines of Moria. With great trepidation, I entered.

Unlike those mistrusting and impious Protestants, we Catholics prided ourselves on never locking our churches. It took the whole weight of my slight frame to pull open the great honey-colored oak doors that led into the narthex. I stood for a few moments in the vestibule, wondering whether I should walk through the next set of doors and enter the main sanctuary. The wind whistling through the gap in the front doors convinced me that all the way in was better than halfway out.

The main sanctuary at St. Mary’s was majestic. It had veined marble floors and fluted, marble columns. The ceiling was probably forty feet at its peak. Just beneath the ceiling on a short hanging wall were yellowed individual portraits of saints, each framed by round moldings. They peered down on the faithful with stern expressions, as if to say, “So, what’s your excuse?”

The only light came from the racks of votive candles set in burgundy glass located against the rear and side walls of the sanctuary. These weren’t the newfangled votives they use today, where you put a quarter in the collection box, say your prayer of intercession, and hit a button that lights a fake electric candle. Does anyone really think God takes that sort of tepid prayer seriously? No, these were the days when worries about fire safety were trumped by concern about offending the Almighty. We used real candles that flickered, casting dancing shadows on the walls and ceilings.

Standing in a large sanctuary illuminated only by candles, listening to the whistling wind at my back, began to have its way with me. My heart beat like a tiny hammer against my ribs. I was walking into the heart of the mysterium tremendum.

“Father Durcan, are you here?” I squeaked.

My question was answered by a long yawning sound, followed by a hiss, and then a metallic bang that went off like a gunshot. I knew in my mind that it came from air trapped in the warming radiator pipes, but it was too late. I was undone.

I am told that roughly five thousand children die every year from simply being startled. It’s called the Baskerville effect. Why I didn’t at that moment join that statistical sample of children who perish from sudden alarm is a grace. My entire body became awash in adrenaline, the kind that makes you feel like your interior is being mentholated. I dropped the cassock and surplice I had been carrying over my shoulder in the plastic dry-cleaning bag and made a run for the altar, repeating the name of Jesus to ward off the ghosts that lurked in the shadows. It didn’t matter to me that Father Durcan would be horrified if he found me hiding under the altar, desecrating the table upon which Jesus was sacrificed during the Mass. This was a matter of life or death. I curled into a ball and prayed that I would be spared.

At 4 a.m. Nanny realized her error.

“Mummy, come quickly—something terrible has happened!” she said, banging on my parents’ bedroom door.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” my father moaned, turning over to try to go back to sleep.

My mother, accustomed to Nanny’s excitability, came out to calm her down. But once the facts were known, she grabbed the first jacket she could find—a mink waistcoat—and ran out the door. A true Irish Catholic mother is rarely put off her game by news that one of her sons might be in danger. After surviving the wild exploits of my older brothers, she was inured to mother-fear. Still, a nine-year-old wandering the streets in the middle of a cold winter night was reason to take swift action.

I had already prayed well over a thousand Hail Marys when I heard the two doors leading into the sanctuary open, then swing back and forth just like the ones in saloons in Westerns. I felt certain my savior had come. Who else could it be other than Father Durcan? Peering out from under the altar frontal, however, I was stupefied. In those days, women wore full-length nightgowns. My mother’s was made of gauzy, ice-blue chiffon; it hung all the way to the floor and was trimmed with lace along the sweeping hemline. From seventy-five feet away, in the inky penumbra of the dim sanctuary, I saw not my mother but the archangel Gabriel, or perhaps even the Holy Ghost himself, attired in heavenly robes and floating side to side in the wavering candlelight at the back of the church. Then I heard the gliding figure whispering in pressured tones, “Ian, where are you?”

Even if I had wanted to answer, I could not. Even a grown man like Isaiah had fallen and trembled with fear in the presence of the Lord. I, too, was sore afraid. The indistinct figure began making its way down the center aisle toward the altar, pausing to look in every pew. With its every step my small bladder sent a flood warning to my pants.

The hovering specter stopped halfway down the nave. “If you’re hiding from me, I’ll kill you!” it said.

The religious imagination of a nine-year-old Catholic boy is an awesome thing. I shrieked as no child has ever shrieked before or since. It was a cry to wake the dead.

I leaped from under the altar and threw myself at the feet of the Virgin Mary, who stood enshrined in marble at the side of the altar and whose beatific smile had so often comforted me during the Mass. I vowed to her that I would join St. Damian as a missionary to the lepers on the island of Molokai if she would protect me.

And the Holy Mother answered.

The lights came on. There stood Father Durcan, mouth agape, staring at my bleary-eyed mother in her mink waistcoat and ice-blue chiffon nightgown, red hair run riot on her head, without the benefits of makeup, frozen in the center aisle like a thief caught in the act by an equally surprised home owner, and me quaking at the feet of the Virgin. We were a Shakespearean tableau gone awry.

I was forgiven, but days passed before my mother spoke in full sentences to Nanny again.

Nanny didn’t have to follow a troubled American family to the United States. She could have remained in England and found a stable and prestigious family with well-behaved children to work for, but she didn’t. She loved us, and love is not quick to quit.

She would stand in the gap between my father and us when he threatened harm, and she held us tight to her breast when, despite her best efforts, she failed to do so. She missed paychecks when times were hard, but to my knowledge she never once threatened to leave. Her eyes were dim, but she watched over us with ferocious devotion. This was the errand upon which God had sent her, and she completed it. Of how many people can this be said?

After twenty-three years of living in our home, my mother made arrangements for Nanny to live in an apartment complex for the elderly in Greenwich so she would be near us. She did not return to England. It was not her home. We were.

Once every few weeks I would go to her studio apartment to have a toasted cheese sandwich with her. Sometimes she’d make me poached eggs on toast, like I was a kid again. When I’d put my coat on to leave, she would stuff a five-dollar bill into my pocket to buy gas for my dinged-up Gran Torino. Nanny lived on a small pension, so I would try to give the five back.

“Don’t be cheeky,” she’d say, closing my fist around the bill with those hands I’d gripped so tightly as a boy.

I wish I knew then what I know now about duty and love. I’d have gone to visit her more.

Nanny died one month before I turned twenty-four. My mother sat on the edge of her hospital bed and held her hand as she slipped into the heart of God. There’s no one Nanny would have wanted at her side at that moment more than my mother. Nanny would sometimes tell people that my mother was her daughter, nodding her head up and down to highlight the gravity of this secret. It was a plot worthy of a Charles Dickens novel. My grandmother complained, but God bless her, my mother never told Nanny to stop.

Minutes after Nanny died, my mother removed her cat-eye glasses and gave them to me. I’ve kept them in the top drawer of my bedside table for twenty-five years. I suspect they will remain there for the rest of my life.

6

There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.

—ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

We lived in four houses in Greenwich before I was twelve. As my father’s drinking and depression augured downward, my mother was forced to go to work as a secretary in a publishing company—what was called a “girl Friday”—to pay the bills and keep food on our table. My mother grew up in a wealthy and highly regarded family on Long Island. Only a few years earlier, she had been touted in British tabloids as one of the most beautiful American women on the London social scene. Now she was a personal assistant to a publishing executive.

It’s hard to refute Darwin’s theory of natural selection after you meet my mother. The poor guy who hired her had no idea that he had just hired his replacement. It was only a matter of time before she would have his job. With some income flowing in, our financial condition began to stabilize, if not inch up. It would be a long time before we could sing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but one or two green shoots were peeking up through the dirt.

In fourth grade we moved to Havemeyer Park, a subdivision built in the 1940s. Gene Tunney, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was one of the developers. He named the streets after famous military heroes, supposedly to appeal to men coming back from the war. We rode our bikes and played kickball on Halsey Drive, Nimitz Place, Amherst Road, and MacArthur Drive. On some roads the houses were identical, small Cape Cod–style homes on tiny square lots. Tunney was long on athleticism but short on imagination.

The adult residents of Havemeyer Park could have been used as a sample group in a fertility study. The streets were teeming with kids. Every time we yelled “Olly, olly oxen free” to end a game of hide-and-seek, five or six kids we’d never seen before would come out from hiding. I’m surprised the Census Bureau didn’t go door-to-door to beg our parents to slow it down so they could get an accurate head count.

We lived in the last house on the street. It was a 1950s ranch-style home with a yard that swagged around until it backed up to the several acres of woods and wetlands that lay at the heart of Havemeyer Park. The woods were striated with a maze of paths carved by generations of kids whose pounding Converse All-Stars had worn them smooth. On summer mornings, groups of us would walk to the edge of the woods and shush each other as we strained to hear the sounds of friends playing deep in the thicket and trees. Once we had a bead on their location, we would tear off in the direction of their voices, making the earsplitting, high-pitched yodel that all kids make to let other kids know they are coming. If an adult were to attempt the same ululation, his larynx would explode.

Time found no purchase in the woods. No one wore watches. Cell phones didn’t exist. We told time by the sun and by our stomachs. We would vanish into the woods in the morning and not appear again until shadows, cast long by the waning light, made it too difficult to see where we were going in the dark stands of trees.

Near the edge of our property, high on a hill, was a large rock outcropping. It stood twenty feet above the forest and was marked by a gaping fissure that cut through its center. Kids imagined they could drop oversized slices of lemon into the yawning gap, where they would be crushed into lemonade by the opposing rock faces. Thus its name: the Lemon Peeler. The top of the Lemon Peeler was large and flat enough for several kids to stand on with room to spare. It was like an ancient stone altar, the kind archaeologists find on remote islands in the Hebrides and wonder what pagan religious ritual people used it for. It was a perfect vantage point for looking out over the expanse of woods below. It was also the site of my first taste of glory.

Rummaging around our basement one afternoon, I came upon a carton filled with junk rescued from the trunk of one of our cars before it was sold. Mixed in among the old jumper cables, oily rags, and wheel lugs at the bottom of the box, was something wrapped in old newspapers and twine. I carefully opened the twine, and the contents of the package fell at my feet—a dozen roadside flares rolling across the basement floor. Their outer wrapping was red and waxy. Each stick had a nail sticking out the bottom so it could be jammed into the ground. I thought the nail was a nice touch. There were warnings written in blurry letters along the side about the fatalities sure to occur if the flares were used for any purpose other than as roadside distress signals. They all but had my picture on the side with an admonition under it to put them back immediately.

There is a feeling that comes over eleven-year-old boys when they stumble on such treasures. Their faith in God trebles. I knew deep in my soul that Jesus himself had blessed me by letting me find these incendiary devices, and that they were to be used to advance his purposes in the world—namely, my social rehabilitation.

I was the school crap magnet. I was small and athletically challenged. My family, like characters in a Madeleine L’Engle story, had fallen out of the sky into a middle-class neighborhood in Connecticut, along with a visually impaired English nanny. How do you explain having a governess to kids whose parents owned diners or worked as airplane mechanics? I was chased home almost every day for using big words or fancy turns of phrase I had heard my father use or had read in the books I had begun devouring. I tried to do all the things I thought would win me some measure of acceptance. The harder I tried, however, the worse things became. My precocious vocabulary made kids feel I was talking down to them. They would tilt their heads and gape at me in silence when I used British words like laurie (truck) or mac (raincoat), then burst out laughing. The previous September, Nanny had packed me off to my first day at my new school wearing a blue blazer and carrying a leather briefcase. These were socially expensive mistakes.

Most of all, I felt like I didn’t fit because my father was so sick. Kids don’t know their parents are human. They think they’re gods. When you’re two years old, you look up the crease of your father’s pants and into his face and he might as well be Zeus. You realize that he can hug you or throw a bolt of lightning through your head. If Zeus happens to be mentally ill and an alcoholic whose irrational and rage-filled outbursts are as predictable as the whims of an active volcano, he begins to live in your mind as something half human and half monster, someone like Darth Vader, only less empathic. You ask God if you should take this personally.

Once I brought a kid home after school to play. When we came in the front door, my father was drunk and unconscious on the floor of the living room. I suspect Nanny had tried to lift him up and get him to his bedroom before we got there, but he was too heavy. The kid took one look at my dad and called his mother, who rushed over to pick him up. I peered through the white sheer curtains that covered our living room windows as Nanny leaned over to speak to my friend’s mom through the driver’s-side window of her car. Nanny was practiced at coming up with excuses. Then I went to the kitchen and ate the cheese toast and tea she had laid out in anticipation of our arrival. I looked at the empty chair and the plate of food meant for my friend and knew in the precincts of my heart that I was a freak. The play date gone wrong had happened months earlier, but it chiseled in stone this thought that I would never find my place in the world.

Then I found the flares. They were my salvation.

Carefully tucking the flares under my T-shirt, I ran into my backyard, my heart thrumming with anticipation. Johnny Gopnik was sitting on top of the Lemon Peeler, idly throwing rocks into the woods below. Johnny was one of the most popular boys in our school. He was everything I wasn’t—a sports god, admired by everyone, and universally feared. Could God have sent a better person for me to share my miraculous discovery with?

Seeing me running up the hill, Johnny stood up. “What are those?” he asked, pointing at the bouquet of red flares in my hand.

I sprinted the last few feet to the top of the Lemon Peeler, then bent at the waist to gasp for air. “They’re flares,” I managed to say. “I found them in my basement.”

Johnny grabbed one and balanced it in his hand to feel its heft. He scraped the side of it with his thumbnail. He sniffed it. He all but licked it. Finally, slapping it against his palm like a cop menacingly playing with his truncheon, he asked, “What are you going to do with them?”

I had not anticipated this question. I possessed a prize of great value but no plan. It was time to wing it.

I shrugged. “Let’s bust them open,” I said.

This was no easy task. Whatever was at the core of the flares that made them combustible was encased in super tightly wrapped cardboard. Johnny and I hit one against a tree, tried crushing one with rocks, and tried breaking a couple over our knees. That the company had made the flares so difficult to break only confirmed what we suspected: there was something inside them of measureless power and value, something the gods didn’t want us to have, and therefore we had to have it, no matter the cost.

I went home and got a hacksaw.

By the time I returned, there were five or six other kids at the Lemon Peeler, passing the flares around. I was becoming a celebrity.

“I don’t know if I would use that saw on them,” one kid said. “It might set them off and catch your clothes on fire.” This was one of those kids who were always wringing their hands.

“What if it isn’t a flare?” another piped. “What if it’s dynamite?” This must have been the hand-wringer’s brother.

“My dad knows someone who messed around with a flare and blew his boat up,” one of the older kids said. “It killed his dog too.”

This last story gave me pause, but I was not to be deterred. I was standing on the precipice of social integration. I got down on my knees and began sawing each flare in two. Cupped around me was a swelling crowd, their attention riveted on me. I sawed faster and faster, lest my audience of potential new friends lose interest and leave.

As I remember, the flares were filled with a sticky, yellowish-white cake. It had the consistency of powder laundry detergent when it gets damp and clumpy. I carefully scraped the cake off the side of the wrappings of all twelve flares with a stick, until it formed a pyramidal mound that stood a foot high on a flat part of the Lemon Peeler. When I was finished, the congregation stepped back a few feet and gazed at the pile of phosphorous in worshipful silence.

The sky was darkening, and a light breeze brushed against our faces. Johnny Gopnik came and stood next to me. “Now what are we going to do?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the mound of cake.

Johnny Gopnik had said we. I was drunk with belonging.

The crowd had now grown to fifteen or twenty boys, along with a few five-year-old sisters peeking out from behind their older brothers. In the distance I could hear the sounds of other kids yodeling and running down trails toward the Lemon Peeler. Word was spreading that something big was about to happen. It was late in the day. Soon mothers would be calling kids home for dinner. The clock was ticking. I was in a race against time.

I stood up straight and thrust out my chest. “I’m going to light it,” I announced.

The assembly gasped.

“Are you crazy?” Johnny said. “What if it blows up? What if you burn the woods down?”

I turned away from him. “Anyone got matches?” I asked, my chest swelling with boldness and bluster.

Instantly I was handed five packs of matches, a metal flip lighter with a green jumping trout etched on its side, and a magnifying glass in case we got desperate and had to use the sun. In those days, no self-respecting eleven-year-old boy would leave his house without the basic tools of an arsonist.

I bent down, took a deep breath, lit a match, and held it to the base of the powder tower while turning my face away. Angels and children held their breath, but nothing happened. I lit one match after another, but the yellow cake didn’t even smolder. In the distance I heard the sound of a mother calling her kids home. Soon other moms would start hollering as well.

“This is stupid. Give me back my matches,” one boy said.

“Shut up, you freak,” Johnny said. No one moved. Gopnik had spoken.

I figured out that in order to ignite, the powder needed sustained exposure to an open flame. I clicked back the top on the lighter, lit it, and gingerly laid it on top of the pile.

We waited for eternity.

The only man who could have appreciated what happened next was Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project team that built the first atomic bomb. I did a project on him for my third-grade science class. I made a crinkly papier-mâché replica of the first atom bomb, painted it dark brown, and placed it next to a poster board that I had filled with pictures of angry red mushroom clouds hurtling into the air, and aerial photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they had had been leveled by the weapon code-named “Little Boy.” I stood next to my presentation on science fair night in our school cafeteria and explained to small groups of interested passing parents and grandparents what would happen if one of these suckers got dropped on New York City, only thirty-five miles away from us by land and only a few miles from us across Long Island Sound. First, the paint on the sides of their houses would bubble and melt from the heat emanating from the fireball. A second or two later, a blast wave called a “Mach front” would roar across Long Island Sound and blow their split-level homes off their .15-acre lots as if the avenging arm of God himself had swiped them off their foundations. Everything and everyone they ever loved or cherished in this life would be vaporized.

Not everyone stuck around to the end of my presentation.

I learned that as Oppenheimer watched the first test of the bomb at Los Alamos, he recalled the verse from the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” Now I knew what he must have felt. The initial flash and heat impulse of the powder’s ignition blew me onto my butt, and I scurried backward like I was going for a land speed record in a crab race. Everyone else broke into a chorus of “Holy Crap” (the favorite hymn of prepubescent boys) and scrambled to hide behind trees and rocks, lest they be consumed in the blast. Just when I thought the light from the phosphorus ziggurat couldn’t get any brighter or bigger, it quadrupled in luminescence and size. It became a five-foot standing wave of colors, pulsing white to red, vermilion to orange. It burned temporary blind spots into our retinas, but we couldn’t take our eyes off the pillar of fire. It was terrible and wondrous to behold.

Once we determined that the inferno wouldn’t kill us in the short term, the now sizable mob inched toward it, as though tiptoeing toward a burning bush. By now, the tower was roaring so bright that the coming night was as bright as the day. When it hissed and spit sulfurous sparks, we jumped backward and shielded our eyes and then approached it again. Thick columns of smoke pushed into our faces by the light winds made our noses and throats burn.

But the glory of what we had unleashed was too much for eleven-year-old boys to take in all at once. Think of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the crazy French archaeologist takes the top off the ark of the covenant and looks inside, and his eyes bug out and he screams, “It’s beautiful!” That was us, only our faces didn’t melt off. We were seized by ecstasy. Johnny Gopnik was so enraptured that he kissed me full on the cheek. He began dancing around the blinding fire, throwing his head back and screaming great whoops of joy. Soon, Johnny’s frenzied delirium infected the rest of us. Twenty boys danced around the fire like heathen savages on a South Pacific island, lit up on moonshine, while their little sisters looked on wide-eyed, sucking their thumbs. It was a scene from Lord of the Flies, only innocent and precious. None of us would ever be so beautifully eleven years old again.

Five or six minutes later, it was done. The pillar of fire was now nothing more than a hot white circle of molten residue surrounded by blackened rock. A blanket of acrid smoke lay over the forest floor. It would take days for the woods to lose that rotten-egg smell. A few touched the place where the miracle had occurred. We all agreed not to tell anyone what we had seen, at least our parents.

Johnny Gopnik and I were the last two there. We stood on the Lemon Peeler, the site of our Pentecost. We were filled with gratitude and amazement for the signs and wonders we had witnessed.

Johnny shoved me and laughed. “Cron, that was awesome,” he said.

Like a man regaining consciousness after being knocked out, I was dazed.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, turning and running down the trail toward the sound of his mother’s voice.

“Sure,” I called back.

I sat on the Lemon Peeler for a long time and surveyed the forest below. The setting sun appeared under the outer edge of the overcast sky, announcing day’s end. Getting up, I took a piece of red chalk that we used to draw four-square courts and drew a circle around the place where the fiery pillar had stood and danced for us. I walked down the hill from the Lemon Peeler. My face was radiant.

Forty-five-year-olds aren’t the only ones who feel despondent when they realize that the clock can’t be turned back. Just ask a boy toward the end of August, when the sun begins to set earlier and your mother begins talking about your needing new pants and school supplies. That summer, late August brought cooler nights and a sense of dread.

My father was skating just in front of the cracks. If something didn’t change, he would fall through the ice and be swallowed by his own insanity. He would start drinking at eleven in the morning and only stop to sleep. In their inestimable wisdom, doctors were pumping him with Librium and Valium, making him not only an alcoholic but also a drug addict—so much for the Hippocratic Oath. His depression seemed bottomless. Like one of the ghosts in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, he was becoming insubstantial. His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.

I remember things in colors. In 1971, the air in our home was burnt ocher. Nothing like the pure golden sunshine that filled other kids’ homes or stippled the floor of the woods, where I spent more and more of my time. One day while playing in them, I was caught in a thunderstorm and had to make a decision between running to my house, which I could see in the distance, or taking shelter in a pile of boulders and waiting it out. I took my chances on being struck by lightning rather than having to go home. I huddled and prayed as lightning flashed and thunder exploded above my head, startling even the stones and trees.

On the opposite side of the woods from the Lemon Peeler, there was a big hole, about ten feet deep, fifteen feet wide, twenty feet long. We called it the Pit. To get to it you had to brave swarms of mosquitoes as you walked ankle-deep through a marsh of ink-black mud. The air was thick with the pungent smell of skunk cabbage and old foliage decomposing in the water. You had to pass the scant remains of a hundred-year-old farmhouse and clamber over a decrepit stone wall that had once demarked where one farmer’s land ended and another’s began. Finally, you had to pass through a shroud of bushes, saplings, and reeds that had grown up around the Pit, creating a leafy protective curtain.

There were countless theories about how the Pit had come into existence. Some kids were sure it had been created by a meteor strike; others said an alien spacecraft had made a crash landing there and the air force had secretly taken it away in the night; others said it was a mass grave dug by members of the criminal underground. Adults claimed with annoying confidence that it was an abandoned construction site and that the hole had been dug to lay a foundation. This sounded improbable to us.

Despite the mystery of its provenance, this cavity in the earth was a magnet in the neighborhood. You could go there anytime and be certain to run into boys of all ages, killing time by talking, spitting, bragging, and competing to see who could pee the farthest.

I would steal cigarettes from my parents or my brothers and go down to the Pit to smoke them. I started smoking early, but five of the seven people living in my home were smokers. If I’d complained about the effects of secondhand smoke, they might have placed me in foster care. By joining them, I was helping keep the family together.

I loved to lie on my back and take huge drags of Pall Malls or Chesterfields deep into my lungs. I liked the punch to the chest every pull on a cigarette gave me, the brief high I felt from the nicotine, and the heightened sense of well-being. I liked to smoke alone too. It’s not that I wouldn’t smoke with my friends, but there was something about smoking alone that gave me solace.

I went to the Pit late one morning and was glad to see no one was there. I’d had a rough morning with my father, who had yelled at me for playing a set of bongos I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Anything that made noise drove my father to his wit’s end. The house was beginning to feel like a mausoleum.

Just when I had settled into a comfortable position and was starting to light my cigarette: “Boo!” someone whispered.

“Crap,” I said, jumping and dropping my lighter.

It was Dennis Coughlin. He had been sitting on a big rock across the Pit from me, watching me, leaning back on his hands so that his shoulders nearly touched his ears. He was wearing jeans and a light-green, short-sleeved, button-down shirt with one tail hanging out the front. The curved ends of his thin black hair nearly covered his almost topaz-blue eyes. The hours he had spent in the sun that summer had made the field of freckles under his eyes so pronounced I could almost count them from across the Pit. Billy Dempsey and John Babcock were sitting on the ground next to the rock Dennis was perched on. They were quiet, lumbering ninth graders who followed Dennis everywhere like stray dogs grateful to have someone to tag along after. They were every bit as dumb as Dennis was smart.

“I haven’t seen your sister around,” Dennis said, ignoring my alarm.

Girls thought Dennis was handsome, but moms warned their daughters not to hang around with him. He was alluring, but treated others with an unsettling air of indifference.

“She’s working at a day camp this summer,” I said. I tried to steady my shaking hand as I lit the Pall Mall drooping from my lips. My heart was still beating fast from the surprise.

“What are you doing this summer?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Nothing,” I said. “I went to Camp Monakewaygo for two weeks in July. That was okay.”

“Okay for losers,” Babcock said. He and Dempsey laughed, but Dennis frowned.

He paused. “Does your mom know you smoke?” he asked.

I laughed. “No way,” I said. “She’d kill me.”

Dennis watched me. His gaze was soft.

He grinned and blinked slowly. “Pull your pants down,” he said.

The demand was such a jarring departure from the flow of our previous conversation that my head jerked backward. I felt the way non-native speakers must feel when they are just beginning to learn a language. They hear the words; they vaguely understand their meaning but can’t get them in order fast enough to make sense of them.

I forced myself to laugh. “Right, that’s funny,” I said. I was becoming aware of the pronounced rise and fall of my chest as my breathing quickened.

Dennis slipped off the rock and leaned against it. “You heard me. Pull your pants down,” he said, casting his head to the side to flick the hair out of his eyes.

The smile frozen on my face began to quiver.

Dennis flicked his cigarette into the Pit and spit after it. “Pull down your pants, or I’ll come over there and beat the snot out of you,” he said evenly.

Fear filled my mouth. It tasted like copper. I began to think through how I might escape, but I knew my limitations. I was small for my age, no more than ninety pounds. Dennis was fifteen, 5‘10”, with the lithe build of a gymnast. There was a rumor that the football coach at the high school had begged him to try out to be a running back for the varsity, but Dennis wasn’t interested. I knew that if I made a run for it, he would catch me and the punishment for disobedience would be awful.

My head felt hot, my scalp started to itch, and there was now a steady ringing in my ears. “Why?” I said.

He ignored my question. “Do I have to come over there and make you?” he asked, motioning to come around the Pit to where I was standing.

The air turned a sickly green, the way it does right before a really bad storm. There was no breeze. A pair of bluebottle flies danced in the air near my head, making the sound you get when you blow a harmonica made from a comb and Saran Wrap. A sour smell I had never noticed before wafted up from the Pit. I had never felt so alone.

I dropped my cigarette. I unbuttoned my pants, undid my zipper, put my thumbs down my loosened waistband, and paused to look one more time at Dennis. I was hoping he would feel satisfied that I was willing to follow his orders this far, and maybe tell me I didn’t need to go any further.

Dennis bugged out his eyes and thrust his head forward. “What are you waiting for, you freaking idiot? We don’t have all day.”

I looked at Babcock and Dempsey. Asking them to intervene was pointless. Independent thinking wasn’t one of their gifts. Besides, there was no upside for them. Who wanted to hack off Dennis? Even adults gave him wide berth.

I bent over, pushing my pants down to my ankles. I paused and gazed at my kneecaps. I didn’t want to stand up straight. Rivulets of sweat ran down my back, and for some reason my legs prickled like ants were swarming all over them.

“Stand up, you freak,” Dennis said.

Slowly, I stood. Dennis folded his arms, nodded, and looked me over, up and down.

“Look; he’s got no hair. He’s bald,” Dennis said, pointing at me and laughing. Dempsey massaged the back of his neck and looked away. Babcock snorted halfheartedly. Dennis looked at them through half-slit eyes. Their increasing discomfort seemed like betrayal.

With his attention briefly diverted, I hunched over to pull up my pants. A rock whizzed by my head and through the brush behind me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dennis asked.

I stood up and threw my hands out in a gesture of pleading. “I’m pulling up my pants,” I cried, unable to contain the fear, rage, and grief strangling my voice.

Dennis pointed at me. “No, you’re not. You’re going to stand there until I tell you to do something else,” he said through gritted teeth, then began to pace again, never breaking eye contact.

I pushed my pants down, then waited.

He stopped walking and simply considered me, his eyes vacant and unfeeling. He leaned again on the rock he had been sitting on. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. His first inhalation and exhalation were noisy. “My mom says your dad tried to kill himself,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“She said they brought him into the emergency room, OD’d on pills or something,” he said. Dennis’s mom was an emergency-room nurse.

It seemed strange to be drawn into such a serious conversation with someone while my pants were pooled around my ankles. But this subject was so grave that I began to forget my humiliating circumstances. “That’s a lie,” I said.

Dennis smirked. “My mom says he’s a drunk too.”

Dennis formed his lips into the shape of an O to make smoke rings. I watched the bone and muscle just under his ears bulge out, then snap to shoot the blue ovals forward. They flew out, one after another, each perfectly formed. Then they wafted upward and hung in the still, humid air, eventually changing shape like lazy jellyfish.

My mind began working. About a month earlier, I’d half-awakened in the middle of the night to the sounds of people running around upstairs. The din hauled me up from the depths of slumber like a deepwater fish fighting in a net. I finally settled into the gray waters just below the surface of consciousness. I could hear Nanny and my mother speaking in pressured whispers at the top of the stairs. I was almost certain I could hear the voices of two men as well, official and serious, but kind and reassuring at the same time. Then I noticed the rumbling of a large car or truck in our driveway and blinking red and white lights through the slats on my window shutters, flashing onto the wall. Always a sound sleeper, though, I soon disappeared back into the murk of slumber.

The next morning, I lay in bed and wondered if what I had heard the night before had been a dream or an actual event. This was a reasonable question. In my life, nighttime was when the really strange stuff would happen.

When I was little, I would sometimes go to bed in my house in Greenwich and wake up in the morning in a different place. Once I went to sleep in my own bed, and the next morning when I opened my eyes I was staring up at a tangle of water pipes on the ceiling. This was unsettling. The pipes hadn’t been on my ceiling when I’d gone to sleep the night before. Unless a workman had managed to rearrange the plumbing infrastructure of my home without waking me, then something was wrong. I sat up and looked around, wondering if I had been teleported to another planet, like Captain Kirk and Spock on Star Trek. I was relieved to find my sister sleeping on a blow-up mattress next to me.

Later we discovered that we were in the finished basement at my cousin’s house in New York.

Our being teleported while sleeping happened more than once. Years later, I learned that my father would sometimes go off the rails in the middle of the night, and my mother would scoop my sister and me out of bed and take us to the home of one or another of my aunts. Later in the day, I might vaguely remember being put into the cold backseat of the car and my mother laying a blanket on top of me or leaning me against my sleeping sister. Maybe I’d recall looking up at streetlights on I-95 through the rear window of our Maalox-yellow Dodge Dart as they rushed by, but I was never sure. Sometimes we’d only stay with my cousins for a day; other times we would be there for two or three. No one ever explained why we were there, how we got there, or how long we’d be there before we were beamed home again.

But on that Saturday morning a month or so before, when I’d gotten dressed and gone to the kitchen, I could smell that something was wrong. One of our dining room chairs was lying on its side, its arm broken. Nanny was in the kitchen, wiping down every square inch of countertop and cabinetry, almost taking the paint off them.

“Where’re Mom and Dad?” I asked, getting orange juice out of the fridge.

“Your father felt sick last night, and they went to the hospital. Everything’s fine,” she said. Nanny didn’t look at me. I knew she had rehearsed the answer.

My father didn’t come home for a few days. When he did, he spent more time in his bedroom than ever. Dennis’s story was plausible.

“Hey, numb nuts—you in there?” Dennis yelled, jerking me back into the present.

I nodded.

“Pull up your pants,” he said, his face relaxing into a catlike smile.

I tried to, but my clothes had become disarranged, knotted and twisted around my ankles and legs. I couldn’t maintain my balance. I fell over.

I lay on the ground, leaves and branches stuck to my pale, naked legs. Dennis, Babcock, and Dempsey laughed.

Then Dennis’s demeanor became serious. He glared. “If you say a word about this, I’ll tell everyone about your father. You understand?”

I nodded.

He threw his head to the side to get the hair out of his eyes again. I hoped it would come loose and fly off.

“Say hi to your sister for me,” he said.

I watched as he disappeared into the woods. Dempsey and Babcock got up and followed him. I listened as the sound of them moving through the thicket diminished until soon I couldn’t hear them anymore—except that every so often, the sound of one of them laughing in the distance punctured the silence.

After they’d left I sat down, cross-legged, near the edge of the Pit and lit another cigarette. My shirt was soaked with sweat; my pants were still unbuttoned, and my boxers were now twisted around my hips. After two drags, I felt nauseous and gagged, nearly throwing up into the Pit. I pulled my knees into my chest and wrapped my forearms around my shins. I was cold.

I knew these woods, yet now they seemed alien and unreal. The surfaces of things were flat, two-dimensional, slightly out of focus. Everything was far, far away, like I was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I shook my head sharply and wondered if my ability to rightly perceive the world would ever return to normal, or if something had shorted inside my head and I would see it this way forever.

Why am I so upset? I asked myself. So what if a psycho made me pull my pants down? It’s not like the whole world was there to see it.

I closed my eyes and sat cross-legged, trying to find a feeling to go with my experience. I had cried when Dennis made me stand in front of him with my pants down, but now I felt vacant and half-alive.

To my right I heard the sudden crack of a twig. Afraid it was Dennis returning, I looked that way quickly.

It was a fawn. He was a tan smudge, thirty feet away, unaware of me. He shook his head to chase away the horseflies swirling around his nose. His legs were spindly, his sides covered with white spots. He was sniffing along the ground, perhaps in search of food, perhaps because another animal had recently passed by and its scent had captured the fawn’s attention. Its ears were comically large and twitchy.

I lay frozen, watching him, for so long that my right leg fell asleep. Eventually the pain of it became unbearable. Little by little, I shifted my weight to get my right ankle out from under my left thigh, but the crack of a dry twig snapping under my bony butt sounded the alarm. The fawn’s tail shot up, revealing its white underside. He crouched down and froze; his legs trembled, poised to flee. I’d spooked him good, but he didn’t run. He looked at me, and gradually the fear that passed back and forth in our gazes dissolved. The fawn’s legs soon relaxed and straightened, and I lay down on my side with my head propped up on my hand. After a long while of looking at each other, our eyes registered agreement. We belonged here and to each other.

The fawn sneezed, its head jerking downward. I blinked and he was gone.

How do we explain these fugitive graces?

On the last day of summer vacation, I made a makeshift altar out of a piece of plywood placed on top of four rocks, and I celebrated my first Eucharist with Hi-C Fruit Punch and a hamburger roll. My congregation consisted of blue jays and ravens, a few puzzled chipmunks, and a rabble of squirrels, all interested in the fate of the bread when I was done. I knew most of the words of the liturgy by heart, and the ones I didn’t know I made up. What inspired a Catholic boy to perform this heresy still puzzles me.

7

It’s so sweet, I feel like my teeth are rotting when I listen to the radio.

—BONO

Sixth grade was about as painful a period in my life as any. There was a tiger in our home, roaming the hallways. When I heard my father coming, I would dart into another room or quietly close the door to my own, so I wouldn’t have to see or speak to him. The rest of the family tiptoed around the house as well. If he was napping in his chair, we were terrified of disturbing him. When we committed the crime of making noise while playing a game or laughing too loud, he wouldn’t yell; instead, he would bellow from the living room. He roared against our childhoods.

During the day, we left my father alone on the front side of the house, where the living room, dining room, and bedrooms were. The rest of us holed up in the kitchen or the den, while thankfully maintaining access to the back door and the stairs that led to our finished basement. We had an unspoken contract. We would stay out of his side of the house as much as possible, if he would avoid coming into ours. If it worked for North and South Korea, why not for us? Needless to say, we never burst through the front door of our house, throwing our book bags onto the sofa and crying, “I’m home!” the way Ron Howard did on Happy Days. We crept in through the back door and went to the den to do our homework or to watch TV with the volume turned down so low that we had to stick our ears next to the set to hear anything.

We were living in an Edward Albee play for the hearing impaired.

School wasn’t much better. My typical day followed a predictable pattern. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. I would go to school and get my butt kicked by the cool kids. Now that I think about it, there were even a few girls and kids with disabilities in my class who kicked my butt a few times. Okay, everyone kicked my butt. I was an easy target.

I was invisible to my father. He rarely spoke to me unless it was to tell me I was making too much racket or to tell me to stop running in the house. My father’s psychological and emotional problems so consumed his visual field that he had trouble seeing anyone but himself, much less a lost, father-hungry kid.

This haunts me to this day. No matter who I am talking to, I eventually have the feeling that they are experiencing me like a gnat. I ask people on the phone if I’m calling at a bad time. After saying “good morning” to someone, I apologize for rambling. A counselor once recommended I should carry a can of Raid bug killer around so I could spray myself when I feel like I’m being a bother to someone.

I pay people for this sort of advice.

More often than not, Jesus comes to us incognito. In the sixth grade, he came to me in the disguise of a manic, irreverent radio personality.

My most treasured possession was a small handheld transistor radio that could pick up all the AM stations in New York City. Made from royal-blue plastic, it had a speaker no bigger than a quarter glued to the back of a grill made up of lots of little holes aligned in neat rows on the front panel. You tuned in to the station you wanted by sliding the ridged dial that stuck out from the side of the radio with your thumb. I don’t remember who manufactured it, but the model name—Westminster— was printed in big, bold, black letters under the dial face. Beneath the model name were the words “solid state” in small understated red letters. It also had a strap so you could carry it around on your wrist. I never took advantage of this feature. I had trouble making friends as it was.

Every night at precisely 10:15 p.m., Waldo would jump onto my bed, scratch and paw at my comforter to mark out a space for himself, do the three-turn dog pirouette, and collapse into a heap by the footboard. I would tuck the radio underneath my pillow and wait for the familiar strains of Strauss’s “Bahn frei!” polka, performed by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, that heralded the arrival of my hero. His name was Jean Shepherd. He saved my life.

Shep, as his listeners called him, was a radio personality whose nightly show was broadcast live from the studios of WOR-AM in Manhattan. He went on the air every night and spoke for an hour without a script or notes. Unimaginably creative material gushed out of him like water from a fire hose. Sometimes he would start the show with words like: “Yes, you fatheads out there in the darkness, you losers in the Sargasso Sea of existence, take heart, because WOR, in its never-ending crusade of public service, is once again proud to bring you: The Jean Shepherd Program!” No one does this sort of thing anymore. Today we get Rush Limbaugh, and comparing Rush Limbaugh to Jean Shepherd is like comparing Miley Cyrus to Bono.

Shep ripped across the airwaves like a tornado through a cornfield. As I listened, I imagined him in a rolling chair, ricocheting off the walls of the station’s control room like a BB in a shoebox. When he wasn’t chastising his engineer for making technical mistakes, he might go into a tear about the bird-brained commercials interrupting his show. One minute he was dead serious, waxing philosophical about the meaning of life, and then he would say something like, “You get too close to the primal guts of life and you’ve got to clear the air,” then pick up a kazoo or a Jew’s harp and play a chorus of some old classic song, like “Lucky Star,” “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” or “Margie.” He even played an obscure Polynesian instrument called a nose flute. He was a raconteur, a biting wit, a social critic, and the ideal spokesman for those of us who got our butts kicked in dodgeball every day. He was the uncle your parents didn’t want you to know about.

Shep told it the way it was. He mused about what people would say thousands of years from now when they dug up artifacts from our crazy civilization—like televisions and Slinkys. One night he spoke about the difficulty of explaining the purpose of an amusement park to an alien from Venus. His material was not only funny; it was smart, an indictment of an age satisfied with “bread and circuses”—a phrase Shep taught me the meaning of one night as he bemoaned the inanities of life. He would sound off about our succumbing to “creeping meatballism,” which had something to do with being hypnotized by Madison Avenue and the loss of our individuality. He did it all in this conspiratorial voice, moving from whisper to pressured rant, as though he were radioing in while the enemy advanced on his location.

Shep said there were two kinds of people—Night People and Day People. The Day People were folks who were being trivialized by the increasing insipidness of life. The Night People were the lucky ones who saw through the whole sham. The Day People were content to be brainwashed by the pernicious forces of commercialism that dehumanized us, while the Night People had the inside track on what was true.

The kids with radios under their pillows were Night People.

Shep wasn’t afraid to do things to try to wake up the Day People. One time he got his listeners to go into bookstores all over New York City to ask salespeople for a nonexistent book entitled I, Libertine, by Frederick R. Ewing. Thousands of Shep’s fans followed his instructions, driving bookstore clerks all over the five boroughs crazy looking for the book. I’m told that it took almost two weeks before the Wall Street Journal revealed that the I, Libertine book hoax was a well-planned gag—and that it was the only time a book became a best seller without actually having been written. If this fact isn’t true, it should be.

Shep is best known for writing and narrating the film A Christmas Story, a classic holiday movie that gets played repeatedly on cable during the Christmas season. It’s about a nine-year-old kid named Ralphie who’s obsessed with getting a Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range model air rifle for Christmas. Every time he tells people about it, they dash his hopes by saying, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.” After finally getting his air rifle, Ralphie shoots at a paper target attached to a metal sign, and the ricocheting BB breaks his glasses, nearly shooting his eye out. Shep didn’t believe in wallpapering over reality.

I didn’t always understand Shep, but he understood me. We were the outsiders, the misfits, and he was our voice. If you saw a picture of him from the 1970s, you would know instantly that he was our guy. In the shots I’ve seen, his clothes look like they have a lot of cat hair on them, and he was pudgy in the way New Yorkers are when they’ve eaten too many gyros on the streets of Manhattan.

The Jean Shepherd Show was to me what the wardrobe was to the Pevensie kids in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was my way out of a world that adults had screwed up. Every night Shep would transport me to a different place and time. He would take me to his hometown of Hohman, Indiana. I would lose myself in his descriptions of what sounded to me like an ideal America. Shep made me nostalgic for something I had never experienced—a normal “kidhood,” as he called it. He had friends with names like Flick, Schwartz, Bruner, and Randy. Shep’s father, “the old man” as he called him, showed up to his baseball games and spoke to him about life, albeit awkwardly. His mother, who always wore a “yellow rump-sprung chenille bathrobe with bits of dried egg on the lapel,” was drab but predictable. The world he described wasn’t perfect. Alongside the absurd and hilarious stories he told from his childhood, he spoke about the disappointments and hardships that were warp and woof of being a child. Shep told the kinds of stories you find in the Bible—they were unnervingly honest.

It was in one of my darkest hours that Shep, like the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation, came and said, “Do not be afraid.”

It was the night of my elementary school band’s spring concert, and my friends and I could hardly contain ourselves. This was the night our parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, even a few lapdogs, came to hear us play “America the Beautiful,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and our rollicking version of “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” Sitting through an elementary-school music program in which volume trumps intonation is a profound act of human love. It’s like falling on a hand grenade to save a group of friends, except that you have to do it three times a year.

Every eleven-year-old boy in the Western Hemisphere chooses to play one of two instruments: the snare drum or the trumpet. I played the trumpet, and I was pretty good too. Most of the time I practiced in our basement with the bell of my horn stuffed into a pillow so the sound wouldn’t hack off my father. This practice regimen had the same effect marathoners experience when they train at high altitudes and then run a race at sea level. Once that pillow came off, I was like Miles Davis after six cans of Red Bull.

The accomplishment of all accomplishments for a young trumpet player was to be able to hit a C above middle C. If you could hit a high C, then every kid in band knew you could play for Earth, Wind and Fire or Tower of Power, two bands whose horn sections were filled with major blowers. During spring tryouts I squeezed out a high C in front of Mr. Martin and the whole band. The effort rendered me cross-eyed for three days, but that momentary squeak was enough to earn me the honor of sitting in the first chair. And this was the first concert during which I would be occupying that prized seat.

My mother was on a business trip but had called from an airport earlier in the day, promising that she would be home in time for the 7 p.m. concert and that she would bring Nanny along. The performance was to be held in our school cafeteria, which doubled as a small gymnasium. The school administration referred to it as the cafetorium. This word should be stricken from the English language immediately. It signals to children that food should be followed by frolic. At lunchtime we would wolf down our bologna sandwiches and pretzels so we would have time to move the tables out of the way and play basketball. And every day, some kid would blow his lunch.

The band was forced to wait in the hallway that led into the cafeteria while the audience took their seats in those brown folding metal chairs that freeze your butt when you first sit in them. As the clock ticked closer and closer to 7 p.m., the more panicked I became. Not only was this my first appearance as the first-chair trumpet player, but I also had a short solo at the beginning of the song “Shenandoah.” I had practiced that solo for weeks. All day long, I would rehearse the fingering for it on my thigh while hearing the notes in my head. In my pre-performance anxiety, I began to imagine what it would be like if I got sick into my trumpet midsolo. I could see my Chef Boyardee spaghetti dinner with pulpified meatballs in red sauce shooting down the lead pipe, hurling at untold speeds through the pistons and valves, and exploding out the bell of my horn, splattering my beloved band teacher, Mr. Martin, and the front row of the unsuspecting audience.

Mr. Martin tried to get us to enter the cafeteria with some modicum of dignity, but to no avail. When the door opened, we ran to our seats and began warming up as though we were the New York Philharmonic waiting for Bernstein to make his entrance. We looked dead serious as we made sure our music was in the right order, which was odd since few of us were capable of deciphering, much less actually playing, the notes on the page. I scanned the audience to see if my mother or Nanny had arrived yet, but I couldn’t spot them. I wasn’t worried, though—there were nine or ten rows of chairs, and they could be sitting in the back where I couldn’t see them.

The audience exploded into applause as our conductor and teacher, Mr. Martin, walked in. Parents regard band teachers with a combination of awe and respect, the way you might a war hero. How could any human being spend eight hours per day enduring the acoustic violence created by fifty children playing their instruments all at once? These families knew what it sounded like with only one kid practicing an instrument at home. Even Jesus couldn’t stomach a group of fifty of them.

To us, Mr. Martin was the funniest human being ever created by God. He had a way of making us laugh at ourselves at all the right moments. We had a kid named Larry who played the clarinet. In the hands of the untalented, a clarinet is a lethal weapon. There are states that allow the sale of automatic assault weapons but ban the use of clarinets at school concerts. If played poorly, they are the sonic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina. Larry had a number of challenges. First, he was eleven and just beginning to pull the whole hygiene thing together. He wasn’t quite there yet. His teeth were coated in plaque, and the armpits of his shirts were stained yellow. Second, he was onerously unmusical. Once, when counting us into a song, Mr. Martin said, “One, two, Larry-don’t-blow.” All of us fell off our chairs, laughing uncontrollably, including Larry, who felt honored to be singled out by Mr. Martin, regardless of the reason. Mr. Martin was the best.

The show was going swimmingly. Parents waved at their kids. Brothers and sisters whistled. Babies cried and held their ears. Grandfathers took photos with those cameras with the square revolving flashcubes. Between songs, I kept looking for my mother and Nanny but couldn’t find them. Even so, I was confident that when I stood up to play my solo, I would finally be able to see over people’s heads and spot them somewhere in the back row.

When the moment came, Mr. Martin nodded at me to stand, and then again to tell me to put my trumpet up to my lips so he could count me in. I knew that solo like the back of my hand, so while preparing to play, I was able to quickly search the room for my mother and Nanny.

There is little point in my telling you what happened next. You already know. Likewise, there would be no point in my musing out loud how it’s physically possible for a hole the size of a galaxy to appear in a boy’s chest, leaving him desolate, in the mere five seconds it takes to scan a room. I could tell you about the tears that ran down my face as I played my solo, but this last detail would be a lie. I felt no surface emotion. The injury was deep and hidden.

When I finished my solo, Mr. Martin beamed at me. I had played it flawlessly. After the concert, kids slapped me on the back and parents said I came close to stealing the show. I was happy but distracted.

By the time we filed out of the school, it had begun to pour rain, and I had no ride. Out in the parking lot, kids and parents were running to their cars, lugging tubas or with long trombone cases banging against legs. My friend Phil’s parents stopped and asked if I needed a ride. I said no. My parents were just pulling the car around and would be there in a minute, I lied. Phil’s mom looked sad. Mr. Martin pulled up in his Volkswagen bus and asked if I needed a lift. I told him the same thing. He looked kind of sad too.

During the half-mile walk home, the rain drenched me. My shirt and the fronts of my white pants were plastered to my body. I had to keep resetting my grip on the wet handle of my trumpet case to prevent it from slipping out of my hands.

Kids from alcoholic homes are lousy accountants. They lose track of the number of times they get let down, embarrassed, or left to make sense of life on their own. But every so often a minor injury comes along—like a missed concert—and it tips over the box in which the disproportionate number of disappointments those kids have yet to acknowledge or grieve are found.

And so I cried.

I cried for every concert and play my parents, especially my father, hadn’t seen. I cried for every pounding I’d taken from kids at school that I hadn’t even bothered to report to anyone. I cried for the father who barely knew I played an instrument and certainly had no idea I was first chair in the school band. I cried so hard I thought my throat was wringing itself out like a dish towel.

Walking up LeJeune Court, I asked God if he would send down a celestial staircase so I could walk up into the night sky and go to heaven before I had to endure the sound I dreaded more than any other—the crunching sound of my feet on the gravel on my driveway that told me I was home. Sister Rita Marie told us God sent staircases for saints all the time. I stood in the rain awhile to see if my staircase would appear. Apparently I wasn’t a saint.

My mother explained that there had been weather delays in Chicago and she couldn’t get home from the airport in time to get to the concert. I looked at Nanny’s face and knew this was only half the truth. The whole truth was that when my mother got home, she’d had to make a choice: attend to my father, who was drunk and demanding attention, or go see my show.

I shrugged. “That’s all right,” I said. “No big deal.”

“I promise not to miss the next one,” she said. I knew she meant it, but it was little consolation now.

By the time I’d changed into my pajamas and eaten a snack, the kitchen clock said 10:00. Fifteen minutes until The Jean Shepherd Show. I ran to my room, jumped into bed, put my Westminster radio under my pillow, and waited for his theme music. Waldo jumped onto the bed and made his nest at my feet. As I lay there listening to ads for Schaefer Beer, Esso gasoline, and Alka-Seltzer, I was overwhelmed again by a terrible sadness. I sobbed.

“Is that you crying?” my father called. He was reading in his chair in the living room, just down the hall from my bedroom. His words were garbled and hard to understand, like he was talking underwater.

“No,” I called back, which was a ridiculous answer, since anyone with half a brain could tell from my constricted voice that I was crying.

Then there was silence. I held my breath and waited for my father to come down the hall. I imagined him sitting on the edge of my bed, stroking my forehead, and asking me what was wrong. I wanted to tell him that I would do anything if he would just stop drinking. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry for not being a good enough son, for being such a disappointment to him. If he would just tell me what I had to do to make him stop drinking, I would do it.

If he would just come sit on my bed and look at me, I would tell him that even though I was already eleven, we could start life all over. He could be like my friend Phil’s dad. We could go to the barbershop on Saturday, and he could run his hand through my freshly cut hair to get the stubble out; then we could spend the day together playing baseball or washing the car.

Instead, I heard the sound of a page turning, and then another. He was not coming to sit on my bed. My father had gone back to reading.

These kinds of experiences are not biodegradable. They float in the reservoir of memory forever.

It was then that I noticed a bottle of Anacin on my dresser. I had once heard a sermon in church about a man named Elijah whom God just took to heaven without dying. I had asked for that option on the way home from the concert but had received no answer. I decided that if God wouldn’t send me a staircase or a chariot of fire to take me into heaven in a whirlwind, then I would arrange it myself. I had been told all my life in Catholic school that suicide was the unforgivable sin, but I felt certain that, given my situation, God would cut me a break. Did I really intend to kill myself? I don’t know. All I remember was that I was weary and sad. I got out of bed and grabbed the bottle of Anacin and held it in my sweaty hand under my pillow next to my radio.

Then came the “Bahn frei!” polka and the voice of Jean Shepherd.

Let me adjust the equipment here in the studio. I am now inundating Staten Island with mediocrity. Just a minute— now we are sneaking out to Darien; you can hear them screaming out there. All right, now I’m all set. I’m ready to sing. This is a singing night.

And Shep then launched into what he called a rare Swahili version of a Mantovani classic.

That night Shep said he was telling a story from when he was in the second grade.

I’m sure there are a lot of skeptics out there. I suppose if you have never had any experience of the supernatural, you tend to be skeptical about it, I’m sure. I think it goes back to the experiences you have as a kid with this kind of thing. The only reason I ever talk about being a kid has nothing to do with nostalgia, about it being great to be a kid. You just stop and ask any legitimate, walking-around, certified, guaranteed kid and you ask him what it’s like being a kid, and you’ll get the straight dope. He’s likely to kick you in the kneecap! So don’t come around with this jazz about it being great to be a kid. It’s not great being a kid. It’s just a fact … It’s not great being a kid.

No kidding, this is nearly word-for-word what Shep said that night, and it was exactly what I needed. If Shep had said childhood was the most precious time in a person’s life, I would have shut off the radio and inhaled that entire bottle of Anacin.

Then Shep said, “This show tonight is not for the squeamish or the lighthearted.”

As he spoke I forgot who I was, where I was, what had happened that night at the concert, my feelings that dying would be better than living, the belief that at my core I was so wretched a child that my father felt it necessary to drink himself blind every day just to endure me. I was ready for the truth, a show that wasn’t for the squeamish or the lighthearted. Bring it on.

I had three pals growing up—Bruner, Schwartz, and Flick. Now when it comes to childhood myths, you’ll always find three believers and a skeptic in a group of four. Bruner was a true believer. If you told the same joke a hundred times, he would laugh as hard the last time you told it as he did the first. Schwartz was a believer but always waited to see which way the wind was going to blow—which way the crowd was going. Me, I was a patsy. Do you know what a patsy is? He’s the guy who fills out the coupon and gets shucked. He’s the guy that says, “Gee, that’s a great idea. I’ll try it first.”

Flick, on the other hand, was a skeptic. He was always six months ahead of us and always on top of everything.

One day the wind was blowing out of the cold, frozen north and we were struggling on our way to school—me, Flick, Bruner, and Schwartz wearing our sheepskin coats, wearing those helmets with the goggles, snow up to our you-know-whats, trudging our way to the Warren G. Harding School, when one of those perennial kid myths is brought up.

Childhood is full of myths, and like I said, most people are believers and there are a handful of skeptics. One of the great myths we discovered was the Tongue Myth. The Tongue Myth said that if the weather was cold enough and you were to apply your tongue to a streetcar track or lick the grease off a hubcap on the bottom of an Oldsmobile, that your tongue would stick to this thing and it would tear your tongue off if you tried to pull it away. Bruner believed this myth so much that every time he walked past a metal telephone pole, he would give it a six-foot berth. Schwartz played it cool and didn’t say anything. Me? I was a believer.

So one day we are struggling through the ice and snow on our way to the Warren G. Harding School, and Schwartz says that if you stick your tongue to a metal telephone pole that it will stick so hard that you have to wait for summer to get it off.

Flick the skeptic was incredulous. “C’mon, you believe this stuff?” he asked. “It ain’t true.”

“I dare you to do it then,” Schwartz replied. “I double-dare you.”

This challenge can’t be ignored in kid-dom. Flick’s lip curled like an atheist at a Billy Graham meeting. The wind is blowing. The temperature stands at three degrees blowing off Lake Michigan, straight from the Arctic Circle like the breath of a wolf. And there’s the telephone pole with the wind whistling through the high-tension wires.

Throughout the story, Shep would make sound effects. He would cup the studio microphone and with his breath make the sound of the wind as it whistled across the high-tension wires. At dramatic moments he would turn on music that sounded like Wes Craven picked it. Then he continued.

So Flick stands up tall and says, “Who’s afraid of sticking his tongue to the telephone pole?” You rarely see an act of heroism in this life, and this was one of them. Flick walked right up, stuck his tongue out, and ZAP. Flick’s face whitened. Schwartz backed away. Bruner is on his knees, whimpering. I am circling around, waiting to see which way the wind is going to blow. And there is Flick with about a foot and a half of tongue riveted to the pole.

Schwartz says, “Okay, take your tongue off, Flick.” But all Flick can do is talk like he’s holding his tongue with his fingers.

The story went on for another half hour, and every detail was delicious. Shep, Bruner, and Schwartz abandon Flick and run to school, where they tearfully tell the teacher that Flick is outside with his tongue stuck to the telephone pole. Fire engines, police cars, the school nurse, and ambulances rush to the scene. Flick, of course, is eventually rescued, but not before Shep says,

Lo, this early morning we had all taken off to school after an innocent breakfast of Ralston’s and Cream of Wheat, and we had put on our high-top shoes and socks in such innocence, not knowing that today would be a day of total disaster.

And then he concluded, “It’s interesting to see an atheist like Flick get his comeuppance.”

By the time Shep finished his story, I felt like I had eaten a gargantuan plate of Nanny’s meat loaf with ketchup, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach, the supper that steamed up the windows of our house most Sunday afternoons. I could almost smell the blueberry crisp and taste the vanilla ice cream waiting in the kitchen for dessert. His words were comfort food. I lay on my back, hands behind my head, and looked at the ceiling. Shep’s tale of a goofy childhood experience and his candor about the hardships of childhood was balm to my soul.

I was about to turn over and go to sleep when the large brown water stain on the ceiling over my bed caught my eye. The previous winter, an ice dam had formed in a gutter, causing the leak that created the stain. I had glanced over that stain a million times, but tonight it captured my attention. The edges of the stain were more pronounced than its interior, and there was a dried bubble in the center. Around it were glow-in-the-dark stars I’d bought at a toy store on Greenwich Avenue. I’d stuck them to the ceiling without looking at the picture on the back of the package showing how to lay them out to look like a real night sky. There were numerous ringed Saturns and a few crescent moons thrown in for good measure.

I had never noticed until that night that the stain resembled a country on a topographical map, with its jagged borders and the bubble mountain stuck in the middle. I was seeing this country now surrounded by the heavens.

I didn’t know anything about the Bible in those days. I had never read Hebrews 11, the roll call of the saints who felt like “aliens and strangers on the earth” and who lived through hardship, all the while “longing for a better country.” They knew in their hearts, though, that God had prepared a city for them, and it gave them the gumption to carry on. I was given a revelation that night. Shep’s idyllic hometown of Hohman, Indiana, was not the center of the universe. It was only a signpost pointing to this other country that was infinitely more innocent and larger than my little world.

I felt that night as I felt during Communion—as if we were caught up in something bigger than we could grasp, and somehow the bread and wine were a visible sign of it. Every time I went forward to receive, I was re-upping to play some part in that story.

I’m not saying I understood any of this as I lay there in bed that night; I didn’t. As was so often the case in my life, it was a feeling that I now know was homesickness for God.

As I said, I wasn’t a student of the Scriptures, so I wouldn’t have been familiar with the verse from Proverbs 25 either: “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.”

Shep delivered the good news that saved my life that night. I slipped out of bed, put the Anacin back on my dresser, and went to sleep.

8

If God wanted a world filled with saints, He never would have created adolescence.

—SUSAN BETH PFEFFER

Something in me broke in the seventh grade. The boy who celebrated the Mass alone on a crude altar in the woods, the kid whose heart was inclined toward wonder, didn’t gently fade away as so often happens in the dark passage from childhood to adolescence; he vanished in the blink of an eye.

This is not the well-rehearsed story of the once-adorable child who temporarily goes through the pouty-lipped, surly adolescent phase, only to re-emerge at eighteen with a new perspective on life and a scholarship to Princeton. The conviction that I was an unlovable freak had metastasized in my heart so that I curved in on myself. I was beginning to make private everything that was good about me.

One of my favorite stores in Greenwich was Gene’s Bicycle Shop. New and used bikes hung from hooks on the ceilings like sides of beef in a butcher shop. As you walked through the store, you had to dodge and weave to avoid hitting your head on handlebars and spiked pedals. The old oak floor was covered in dust and cloud-shaped 3-in-One oil stains, and the never-ending sound of clicking gears played like Muzak in the background. I once went to Gene’s to get my orange ten-speed Raleigh fixed, and he said that my front tire was “out of true.” I had never heard the expression before. When a tire rim is bent or one of its spokes is missing or damaged, the wheel no longer spins straight, or true. It goes cockeyed and wobbly, and if it’s bad enough, riding on it becomes impossible.

That was it. I felt out of true.

I was sure there was some indefinable darkness in me that I needed to make reparation to God for, a shameful defect far more serious than the pedestrian inner flaws of my peers. I subconsciously decided I could either win my father’s love, restore my family’s former glory, and assuage the anguish I was experiencing at home by becoming the “good boy” who excelled at everything, or become a “bad boy” and gain my father’s attention that way.

It’s strange the way people trawl for love.

In the first two weeks of junior high school, something occurred that I couldn’t have anticipated: I became popular. I discovered that if I titrated my overdeveloped vocabulary with just the right amount of sarcasm, my peers thought it was funny, not to mention impressive. Teachers call this kind of student a precocious pain in the butt. In Washington I’m told they call them press secretaries.

Not all the popular kids at my junior high were model students; some were miscreants. I learned from this period in my life that if you put a hundred people in the same room, in less than two minutes the sociopaths will find each other and begin terrorizing the rest. The same thing happens on playgrounds and in prison yards. It also happens at the United Nations, but that’s a different conversation.

It was a criminally cold January afternoon and we had been given a day off from school because of a snow-and-ice storm. That’s how five seventh graders, whose IQ in the aggregate was nineteen, found themselves hanging out in a house with no adult supervision. It would have been safer to send a seven-year-old with a pack of matches into a garage filled with accelerants. I don’t remember everything that happened on this particular snow day, which ironically proves that I was there. I know that it was the beginning of a journey that would mark me forever.

The five of us ended up at my friend Grant Dixon’s house. Grant was physically more advanced than the rest of us. His upper lip was lightly feathered with black hair, and his voice had completely changed. This seemed unfair since he wasn’t even Italian. Despite the icy roads and schools being closed, Mr. and Mrs. Dixon still had to report to work, leaving Grant on his own for the day. If I were Grant’s mother, I would have called in sick or even quit my job and stayed home. Grant made Bernie Madoff look guileless. He required twenty-four-hour surveillance.

The five of us met up at Angie’s—our favorite hangout. Angie’s was a tiny general store whose management and product line were something straight out of Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series. Angie sold everything from penny candy to Copenhagen snuff. In 1972, the FDA didn’t require “sell by” dates, which was probably what saved Angie’s business. There were food products on the shelves that had been there when JFK was president. Angie was around fifty but looked much older. A chain smoker, she had a voice deeper than Johnny Cash’s. Nor was Angie discriminating about what she sold to whom. In the same transaction, she would sell a bag of gummy worms and a pack of Marlboro Reds to a twelve-year old. She didn’t ask who the cigarettes were for.

Angie’s had a back room with an antique Coke machine. Its seams were rusting and its white paint peeling. Boxes of leftover inventory—Hormel’s Corned Beef Hash, Claussen Pickles, boxes of Brillo Pads, and stacks of old issues of the Greenwich Times—lined the dusty, wainscoted walls. We would sit on top of the old soda cooler, smoke butts, drink orange Fantas, and talk for hours, until Angie got tired of us and threw us out. This is what happened on the fateful snow day and what led to our going over to Grant’s house to play air hockey.

Most seventh graders don’t set out to make trouble. They are like puppies with impulse-control disorders. Opportunities for mischief arise, and they can’t stop themselves. This is why they should be crate-trained. Grant, Jim, Daniel, Wiley, and I were in Grant’s basement, watching reruns of Scooby-Doo, when Jim made the fateful discovery.

“Hey, come look at this,” he called from the top of the stairs.

Jim had been looking for Froot Loops in one of the cupboards in the pantry and discovered a cabinet filled with every intoxicant imaginable. The only thing missing was an IV drip bag of propofol and Michael Jackson’s personal physician.

“Jeez, Grant, your parents are boozers,” Daniel said.

“Shut up, you idiot,” Grant said, nearly shoving Daniel down the staircase.

A group of children not suffering from oppositional defiant disorder would have closed the cabinet door and taken advantage of their snow day to get a head start on a science project or an English essay. We were not in this category. In terms of moral development, we were late bloomers.

Grant’s face lit up. “My parents make this drink with orange juice called a ‘screwdriver.’ Want to try and make one?” he asked.

We were gripped by indecision. We knew that this act represented a quick and significant step forward on the evolutionary ladder of deviance. Our hesitancy was short-lived.

“Let’s just have one,” we said, pleased with ourselves for being so temperate. A few of us would say these words a million times in the next twenty years, to diminishing effect.

“First, we need orange juice,” Grant said, rubbing his hands together and opening the refrigerator. Grant moved every item on every shelf, trying to locate the Tropicana while we anxiously peered over his shoulders. “Shoot, I don’t think we have any.”

“How about we use this?” Daniel said, holding up a jar of Tang powdered orange drink mix he had found on the lazy Susan on the kitchen table.

At one time Tang could be found in just about every home in America, but it’s hard to find in supermarkets anymore. The good people at Kraft Foods offer an interesting statement on their website:

We have heard that some consumers have used TANG Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG does contain citric acid, which can act as a cleaning agent.

TANG Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose.

This disclaimer goes a long way toward explaining why it’s not always easy to find Tang anymore. People don’t drink detergent if they have other alternatives.

But I digress.

We knew how to make Tang, but we were uncertain about the correct ratio of Tang to vodka for the perfect screwdriver. Half a glass of Tang and half a glass of vodka? One-third vodka to two-thirds Tang? Vice versa? I have no memory of what we decided. From this I infer that we erred on the side of more vodka than Tang.

“This tastes great,” Daniel said, making a controlled flop onto the couch so as not to spill his drink.

“It sure does,” everyone agreed.

I had a different reaction to the Tang screwdrivers. The other guys were intrigued by them. At our age, sneaking a drink out of the liquor cabinet was a novelty. None of them drank enough of it to get drunk—maybe giggly, but not loaded. In me, the drink opened up a place that I had forgotten about, a feeling that until that instant I didn’t know I grieved not experiencing anymore: it gave me something close to the joy and wonder I had felt alone in the woods with God.

The more I drank, the more intense this euphoria became. I was more at home in my own skin. My apartness disappeared.

I didn’t feel out of true.

“Whoa, Ian—slow down or you’ll puke.” Jim laughed.

I would have listened to Jim except I was busy downing more and more Todka (the name we adopted for our new cocktail) and fantasizing about all the other cool ingredients vodka might taste good with, like furniture polish or weed killer. I drank it like I was a dehydrated athlete. I’m surprised I didn’t pour it over my head like an overheated marathoner.

The Greenwich Times did not print my name or the details surrounding my need to be transported to the hospital by ambulance for suspected alcohol poisoning. Nor did they report that my bloodstream was so full of Todka that it could have caught fire like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

My first experience of drinking was a harbinger of things to come.

One of the most painful moments in my life was looking up at my mother from a hospital gurney in the emergency room. Her expression cycled from irate to sad to tired, then started again. She had rushed to the hospital with a coworker named Mark for support.

While my mom spoke to the doctor, Mark looked down on me and shook his head. “Doesn’t your mom have enough on her plate right now?” he whispered. “This is the last thing she needs.” If sympathy were a religion, Mark would’ve been an atheist.

The emergency room doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me a stern lecture about how hospitals are for sick people, not for seventh graders who OD on Smirnoff’s. He jabbed his finger a few inches from my face. “You show up here for this again and I’ll let you die,” he said.

This wasn’t true, but his point was well taken.

On the way home from the hospital, my mother said, “First, you’re done hanging around with those kids. Do you understand me? You’re making all new friends.”

I looked down at the car floor mats. “Okay,” I replied.

“Second, you’re grounded. Your grades are atrocious.” That was inarguable. Had anyone else ever failed wood shop? “You will come directly home every day after school and do your homework. And you will stay home on weekends until I say otherwise.”

That sounded a bit over-the-top. First I have to give up my friends, and now I’m under house arrest. I crossed my arms and looked out my side window. “How long am I grounded for?”

In the long silence that followed, I realized that I had just made an egregious tactical error. This wasn’t the time to ask my mother to calculate my sentence. She reminded me for the third time that I would have been charged with being drunk and disorderly if she hadn’t persuaded the policeman that the criminal justice system didn’t have the will, the means, or the constitutional latitude to inflict the kind of punishment waiting at home for me.

“A year,” she said, slapping the steering wheel.

I whipped around. “A year? Ron Decker ran over a cat with a lawn mower and didn’t get grounded for a year.” I didn’t mention that Ron went to a special school now.

My mother took one of those swats at me that moms do when they’re driving but want to beat their children at the same time. “Don’t talk back to me,” she said. “From now on, it’s a new program.”

The glands behind my ears felt tingly and hard. “Pull over,” I said.

“What for?” my mother asked.

Cold sweat poured down my back. “Just pull over,” I said louder, clawing at the door lock button with one hand and the door handle with the other.

It was too late. I threw up all over my jeans and the car floor. I laid my head back on the headrest.

“Good Lord,” my mother said. “Roll down the window.”

She reached into her purse and handed me a travel-sized Kleenex. I took the five-inch-by-two-inch piece of tissue between my thumb and index finger, dangled it in front of my eyes, and squinted at it, then at the car floor and my drenched pants. “And you think this will be helpful because … ?” I said.

She took another swing, this time connecting with the side of my head. I rubbed the spot where one of her rings had dug into my temple.

“I don’t know what’s happened to you. You were such a nice boy,” she said.

Mr. Lippmann, the social worker at my school, called me into his office two days after the Todka incident. “Ian, doctors think alcoholism is a disease passed down from one generation to the next. It troubles me that the first time you tried alcohol, you had trouble stopping. For some people, the disease kicks in the first time they pick up a drink. Given your family history, you’re statistically likelier to become an alcoholic than other people. You might want to think about staying away from alcohol in the future.”

I liked Mr. Lippmann and knew his concern was real, but I knew I would never become what my father was. I knew firsthand what that hellhole looked like, and there wasn’t a chance I’d fall into it.

Several weeks after our conversation, Mr. Lippmann pulled me aside in an empty stairwell. “So have you thought any more about what we talked about?”

I stood tall and looked him straight in the eye. “Mr. Lippmann, I’ve decided drinking isn’t for me,” I said. Ferris Bueller would have been proud.

His face softened, and he patted my shoulder. “That’s a mature decision, Ian. I’m proud of you.” He turned to walk down the stairs.

I felt a twinge in my gut that felt like guilt. What I couldn’t tell Mr. Lippmann was that since our meeting I’d found something that made abstaining from alcohol easier.

There was a boy in the ninth grade named Leonard. He was tall and gangly, with long, greasy blond hair and a jaundiced complexion. It’s only a matter of time before researchers determine that Leonard was Patient Zero for attention deficit disorder. Kids nicknamed him Ricochet after the cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit, who bounced off things to the sound-effect ping, ping, ping. Leonard had trouble focusing or staying on topic. You could tell him that you had just been shot and needed immediate medical assistance or you would die, and for a few seconds he would look sincerely alarmed, followed by a gradually increasing glassy stare, and finally he’d say something like, “Have you seen my math homework?” He and I were more acquaintances than friends, but we shared a gym locker and from time to time smoked cigarettes in the loft above the woodshop.

One afternoon during lunch, Leonard waved me over to the window where the dirty dishes and silverware were tossed.

He put his mouth next to my ear. “You want to get stoned?” he whispered.

“You mean like, smoke pot?” I asked.

His eyes darted side to side. “Be quiet, you moron. You want someone to hear you?”

This was unlikely. We were in a room with a hundred sugar-jacked junior high kids, chucking Ring Dings at each other and stuffing the socially vulnerable into the gray garbage cans on wheels that the janitors pushed around. You could stand next to a shuttle launch and hear the person next to you more clearly.

He looked around again. “I got a joint from my older brother,” he said, opening his hand just enough for me to see the twisted white paper stick cradled in his soiled palm. I’d never seen a joint before. This was a watershed moment.

My heart raced. “Have you tried it before?” I asked.

“Lots of times,” he said, smirking. “My brother showed me how.”

This was a big decision. I wanted more time to think about it, but I could tell Leonard wouldn’t wait all day for me to make up my mind.

“Where would we do it?” I asked.

Leonard’s eyes lit up. He knew I was almost on the hook. “I’ll meet you in the boys’ room, the one near the science lab on the second floor. Be there at two o’clock.”

My eyes widened. “In school? You’re kidding. We’ll get busted,” I said, struggling to keep my voice down.

He sniggered. “Trust me,” he said. “I’ve been doing it there for weeks.”

For the next two hours I wavered back and forth about whether smoking pot in a school bathroom with Leonard was a good idea. If we got caught I would have to make a run for an embassy and beg for asylum on humanitarian grounds to escape my mother getting her hands on me. But I decided that if getting high made that out-of-true feeling go away without involving a near-death experience like the one I’d gone through the first time I drank, then I was up for it. Besides, Rolling Stone magazine said Eric Clapton smoked pot, so how bad could it be?

It wasn’t bad at all.

Leonard was so grateful to have an accomplice that he wanted to get high all the time. I was glad to oblige, since he scored the joints from his brother and I didn’t pay a dime for them. We not only agreed to smoke pot daily, but we smoked it in the same place at precisely the same time. Every day at exactly 2 p.m. I asked my science teacher if I could go to the bathroom, and then returned fifteen minutes later looking and talking like James Franco’s character in the movie Pineapple Express. It makes one wonder what educators in the 1970s learned at those in-service teacher training days. The drug-awareness class must have been a woefully undersubscribed elective.

One day Leonard brought a kid named Bruce to our bathroom rendezvous. His contribution was Valium, stolen from his mother’s medicine cabinet. We’d smoke a joint, then take the Valium right before the last bell. The full rush would roll over me as I was walking home. My perception of reality would shift. The light became lemony, and the world became shimmery and new. For the first time, I was convinced I was seeing things as they really were. How else could I explain the tremulous radiance that emanated from everything my eyes fell upon? For a few hours I was relieved of the unrelenting self-consciousness that dogged me. For once I wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved or fixed. I was Adam strolling in the garden of Eden.

After coming back to earth, I would vaguely remember having felt the same way before, but I couldn’t remember where, and it all seemed like such a long, long time ago.

Never doubt the resolve of an angry mother, born of Celtic stock. When she said I was grounded for a year, she meant it like God meant the Ten Commandments. A few months into my house arrest, I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, eyes closed, listening on headphones to Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon with Waldo’s head resting on my stomach, when my mother came in and placed a black guitar case, a small amplifier, and a book filled with diagrammed chords next to me and left. The volume in my phones was cranked so high that I didn’t hear her.

What inspired this strange purchase? Had she been driving by a music store when the voice of God came over the car radio, telling her that an electric guitar would rescue her son from certain self-destruction? I don’t know. But when I opened my eyes and saw that gear, I felt what St. Simeon must have when he cradled the infant Jesus in his arms on the steps of the temple: “Lord, you now have set your servant free … For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior.”

The guitar was a black Les Paul knockoff with white trim and the brand name Explorer written at an angle on the head-stock. The amp was a used Fender Bronco with one eight-inch speaker and four watts of raw power. There was a short in the wiring that turned the tremolo on and off randomly, and the cabinet was riddled with chips and dents, but I was blind to its shortcomings because that’s what love does. I needed something to be good at. I was pathetic at sports, parents wouldn’t let their children hang out with me because I had earned a sketchy reputation, and although my grades had come up, I was still just a C student. But guitarists and songwriters are grown in the soil of adolescent angst, and that’s what I became.

I already played guitar a little. Years earlier, Nanny had given me a cheap, nylon-string model and sent me to the local YMCA for group guitar lessons. It was 1969. The first day, I walked into a steamy room stuffed with pudgy sixteen-year-old girls with acne who wanted to be Joni Mitchell, crying while they sang and plinked out “Both Sides Now.” I was nine and physically smaller than the guitar I had brought to the class. I only went twice, but in that brief time I was given the keys to the kingdom, namely the ability to play G, C, and D chords. Those three triads are all it takes to change a life. I might have disintegrated without them.

Every day, stoned or straight, I would come home from school, charge down to the basement, pull out my guitar, sit cross-legged on the cold, tiled floor with my Mel Bay guitar chord book open on my lap, and jam until my fingers bled, my butt fell asleep, or I couldn’t stave off the munchies any longer. Then I’d make a beeline to the kitchen, where I’d scarf down two sleeves of Fig Newtons and half a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes without coming up for air. For years Nanny would hug me and brag to people about how much I ate when I was a teenager. I would just nod and smile.

For the next two years, if I wasn’t actually playing music, I was lying on the floor, wearing headphones and listening to it. My brother Connor had a huge music collection, and I consumed it all. Eyes closed, I would imagine headlining at Madison Square Garden, fronting whatever band I was listening to, frenzied fans cheering me with unrestrained adoration.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t learned how to play guitar and write songs. God provided me with music as a spiritual foster home until I could find a permanent place to live. I no longer thought much about God, and when I did my thoughts turned dark. My life was one long, unanswered prayer. If there was a God, he was just like my father, a drunk who forgot to keep his promises to his children. It was up to me to make life work.

In tenth grade, I decided that playing the “bad boy” role had failed to get the attention I wanted from my father. It was time to give the “good boy” role a try. Leonard was sent to boarding school, so giving up pot wasn’t hard. I became a self-righteous teetotaler. I started showing up for classes, doing my homework, and getting decent grades. I put together a killer band that played at parties and dances, and lectured my friends on the evils of partying. I became good in the worst sense of the word.

My father’s life changed at the same time. By some miracle of God, he developed the ability to hold off from drinking during the day. His health improved enough so he could hold down a steady job again. Through connections, he became a stockbroker at a financial services firm. I’m sure there were days when he didn’t make it back to the office from a lunch that was more liquid than solid, but he pulled a fragile life together.

With our financial situation improving, mostly because of my mother’s success, my father and I began shooting trap and skeet at Greenwich Country Club or Riverside Yacht Club on Saturday mornings. He joined the exclusive Campfire Club in Chappaqua, New York, where we’d shoot sporting clays. The exclusively male Campfire Club, founded by Teddy Roosevelt, was filled with powerbrokers from around the world. My father began buying his clothes at Paul Stuart, wearing watches from Tiffany’s, and taking expensive trips with my mother. One day he pulled in the driveway with a new convertible British sports car.

“It’s an anniversary gift for your mother,” he said. I never once remember my mother driving that car.

I suspect this is also when he returned to working for the CIA. It’s difficult to explain my shock when I came across some Polaroids of my father on a golf outing with President Ford in what looks like Vail, Colorado. My father is in the foreground, dressed in a tie and cardigan sweater. In the distance, the president was putting while a few other men watched. I feel certain that the expressionless, thin-lipped men surrounding the area weren’t caddies. I didn’t even know my father played golf, much less that he played golf with the president.

I showed the photos to my mother. “What is Dad doing playing golf with President Ford?” I asked like a bullying prosecutor trying to intimidate his witness.

My mother held the pictures at a distance, scrunching her nose as if she needed reading glasses, which she didn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said breezily, handing the pictures back to me and returning to her work. “Your father has so many interesting acquaintances. Now please put these back where you found them.”

I tossed one of them on top of her work so she couldn’t avoid it. “Mom, that’s not just some ‘interesting acquaintance.’ That’s the president,” I said, pointing at the picture.

She picked it up and handed it back to me without taking her eyes off what she was doing. “Maybe, maybe not,” she replied. My mother could be brilliantly vague.

9

Surprises are foolish things … the inconvenience is often considerable.

—JANE AUSTEN

I was a sophomore in high school when I learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that my father was a spy.

There had been other clues along the way besides the pictures that I’d found earlier of my dad with the president. One night, for instance, I was at our dining room table, writing a report on Cuba, when my father happened past. My history textbook was open to a page that featured an oversized picture of a young Castro on it, delivering one of his famous six-hour speeches to a crowd of deliriously excited young people.

My father reached over my shoulder and jabbed Fidel’s photo with his index finger. “That guy’s a world-class SOB,” he said, then stood as if waiting for my reply.

I sighed. For weeks I had put off doing this assignment, and it was due the next day. I didn’t have time for a debate about international relations. “I suppose you’ll tell me you knew him?” I asked, talking more to myself than to my father.

“No,” he said. “But we did stare each other down from opposite ends of a bridge one night.”

He exited the room.

I dropped my pencil and looked up. What on earth was he talking about? A spy exchange? An assassination attempt? And whatever it was, why was my father mixed up in it? Or had he confused the picture of Castro with someone else he knew who wore a thick beard and an olive-green cap and military uniform, and spoke to thousands of cheering university students?

I put this brief interaction into the burgeoning Psychotic Things My Father Says file I kept inside my head, and went back to work.

Another night, we were watching the evening news when an old interview with former president Lyndon Johnson appeared on-screen. As with newspapers, my father talked to the TV as if it were capable of hearing and understanding him.

“Why are you giving this idiot the time of day?” he asked the Sylvania.

“Why get so worked up? He’s dead,” I said, turning to hang my legs over the arm of the chair. “It’s not like he’ll be running for office again.”

He glared at me. “That fool nearly got me killed once, that’s why,” he said, pointing his finger in my direction. He hoisted himself out of his chair with a grunt and exited the room. Why did he always drop bombs like this, then exit the room before I could ask him what he meant? Did he think I could verbally outmaneuver him, tricking him into revealing something that would threaten national security? I was a high school kid, not Bob Woodward.

All the did he or didn’t he? craziness came to an end when I was finally told about my father’s long association with the CIA. It was an unusually warm spring that year, and the humidity hung like milky drapes, blurring the Manhattan skyline just a few miles across Long Island Sound from Greenwich. From the western tip of Tod’s Point, not far from our home, you could barely make out Great Captain’s Island. It looked like the cover illustration of a Hardy Boys mystery novel, a brown shadow floating on the water enshrouded by a stifling velvet mist.

All across town, the signs of summer’s coming were everywhere. The thick blanket of crocuses that annually announced the arrival of spring covered the lawn of Second Congregational Church, and now the eighty-degree weather confirmed that classes would soon be over, friends would be coming home from boarding school and college, and summer would begin.

It was a year of new music that never got old: Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle,” the Eagles’ classic “Hotel California,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Black and Blue.” New music from an artist named David Bowie and a band called the Ramones could be heard blaring out of cars. There would soon be keg parties somewhere every night, late-night pool hopping at estates in the backcountry, blustery boasts about sexual conquests (most of which were lies), and the yearly ritual of being banned from country club golf courses for driving carts into water hazards. Most of us didn’t have summer jobs, at least not full-time ones, since our parents underwrote our expenses. It’s a good thing Focus on the Family didn’t know about us: James Dobson would’ve had an aneurysm.

I was getting ready to go out when my sister, Caroline, knocked on my bedroom door. She was home visiting for a few days.

“Mom wants to talk to you. She’s in the den,” she said, her voice trailing off as she continued down the hallway.

“Are you serious? Tyler’s waiting for me outside,” I said, throwing dirty clothes around my room in search of a clean T-shirt. Of course, Tyler had already been waiting in our driveway for twenty minutes. I could hear Led Zeppelin’s song “Kashmir” coming from the stereo in his forest-green BMW 2002. We were supposed to meet up with friends at the beach, and we were already late.

I opened my bedroom window and held up five fingers. “I need five more minutes!” Tyler rolled his eyes and slumped his forehead onto the steering wheel in mock despair. I would have added that I would join him as soon as my mother finished dropping a cluster bomb on my psyche, but I was unaware that this was an imminent event.

My mother was sitting in the yellow-and-maroon paisley wingback chair placed perfectly beneath an oil portrait of her as a young American socialite in England wearing a cornflower-blue evening gown. My father had commissioned a well-known portraitist to paint it when we lived in London. On her lap was the previous Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, opened to the crossword page. She was a whiz at blowing through these notoriously difficult brainteasers. Her sister wasn’t so bad either. The two of them would race to complete them and call each other the moment one of them finished to declare victory and compare answers. My mother almost always won. She would do them in ink too. Just for spite.

“What’s up?” I asked, breathless from running down the stairs.

“Darling, I need to speak to you for a few minutes,” she said.

Whenever the word darling was used in our home, it was code for “Steel thyself, child—we are about to have a life-altering conversation.” The last time my mother began a discussion by calling me darling, she informed me that my father wanted me to apply to boarding school at Taft. At the time, the idea made sense. My two brothers were out of college, and my sister was a successful Ford’s model living in Paris. I declined, saying that I had too many friends at Greenwich High School and I didn’t want to repeat my sophomore year. Looking back, I realize that I didn’t go because I didn’t want to leave my mother alone with my father.

“I want you home no later than six thirty, wearing a collared shirt and on your best behavior. We have someone joining us for dinner,” she said, not looking up from the crossword puzzle.

I grabbed the molding on top of the doorframe and halfheartedly tried to do a pull-up. “Who’s coming?” I grunted.

My mother put her pen down and looked up. “Your father is being considered for a job. They want to meet the family.”

I let go of the molding and stood in the doorway. “That’s kind of bizarre. What sort of company does that?”

My mother took off her reading glasses, placed the crossword puzzle on the coffee table, and folded her hands in her lap. “The Central Intelligence Agency,” she replied.

At first I half smiled and waited for my mother to slap her knee and yell, “Gotcha!” Then I realized that my mother wasn’t the “gotcha” kind. I walked into the room and sat on the edge of the sofa across from her. “You’re kidding, right?” I said.

My mother’s face softened, but her tone of voice remained serious. “Your father is being considered for an important position,” she said.

Even at sixteen, I knew that our government was about to make a mistake of biblical proportions. Choosing my father to head up anything, much less a key post in our nation’s intelligence services, would make the Bay of Pigs invasion look like an act of diplomatic genius. Had no one told the people in HR at Langley that my father was an irremediable alcoholic? It’s not like it would have taken much research. Even our Korean dry-cleaning lady knew my father had a drinking problem. Now I was gripped by a new terror. Who did they have carrying the nuclear football—John Belushi?

“Mom, Dad is a stockbroker. Before that he worked for an oil company and before that for a motion-picture company.”

“Well, that’s true.” She paused. “But not the whole truth. Your father has worked on and off for the CIA since before you were born.”

How can I convey how this conversation affected me? Imagine for a moment that your mother sits you down and tells you that you and the rest of your family are actually aliens from a galaxy far, far away, and that a rescue spaceship is coming back to pick you up in the parking lot of Costco at midnight.

Does that help?

I ran my hands through my hair. “But what about those other jobs?”

“They were covers,” she replied.

Cover? Did my mother just use the word cover?

Inside my head I heard the sparking and crackling of wires. Numerous connections were being made in my brain all at once. Had I suspected that my father did something strange on the side? Sure. But almost everything he ever did was out of the ordinary and unexplained. Last-minute business trips that turned into weeks or even months away from home. The days my father said he was going to Manhattan but returned home with matchbooks from hotels or restaurants in Washington left next to car keys and loose change on the side table by the front door.

My father never spoke about friends from the office. We never attended company parties like other families did.

Then of course there was the Mark Harper incident. Mark’s father and my father worked at the same brokerage firm. One night after band practice, Mark drove me home and started asking odd questions.

“Ian, who does your dad work for?” he asked.

I laughed. “You know where my dad works. He works for the same company your dad does.”

“My dad says there’s something screwy about your dad. He says your dad has an office next to his but only shows up once in a while. He hardly has any clients, and he never comes to any of their sales meetings or conferences. Seriously, what does your dad do?”

“You’re crazy, Mark. All I know is, my dad works at the same place your dad does.”

Now I knew that Mark and his dad weren’t so crazy after all.

“Mom, this is nuts,” I said, standing up. “Dad can’t possibly work for the CIA. He can hardly hold down a job,” I said. My mother gave me her death-ray stare. It was unacceptable to talk like this about family, true or not. Outside, Tyler had begun honking the horn. He was probably on the verge of losing consciousness in the heat. I stood up to leave.

My mother stiffened. “You can’t tell Tyler or anybody else about this,” she said.

I threw my hands in the air. “Who would believe me?”

I stormed out the front door and slammed it behind me. As I walked to Tyler’s car, my mind felt disconnected, wafting up into the highest branches of the tall oak that shaded our front yard. From that perspective, I looked down and saw myself get into the car and thought, Does anyone else live this way? Part of me wanted to tell Tyler that something had come up and I couldn’t go to the beach. Then I could drive down to Mianus Park, sit by the river, and try to solve the riddle of my family the way my mother did the New York Times crossword, only I couldn’t do it in ink since the facts kept changing. I took a deep breath and decided to pretend nothing had happened. That’s how we Cron kids survived.

Tyler turned down the stereo. “What the heck were you doing?” he asked.

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” I said, closing the car door. Then I realized it probably wasn’t wise to use that joke anymore.

When I got home from the beach, there was a tan Mercedes 450SL convertible with the top down parked in our driveway.

My heart sank. “My parents are going to kill me,” I said.

“Why?”

“I thought my mom said seven. She must have said six thirty.” I jumped out of Tyler’s car. “Let’s hang out tonight. Come over around eight thirty. Rustin Grant’s parents went to Nantucket. There’s a party at his house,” I said.

“He’s a jerk,” Tyler said.

“He’s a jerk with a half keg.”

Tyler smiled and nodded. “Good point,” he said. “See you at eight thirty.”

I tiptoed up to my room and changed, then ran downstairs and found my parents with … well, let’s call him Mr. Smith. They were on our patio, drinking iced tea.

“Hello. I’m Ian,” I said, walking out our back door, extending my hand, and looking Mr. Smith directly in the eyes.

Mr. Smith stood up. “Your parents have been bragging about you. It’s good to have a face to go with your name,” he said, gripping my hand, so tightly that I nearly yelped.

My parents were dead serious about social protocol. My brothers and I had at one time been required to wear jackets and ties to dinner on Sunday nights. Whenever my mother entered the dining room, we were expected to stand and remain standing until she had taken her seat. Before guests arrived, my father drilled us on the proper way to meet people: “Always look people in the eye when you meet them. Make sure your grip is strong—not viselike, but confident. You’ll never offend anyone by calling him sir. Your wingtips should be polished till you can see your reflection in them. Men can tell a lot about other men by the way they take care of their shoes.”

My father believed shoes told you everything you needed to know about a man. If a man’s shoes were scuffed and unkempt, so was his character. If they were waxed and shined, he was morally peerless. He had an electric buffer in his bedroom. It had a long, silver, vertical pole with an on-off switch at the top, and at the bottom two round brushes, one red and one black, on either side. The brushes spun so fast they would burn your hand if you touched them. You used the red brush first, after you applied the Kiwi polish to your shoes, then finished off the shine with the black one. My father didn’t know the names of my friends or teachers, nor over the course of eleven years had he attended more than one or two events at my schools, but the man knew footwear.

Mr. Smith wasn’t wearing a dark suit with a bulge in his jacket where he kept his gun. He didn’t wear dark Ray-Bans, nor did he have a pen in his pocket that looked like it might fire poison darts. He looked like he had stopped by our house on his way home from playing a round of golf at a local country club, which turned out to be the case. I had expected Sean Connery in a hand-tailored Gieves & Hawkes suit, but instead I got a pudgy Arnold Palmer in madras shorts and grass-stained loafers, with a white leather golf glove sticking out of his back pocket. I was disappointed. It was like finding out your parents had hired a clown to be the entertainment at your sixteenth birthday party when you had been expecting the Rolling Stones.

Eventually, I learned that lots of people who work for the CIA were like my dad. Many of the really important guys didn’t have desks at Langley; some didn’t even collect paychecks from the government. Many of them were to be found in the upper echelons of corporate America while serving the Agency at the same time. This was one of those guys. I recognized his name from around town and from the newspapers. He was a major player in corporate America and later became an ambassador to a country significantly more important to our national interests than Togo.

“What kinds of things do you like to do, champ?” he asked. “You play sports?”

I hated being called champ. It’s what adults call you when they don’t think it’s worth the trouble to remember your name.

“No, sir, I spend my time watching TV and stealing car radios to feed my heroin habit.”

I didn’t say this. I wanted to, but I didn’t.

“I’m not much into sports, sir. I enjoy music. I play trumpet in the school orchestra. I have my own band as well,” I said.

“A rock band?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

Mr. Smith smiled. It wasn’t the “Wow, it’s so cool that you’re a creative person, and I’m curious to know more about you” smile. It was a chilly “I-would-like-you-so-much-more-if-your-name-was-Bucky-and-you-played-golf” smile. Mr. Smith was a disappointment when I met him. Now he was a disappointment and an idiot.

Mr. Smith cleared his throat and got down to business. “Champ, how would you feel about making a move to another country? After all, you’re just about to start your junior year.”

My heart dropped through my shoes. “Move to another country?” I asked.

Mr. Smith looked at my parents. He crossed his legs and shifted around in his chair like he was sitting on a hot plate.

“The position we’re discussing is headquartered in Eastern Europe,” my father said.

Eastern Europe? I thought about the grainy, black-and-white news footage from the 1950s of people being shot by Soviet border guards while trying to get through barbed-wire barricades, or being electrocuted while trying to climb electric fences to escape Soviet-occupied countries in Eastern Europe. Why would anyone volunteer to go someplace other people were dying to get out of?

I took a deep breath. “I think it would be a great adventure, sir,” I said.

Mr. Smith winked at me and pumped his fist in my direction. “Atta boy,” he said.

My father smiled.

Mr. Smith stood. My father and I joined him. He placed his hands on his lower back and stretched like we’d put him through a workout. “Not as young as I used to be,” he said. “My back can’t take eighteen holes anymore.”

I wanted to suggest that losing thirty pounds might help, but I resisted.

“Jack, you’ve got a wonderful family,” he said.

“Thanks for coming by,” my father said.

“Anne, thanks for the iced tea. It was just what I needed,” he said, taking my mother’s hand.

“We’ll be in touch, Jack,” I heard Mr. Smith say to my father as they walked into the house.

I collapsed into a teak chair with a gray-and-white striped cushion. “Eastern Europe? Are you kidding me?” I said to my mother, then buried my face in my hands.

Two guys with mustaches and aviator glasses, wearing suits and driving a tired-looking black BMW, followed me to and from school for a week. I would pull out of our street, look in my rearview mirror, and see them behind me. They must have thought that driving a BMW would fool me into believing they were locals. But after a few days of the same two men tailing you to and from school, you concluded that they either worked for the government or were perverts. And these guys were way too cool looking to be pedophiles.

On day one, I felt flattered that I was being followed. On days two and three, it started to creep me out. Neither guy smiled or talked. On days four and five, I started to get angry that the federal government was spending money on having two men tail a sixteen-year-old who played trumpet in the marching band. By day seven, I decided that these nice men needed to be given an exhaustive tour of the town. Greenwich is not small. It is 67.2 square miles of winding New England roads and lanes. Even longtime residents come across streets they’ve never heard of before. For two hours I zigzagged from one end of town to the other. It didn’t take long for them to figure out I was onto them, especially when I waved to them in the rearview mirror. The guy in the passenger seat said something to the driver, who just shook his head. They eventually pulled into a gas station, and I continued on.

When I got home, I told my father about being followed.

“They want to make sure you’re not doing things that could be an embarrassment later on. I’ll take care of it,” he said.

I never saw them again.

Several weeks later, my mother told me that my father hadn’t been selected for the post in Eastern Europe. He was diabetic, was a heavy smoker, had suffered two minor strokes, had undergone liver surgery, and did I mention he was an alcoholic? The results of his physical exam suggested that the stress associated with the job would have been too much for him.

Given that medical history, the stress of getting a haircut might have been too much for him.

A few days after my father was passed over for the job at the CIA, I came home late from a party, turned off the lamp on the sideboard in the living room, and turned to tiptoe upstairs to my bedroom. My eyes just caught the tiny, blazing orange dot, like a firefly’s final, yet beautifully courageous effort to shine, through the big bay window that looked over our backyard. I looked closer and made out the dim silhouette of someone standing in the middle of the yard. It was my dad, the tip of his cigarette ablaze as he took a long drag, his face lifted toward the sky. It was well after midnight. I leaned against the frame of the opening to our dining room and watched him from the shadows. A pang of sadness pierced me. I was relieved not to be moving to Eastern Europe, but I was sad for my father. This had been a chance to start over, to recover years of lost self-respect. Maybe he hoped to become someone we could all be proud of. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I would have gone to Europe to see him get a second shot.

Usually, I would’ve gone straight to my bedroom, but an instinct, primal and basic to a son’s heart, drew me to be with my father. I quietly opened the screen door and walked down the rose-lined path that led to the open yard.

“Hi,” I said, coming alongside him.

My father turned to me, silvery in the moonlight. He had been crying. The crooked paths of his tears down his cheeks ended at his lower jaw, where they must have pooled for a moment before falling to the earth.

I’d only seen my father cry three times. I was no more than seven or eight the first time. It was a Saturday, and my father had just come home from visiting his brother Kenny at a psychiatric hospital in New York. I had never met Uncle Kenny, nor was he spoken about much in our home. He was like Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird—a mysterious and vaguely ominous figure only my father was allowed to see.

During an invasion in Belgium, Kenny had accidentally parachuted into a tree. His canopy and lines became so entangled in the branches that he wasn’t able to free himself. As he hung on the tree, a passing German soldier stabbed him with his bayonet and left him for dead. Kenny survived the injury to his body, but the wound to his mind wouldn’t close. A few months after returning home, he began wearing his combat boots and sleeping with a knife under his pillow. Soon he started telling people he was Jesus. The family felt they had no alternative but to have him institutionalized.

When he came home from seeing Kenny that Saturday, my father went straight to his bedroom, closed the door, and wept loudly enough that I could hear him from the bottom of the stairs. I asked my mother what had happened. She said that while the two of them were talking, Kenny hiked up his pants and my father saw serial numbers written in black Magic Marker on his brother’s white socks. I was a little boy, so I didn’t understand why this would upset him, but my mother said it had made him very sad.

The second time I saw my dad cry, I was ten. My father took me to see the movie Patton. As I recall, there’s a scene where the camera pulls back and reveals a battlefield strewn with the twisted corpses of dead soldiers. When he realized how graphic and awful the scene was, he cupped his hand and placed it over my eyes. I looked through the gaps between his fingers like blinds on a window and saw him wiping away tears with the back of his hand. As he did, he said, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” until the scene was over. I was an Irish Catholic kid. I knew the difference between taking the Lord’s name in vain and praying. This was praying.

Under the moonlight in our yard was the third time I saw tears on my father’s face.

I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my corduroys. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “I know that job meant a lot to you.”

My father was looking into the sky. “I loved flying on nights like this,” he said, referring to his days as a pilot in the war.

I tried to peer toward the same point in the sky he was looking at. “What was it like up there?” I asked.

He whistled. “The glint of moonlight on the nose of the plane, the glow on the instrument panel, the purr of a Rolls-Royce engine. It was something. Alone in a tiny cockpit, three hundred miles per hour,” he said, like he was talking to himself. “Twenty-five thousand feet above the earth and twenty-five thousand feet closer to God.” His voice trailed off.

There is a photo of my father in a fleece-lined leather flight jacket, wearing a radio headset over his crush cap. He was all business in that picture. It was probably the one they took to send home to your family when you were confirmed killed or reported missing in action.

“Sounds beautiful,” I said.

“I was only a year or two older than you,” he said, shaking his head. “Lost a lot of friends. Still, there’s nothing like flying under a full moon.”

“You sound like you miss it,” I said.

“You start missing things at my age,” he said.

Every so often the door that separated my father and me would crack open and I would scramble to find the words to ease it open a little more, or at least keep it ajar a little longer. This time it was him who nudged it open further.

He exhaled. “Do you know why I didn’t get that job?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

“I wrote checks against my life I couldn’t cover,” he said, looking down at his foot, crushing his cigarette into the grass.

I crossed my arms and thought for a minute. Finally I said, “I don’t know what that means, Dad.”

He smirked. “Don’t write checks against your life that you can’t cover. That’s what it means.”

He put another cigarette between his lips and lit it. I hadn’t realized how smooth the skin on his face was, until the crackling flash of the match illuminated it. He looked like the young man in the leather jacket with the fleece lining, not yet ravaged by the life to which he had resigned himself. He would look older in the morning.

The crack in the door closed. I knew well the awkwardness that followed these moments. It was better to leave.

“Good night, Dad,” I said.

“Good night,” he said.

I trekked across the dewy lawn to the house.

That night I tossed and turned until one of my restless limbs swatted the clock radio off my bedside table, crashing it into the side of my dresser. I wormed over to the edge of my mattress to grab its power cord and drag it back. The oversized numbers illuminated by a faint orange glow read 4:00 a.m. My heart sank; I wanted this fitful night to be over. I slid the clock back onto the table and sat up to gather the sheets that had been kicked into a swirling mass at the end of the bed. I reached even farther to retrieve my quilt that hung over my footboard like a plaid waterfall.

Before resting my head back onto my pillow, I glanced through the window next to my bed that looked out over our backyard.

My father was still there.

10

Alcoholism isn’t a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.

—JOYCE REBETA-BURDITT

The Lucky Charm was a workingman’s bar located in the middle of a dilapidated housing project in Stamford, the city next door to Greenwich. Every week our local paper reported that a drug dealer or gang member had been shot or stabbed to death in that neighborhood. The Charm, as we called it, was a cinder-block fortress. The building’s facade was fitted with a small window covered by rusty security bars and a thick oak door with leaf-shaped hinges and an arched top. The owner must have felt that placing these medieval touches on the entrance would help customers feel like they were entering a friendly tavern in Merrie Olde England rather than taking a tour of the set of Black Hawk Down.

In the fall of my junior year, my mother’s work began requiring more travel. My older brother Phillip was married and living on the other side of town; my brother Connor was with friends on a farm in upstate Connecticut; while my sister, Caroline, was living and modeling in Paris.

Several days a week, it was just Dad and me in the house.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. My father was bitter that he’d been passed over for the post in Eastern Europe, my mother wasn’t home to keep an eye on him, and I was working overtime to get into college.

Children of alcoholics are pros at adapt-and-survive. My days were methodically planned. I would go home after school to let Waldo out and relax. I knew my father would arrive home at around 6 p.m., often after having stopped at a restaurant or the club for drinks, so I’d leave the house at 5:45 and go to the Lucky Charm, where I would spread my textbooks and papers out over two tables in the empty dining room. I would eat, do my homework, or even get a head start on future assignments.

By 9:30, my father would either be conked out in his oversized chair in the study or have gone to bed. At 9:40, I’d leave the Charm and drive home. Playing it safe, I’d turn off my Bug’s engine and headlights and coast the last fifty yards down the little hill to our driveway. I would walk around to the back of the house and peer through the window to see if my father was in his chair. If he wasn’t, I’d cross my fingers and hope he was in bed, rather than in the bathroom or some other part of the house. But one had to be prepared for anything.

For me, being prepared meant not leaving the Charm without a good buzz on. If you got home and all was well, then being lit helped you drift off to sleep quicker. If all was not well, then you were fortified against what might be waiting.

For instance, some nights Dad would be drunk and jovial and marching around the house, singing German songs he’d learned during the war. Sometimes he’d make me join him. If that sounds harmless, then you’ve never been taken hostage by someone else’s idea of fun. It’s easier when you’re buzzed.

Other times, I came home and the house felt off beam, like a sneering prankster had moved everything two or three inches from where it had been content to sit or hang for years.

One night I was shaken from a deep sleep by the sound of my father yelling from downstairs. He’d been sleeping in his chair when I tiptoed into the house hours earlier, but apparently he’d awoken and was drinking again.

“Phillip … Connor … Ian, get down here!” he barked.

More often than not, it took my father several attempts to land on the right name of the child he wanted to see. Sometimes even our dog, Waldo, made it onto the list. My father’s tone of voice was amped up and brusque, so I didn’t even take the time to put on my pants or shirt. I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs and across the house to the study.

“You’ve got five seconds!” he yelled as I barreled into the study. He was sitting in his chair, feet up on an ottoman, hands folded across his stomach, grinning like a well-fed cat.

I instinctively performed an appraisal comparable to a Homeland Security Threat Assessment. Were we facing a Low, Guarded, Elevated, High, or Severe Threat Level? Did the situation call for me to raise the threat level from Yellow to Orange, or should I make the rare hurdle to Red? These assessments took seconds and were based on a subjective but historically accurate visual appraisal.

First were the eyes. I could determine how drunk my father was by where his gaze was directed when he spoke to me. If he could maintain steady eye contact, even of the glazy variety, that meant he’d only had three or four drinks. If while addressing me his gaze was fixed on the center of my forehead, it was certain he was at least three-quarters of the way into a bottle of something flammable.

The second phase of the Threat Level Assessment was more nuanced. To gauge his mood I had to figure out what type of liquor he’d been drinking. Vodka made him arrogant and overbearing. Too much Stolichnaya and he became an authority on everything. Wine was tricky. It made him either mischievous and playful or mawkishly nostalgic for the good old days. Single malt Scotch, however, was the dark prince’s elixir. It made him cruel.

This was a single malt Scotch night. We were at Threat Level Red.

“Bring me another Glenlivet and water,” he said, holding out his empty glass with one hand and flicking his fingers in the direction of the dining room, where an antique cart filled with crystal decanters and tumblers sat in the corner. I gaped at him, heart pounding from being scared out of a deep sleep at 1 a.m., breathless from having sprinted across the house.

“That’s what you want?” I asked.

He frowned. “Do as you’re told, corporal.”

What made this request so heartless was that the bar cart was no more than fifteen feet away from him, in full view of his chair.

Then I understood. My father didn’t want a cocktail. He was staging a play. He was starring as lord of the manor, and I was playing the role of the cowering serf. The plot required a scene in which the antagonist keeps the lowly servant in his place by humiliating him. He’d done things like this before, but never to this degree.

My jaw locked until my teeth hurt. Sweat formed on my chest. “I’m not doing it,” I said, my body taut and trembling.

He leaned forward and placed his hands on the worn arms of his chair. “You’ll do as you’re told, corporal.”

The tendons in my neck tightened painfully. I squinted at him. “You woke me up in the middle of the night and made me run across the house to make you a drink?” I said, hissing through clenched teeth. As I continued, my voice built to a roar. “I have school tomorrow, you stupid drunk!”

My final three words detonated in the space between us like a thermobaric bomb, the weapon that turns air into fire. From the time I was small, I’d been told that my father was a “sick man” with a history of life-threatening medical problems. Whenever we were close to exploding at him because we couldn’t take anymore, we would be pulled aside and reminded that making him angry could lead to his having a stroke or heart attack, and that his death would be our doing. Of course, the people who said this didn’t believe it. They were terrified of conflict, and would do anything to keep my father on an even keel, even if it meant making children believe that their words, even words that were true and needed to be voiced, could somehow kill people. When I was a child, I’d believed what I was told. Even then, as a young man, that message remained unchallenged. Some part of me still believed my words were potentially lethal, and now I had loosed them.

My father glowered. “That’s insubordination, corporal,” he said, rising unevenly and shaking out his hands.

“You come near me,” I said, pointing at him, “and I swear, I’ll—”

“You’ll be bucked down to private for this.” He took a swipe with his foot at the ottoman that separated us, but missed and reeled.

I charged him. I drove my left shoulder into his chest, launching him back into his chair. Had the chair not been snug to the wall, its back would have flipped over, spilling us onto the floor in a heap of tangled limbs and twisted history. A piece of the chair’s wood frame cracked, while the rest of the chair protested with groaning creaks and sighing cushions. The lamp on the side table crashed into the wall, and the exploding light-bulb flashed white, while Waldo barked and whined.

I wish I could claim it was a long and desperate struggle, but it was more like tackling a scarecrow. I stood back up, then leaned over him, pinning his arms back, my face inches from his. His breathing was heavy, and his breath reeked of cigarette smoke and Scotch.

“If you ever do this again,” I whispered. “I’ll—”

He spat in my face.

My head recoiled. I stood up straight, looking down at him as he wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand, never once taking his eyes off me. I knew this gesture was fraught with meaning, but my heart was too young to fully grasp it.

I raced back upstairs. I wiped my face on a towel I’d left on my floor, threw the same clothes on I’d worn earlier that day, heaved my book bag over my shoulder, and dashed out the front door half-dressed. I pulled into a gas station parking lot to button my shirt, put my pants on right, and buckle my belt. It was too late at night to call Nanny or show up at a friend’s house, so I headed to the high school.

On the way, I passed St. Joseph’s Church, and my eyes were drawn to something I’d never considered before. The gold cross atop the steeple, illuminated by concealed lights, was bare. I was taught in Catholic school that crucifixes should be “inhabited,” meaning that the battered corpse of Jesus should remain hanging on the cross to remind humankind of the terrible sacrifice the Savior made on its behalf. The more lifelike and gruesome the crucifix, the better. Most Protestants believe crosses should be uninhabited as a sign that Jesus is no longer dead but risen. As I watched the empty cross at St. Joseph’s fade in my rearview mirror, I realized that the Protestants were right—the cross should be empty. But for a different reason than the one they offered.

The cross was empty because there was no Savior to put up there.

There was no God who loved me or my father or anyone else so much that he died for us.

Jesus’ tomb wasn’t empty. It just hadn’t been found yet.

For two thousand years, people had followed someone no different from my crazy Uncle Kenny. He thought he was the Messiah too. I wished Jesus had died and stayed dead. Instead, he’d hung around for two thousand years making promises he couldn’t keep.

I drove to the high school and pulled into the most sought-after space in the lot. Small consolation. I tilted the rearview mirror down and saw a dried patch of my father’s spit still on my face. I grabbed an old T-shirt from the backseat, wet it with my tongue, and rubbed it off. Years later I would realize that I had rubbed it in.

It was only a matter of time before he called. I had a hunch that waking up with bruised ribs, discovering the broken lamp, and not being able to remember what had happened would rattle him. Sooner or later, he’d call, fishing for clues. I was working on an Honors Asian History paper at my mother’s desk when the phone rang.

“Hi. Your mother home yet?” my father asked.

I rolled my eyes. My mother’s itinerary had been on the refrigerator door for days. He knew her plane didn’t land at LaGuardia until 8 p.m. Clue fishing always began with lame but innocent-sounding questions.

I stood up and held the phone between my ear and shoulder and lit a cigarette. “Not till nine thirty,” I said.

He chuckled. “Oh, that’s right.” I was waiting for him to say something about having a senior moment. Instead, I heard the rapid click of his reel as he cast his line out again.

“What time did you come home last night?” he asked. I heard him shuffling papers in the background. He was working it.

“Around ten,” I said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

“I was wiped last night. I must’ve been in bed by then,” he said, the end of his sentence on the verge of sounding like a question rather than a statement.

I made him wait a long time before I said, “No, you definitely weren’t in bed.”

The paper shuffling stopped. Now he knew something had happened the night before, and he could tell from my cold answers that it had been serious.

He sighed. “Your mother told me that if anything happened while she was away on business, she’d leave me,” he said. “You don’t want that on your conscience, do you?”

I pulled the handset away from my ear and thrust my middle finger at it before bringing it back.

“I’ve got to go,” I said and hung up.

11

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who know where their high school yearbook is and those who do not.

— SLOANE CROSLEY

Three thousand kids attended Greenwich High School. We had no idea how good we had it. The state-of-the-art facility and the tastefully manicured grounds eclipsed those found at most small colleges. The crown jewel of the campus was the student center. An acre in size and maybe four stories tall, it was described as the second-largest “room” in Connecticut. The space was ample to accommodate several large trees planted in enormous concrete pots and grand spiral staircases that wound down from two of the four academic houses. To get from one class to another, kids often had to pass through the student center, so when the bell rang, the place became Grand Central Station at commuter rush hour. At its quietest moments, there were still hundreds of students in the center, eating, studying, or lounging during free periods.

The student center was a case study in adolescent anthropology. It was broken up into unofficial neighborhoods where kids sat according to their standing on the social food chain. The popular kids, or “preppies,” as they were called, occupied the middle. The drama club types and marching band kids sat under one of the staircases near the entrance to the cafeteria; the stoners loitered by the doors that led to the science wing; the kids who smoked hung out by the exit doors in front of the library, where they could pop out for a butt whenever they wanted to; the jocks hung out in a zone next to the cool kid area; and the kids who thought they were above being on the social food chain at all congregated near the main entrance, until they flunked out and were packed off to boarding school.

The kids in wheelchairs, the lost souls with oozing acne, the students in special programs who drooled or talked to themselves, and anyone deemed freakish had their own area as well. We avoided it. No teenager wants to see someone whose outside looks like the person they feel themselves to be on the inside.

By senior year, I had become one of the cool, preppy kids who sat in the middle of the student center. Like a lot of them, I not only played hard but studied hard.

In Greenwich, the pressure to get into the right college was suffocating. Over-caffeinated parents spent fortunes on SAT prep camps, educational consultants, and private tutors. They would chew their nails and argue about whether their kids had picked the right combination of extracurricular activities or put in enough hours teaching poor kids how to read to make an admissions officer’s heart go pit-a-pat. All this so you would get into one of fifteen schools. If you did, you were considered to have made it. What kept you awake at night was thinking about how many qualified applicants there were relative to the number of available spots in the freshman classes of these schools. There were hundreds of kids scratching and clawing for every space. It was a cage match.

I knew from the moment I read about it that I wanted to go to Bowdoin College in Maine. Bowdoin is one of a group of small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast called the “Little Ivies.” It was a top-ten liberal arts college, but that wasn’t why I wanted to go there. I believed that if Bowdoin took me, I would magically stop feeling out of true. It would be like God saying the lien on my happiness had been removed. It would mean no more going through the day asking, “How do I compensate for who I am?” I thought this mysterious voice could make me believe what I couldn’t make myself believe: I belonged on earth.

I spent two hours just completing the personal information section of the application. If there was a way to wordsmith your name, address, and phone number, I was going to find it. I made fifty people read my essay while I stared into their eyes to see how it was grabbing them. If after finishing they didn’t cry, “My God, it’s a triumph!” and hug me, I would be wrecked.

I was betting everything I owned on one horse: Bowdoin.

I sped home from school every day to check the mail for the decision letter from Bowdoin. Like every kid waiting to hear from a college, I believed that if the envelope was thick and heavy, it was good news. A fat envelope meant it contained an acceptance letter along with all kinds of other forms you needed to fill out and send back in. It was bad if the letter was light and thin. This was the one-page rejection letter with advice on how to break the news to your unhinged parents.

On a gray Friday afternoon I pulled into our driveway. It was covered in thick, lumpy ice, deeply grooved and rutted by our cars pulling in and out. I trekked across the tundra to the mailbox. Nothing but a three-inch stack of Christmas catalogs and a few bills.

My shoulders fell. “Give me a freaking break,” I said to myself.

Then I saw it. The corner of a letter stuck between the pages of an L. L. Bean catalog. I slipped it out slowly and saw the words Bowdoin College Admissions Department in the return address. I gasped, threw the mail back into the box, and ran inside.

I paced the living room rug until I thought I’d wear a hole in it. I smoked one cigarette after another until I ran out. I dialed Tyler’s number to have him come over to open the letter for me but hung up before someone answered. Secretariat would’ve been shocked by the number of bowls of oat bran I consumed. I pulled back the curtains in the living room and stared out the window at the mailbox and the light coating of ice and snow on top of it, then repeated the same routine.

It was now five o’clock and getting dark. I couldn’t hold this off forever. But there was so much riding on what was in that mailbox. I’d worked my butt off to get the kind of grades that made me even eligible to get into a top college, and I’d done it while living in a house with a madman. I had succeeded at playing the “good boy” role, and even though it hadn’t won my father’s love yet, I’d found some measure of self-respect. I felt I deserved this check in the win column. Even though I didn’t much believe or care about God anymore, as I marched to that mailbox without a jacket, the cold wind slicing my 128-pound frame, I shot an arrow into the low ceiling of pewter-colored clouds: Let me have this one, okay?

I extracted the letter from the mailbox with all the care of a surgeon removing a tumor and compared its weight to all the other letters that had come. I placed the admissions letter in one hand and another standard business envelope in the other, but all I learned was that you lose the ability to differentiate one ounce from two ounces when your hands are shaking. I’d have to open it. I walked back to the house and stood in my living room. I looked up at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and tore open the envelope. My heart leaped halfway up my throat when I saw that there was a letter and a green card inside. Now I ripped the envelope away and pulled out the cover letter. It read something like this:

Dear Ian,

The Admissions Committee has completed the selection process for Bowdoin’s Class of 1982, and while we are unable to offer you admission at this time, we have placed you on our Wait List.

Candidates on the Wait List are the first to be considered for admission should space become available in the class. It is important to note, however, that in a typical year more than five hundred applicants are placed on the Wait List, from which only a very small number are chosen to join the incoming freshman class. We strongly advise wait-listed applicants to be realistic and pursue other options should a spot at Bowdoin not become available.

Please complete and return the enclosed Wait List card by April 7 to indicate whether or not you wish to stay on the Wait List. If you opt to remain on it we will give you an update by late May.

We know this letter comes as a disappointment to you. The college application process is stressful and being placed on the Wait List only prolongs that stress. We would not ask you to endure this process if we did not believe you were the kind of applicant we would like to see at Bowdoin.

Regardless of where you choose to go to college, we thank you for your interest in Bowdoin and wish you the best for your future.

Warmly,

James Fitzpatrick

Director of Admissions

I fingered the letter. It was weighty, made from a more expensive grade of stationery than less-important letters. The added heft gave it gravitas, but even worse, a sense of finality. I collapsed into the wingback chair under the oil portrait of my mother. I placed the point of my elbow on the worn arm and rested my chin on my closed fist. I stared into space. The Wait List letter with its two razor-sharp folds lay in my lap. The message was twilight—neither day nor night. I wasn’t accepted, but I wasn’t rejected. I wasn’t in, but I wasn’t out. I was in college purgatory.

I picked up the letter again, but the words read differently now.

Dear Champ,

At first the Admissions Committee decided to accept you, but just before the letters went in the mail we took a closer look at your application and realized you weren’t what you appeared to be at first glance. You present like the perfect candidate until discerning people like us get under the paint and see who you really are. Perhaps if you had just worked a little harder or come from a less screwy family, you might’ve been able to compensate for your personal deficiencies. Alas, you fell short and always will.

I wasn’t angry. I didn’t cry. I didn’t tear up the letter or crush it into a ball and toss it away, nor did I burn it. I left it on the sideboard with the rest of the mail and went upstairs to my bedroom. I’d made plans to see the Steve Miller Band that night in Hartford with Tyler and two other good friends, Andy and Harlan. I was depressed enough that I would have backed out and stayed home, but I was the only guy with a car.

I lay on my bed with my hands behind my head and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the pictures I’d seen in the Bowdoin catalog of kids playing Frisbee on the quad, and of how I’d imagined being one of them. What an idiot.

I remembered as a boy hearing a priest give a children’s sermon about how God answers prayer. He said, “God answers prayers one of three ways: yes, no, or not now.” Maybe if I half believed in God, then I’d have interpreted being wait-listed as God’s way of saying not now, and trusted him for whatever was next. But God didn’t say anything. God was a deaf-mute.

I was thirty minutes late picking up Harlan, Andy, and Tyler. Thankfully, all three were waiting at Harlan’s house, so I didn’t have to drive all over town to pick them up one at a time. I’d gone back and forth about whether to tell them the disappointing news about Bowdoin and finally decided not to for two reasons. First, I’m not immune to magical thinking. What if at that moment the admissions director was driving home from the office, anguishing about my application, and changed his mind? What if he called tomorrow and said that he’d accept me, but only if I hadn’t told anyone about having been wait-listed yet?

The second reason was that I’d awakened from my nap in a vengeful state of mind. Bowdoin could screw itself. I didn’t need their approval. I was going to prove how little I cared about their laughably disguised rejection letter by going out and having the time of my life, or else.

“About time you showed up,” Harlan said, bending to cram himself into the backseat of my car, with Andy following so close behind that his head was nearly up Harlan’s butt.

Tyler settled into the passenger seat and closed the door. He turned and looked over his shoulder. “You guys got enough room back there?” he asked, grinning.

His question was answered by hand gestures, neither of which were A-OK signs.

Tyler had phoned me an hour earlier to call “shotgun” on the trip up and back to Hartford. Guys didn’t normally call and make reservations to ride in the passenger seat on a road trip. Most didn’t think about it until the sight of an empty vehicle awakened the alpha-male drive to occupy the seat of privilege, triggering a mad dash to the car. But Tyler wasn’t stupid. Andy and Harlan were each over six feet and weighed more than two hundred pounds. And Tyler was taller and heavier than either of them. A silverback gorilla would’ve been more comfortable in the backseat of my Bug for an hour and a half than Tyler. The gorilla would’ve been more cheerful when he got out too. Tyler made sure he was riding shotgun.

“Where’ve you been, Ian?” Harlan asked.

“The show starts in an hour and we’re at least ninety minutes from Hartford,” Andy said. Andy wasn’t the most optimistic kid. His nickname was Eeyore.

I held my index finger in the air. “Did I not tell you?” I got out of the car, opened the trunk, and returned with a case of cold Heineken, two bottles of Bacardi premixed piña colada, and a bottle of tequila with a fresh lime and salt. I’d made a run to a liquor distributor in Port Chester and bought party supplies. I hadn’t planned on buying the tequila, but the bottle, shaped like a statue of a Mayan god, caught my attention. It was way too cool to pass up.

Andy and Harlan grinned. “Nice,” they said, nodding.

“Should we open the tequila and the piña colada or have beers first?” Harlan asked.

“Open everything,” I said, putting the car in reverse and flooring it out of Harlan’s driveway. “We’ve only got ninety minutes.”

Tyler was quiet. He looked out the passenger window while the beers were being popped and the bottles of tequila and piña colada were passed around.

Tyler held up his hand when Andy tried to hand him a beer. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll wait awhile.”

Andy shrugged. “More for us, bro.”

My heart fell. Tyler’s refusal to join the festivities bummed me out and confused me. We’d met sophomore year when we sat next to each other in Spanish class. It hadn’t taken us long to become inseparable. I was amazed that one of the most popular kids in school had wanted to hang out with me and introduce me to his friends. And at first, Tyler had been far wilder even than me. I stuck to drinking and maybe smoking the occasional joint, but he would try anything. A few months before, we’d gone to a party, and by the end of the evening I’d had so much to drink that I couldn’t tell you what model of car I owned, much less have driven it. I thought Tyler was in better shape, so I gave him my keys. He neglected to tell me that he’d just smoked a joint dipped in angel dust. He’d never tried it before, and now he was certifiably out of his mind. Once we got onto the interstate, he panicked. He gripped the steering wheel like a man in ten-foot seas clutching a life ring. “We’re going too fast! We’re going too fast!” he screamed. I put my face as close to the speedometer as I could so I could read the blurred numbers. As near as I could tell, it said we were going twenty miles an hour. I told him we were fine, but there was no convincing him. It was no small task managing a driver who belonged in a straitjacket while intermittently having to open my door enough to get sick onto the speeding pavement passing beneath us. It was hell in high definition.

The next thing we heard was the sound of someone tapping on the windshield.

“Are you boys all right?”

It was a neighbor of ours, an older man who lived three houses down from mine. Neither Tyler nor I remembered the sequence of events, but we’d ended up parking cockeyed in this man’s driveway and passing out. Usually we’d think this sort of thing was hysterical and brag about it to friends, but we’d gotten too close to the edge this time, and neither of us wanted to talk about it. We weren’t ashamed, just unnerved.

Two weeks later, Tyler began seeing a girl named Hilary, who introduced him to a Christian youth group called Young Life. The more he became involved with it, the harder it became to convince him to party with me the way he had in the past. He eventually avoided it altogether. He’d still go out with me and maybe have a beer, but it wasn’t like before. He didn’t act judgmental or self-righteous toward me—he just wasn’t interested in the sorts of things we’d done before. When I asked him what was going on, he’d shrug and say we could talk about it some other time.

Every Tuesday Tyler asked if he could pick me up and take me to this thing Young Life put on called “Club.” It was hard not to laugh when he described what they did there. He said meetings took place in this cool barn behind someone’s house. Kids sat cross-legged on the floor on carpet squares and sang jerky songs, some that involved choreography. Even Tyler admitted this part weirded him out. Then they performed melodramas or skits that were supposedly funny. Or you might be called up like an audience member from a game show and made to participate in a ridiculously childish contest. From what I could tell, other than humiliation, there was no first prize. Tyler told me about one where four people competed to cram as many marshmallows into their mouths as possible. It was called Chubby Bunny. A guy who had tried angel dust and nearly gotten us killed on the interstate one month earlier was now singing and clapping along to John Denver’s song “Country Roads” and playing Chubby Bunny. You’d think the g-force required to make this kind of moral 180 would’ve snapped his neck. He said that after the songs and skits, the Young Life leader, a guy named Mike, stood up and gave a short message about Jesus and about how God wanted to be in relationship with us.

That was the deal breaker.

As I recall, we had just passed through a town called Wethersfield, and the lights of the city of Hartford were trembling on the horizon. Unfortunately, the horizon line was fuzzy and wouldn’t stay steady, which is more or less what you want a horizon line to do. An hour into the ride Andy, Harlan, and I had consumed a couple of six-packs of beer and half a bottle of tequila. The Bacardi premixed piña colada tasted like banana-scented aftershave, but that didn’t stop us from drinking it. We were nearing the point when the three cans of motor oil rolling around the back weren’t safe from being sucked down.

Andy and Harlan were obliterated. As driver, I had tried to act more responsibly. I was only three-quarters in the bag.

I found that keeping the car in one lane was becoming a challenge. Tyler begged me to pull over so he could drive, but I wasn’t ready to surrender the wheelhouse just yet. I remembered a trick someone had told me about recently. I rolled down the driver’s-side window and stuck my head out. If I could keep my left tires, front and rear, one to two feet to the inside of the broken white line, then I would know I was staying in my lane. I was just mastering this brilliantly innovative solution when I heard Andy say, “Houston, we have a problem.”

I pulled my head back into the car and looked in the rearview mirror. Andy ducked so I could see what was going on.

“Problem” was an incomplete description.

Unlike in most cars, the engine of the Volkswagen Beetle was mounted in the rear. It was one of the features I loved about it. There was a distinctive series of vents that ran in an arced line across the top of the engine compartment that were responsible for capturing the air that cooled the engine. These ducts were not intended to be openings for angry, three-foot-long, orange and yellow flames to jet out of, or as flues for huge plumes of noxious black smoke. Unfortunately, this was what they were doing.

“The freaking car’s on fire!” Tyler screamed, his eyes fixed on the inferno visible in the side-view mirror attached to his door. It was disheartening to hear an ordinarily fearless, 225-pound guy shriek like a six-year-old girl.

I knew nothing about cars. I knew even less about cars on fire. On every episode of CHiPs and Charlie’s Angels I’d ever seen, burning vehicles always erupted into angry fireballs, and dental records had to be used to identify the charred passengers. No exceptions.

“Hold on!” I hollered.

I cranked the steering wheel to the right and careened across four lanes of traffic. By an act of God, no one was in my flight path. My left-side tires screeched as they clawed for purchase on the asphalt while my right-side tires left the ground. We made it to the shoulder, but I was certain the gas tank was seconds from blowing up. I opened my door and yelled, “Everybody jump!” and leaped for my life. After rolling on the ground two or three times, I pushed myself up onto hands and knees and watched as my driverless car gently yawed right and bumped its way down a short, grassy embankment, the open driver’s door flapping like a wing, and Harlan and Andy’s faces looking at me forlornly through the rear window, until the drama was brought to a halt by a hedge of young trees and thick undergrowth. Flames were no longer spouting out the now-blackened vents, only the occasional curl of smoke.

It was possible I’d overreacted.

First out of the car was Tyler, followed by Andy and Harlan. Andy and Harlan, drunk as skunks, stumbled up the embankment. But they weren’t so blitzed that they couldn’t begin howling with laughter and imitating my cry of, “Everybody jump!” They did this over and over until I gave up trying to defend myself and laughed with them.

Tyler was quiet. He kicked a small pile of blue-and-gray gravel, then frowned down the highway toward home.

While Andy and Harlan went off to pee in the woods, Tyler sat on his haunches next to me. “We have to talk,” he said.

Volkswagens are not expensive dates. All they ask for is gasoline and a little oil now and then. I was good at keeping my VW filled with gas, but less vigilant about the Valvoline. A seventeen-year-old, oil-starved VW gets irritable when asked to drive for eighty minutes at sixty-five miles an hour with seven hundred pounds of teenagers rudely indifferent to her efforts. In these circumstances she’s apt to voice her displeasure. Mine did by throwing her rods and cracking her engine block.

My intention had been to put the cans of oil rolling around in the back of the car into the engine before we left for Hartford, but the guys were so stressed about running late that I’d forgotten to do it. Now my prized car was cooked and I would have to call my mother to come get us. It would be a long ride home.

On one level, life is not much different from a VW Bug. If you fill it with gas and the right amount of oil, it will take you where you point it. The driver is the wild card. All the proper maintenance in the world won’t save you from a nut job behind the wheel.

Life always comes down to who’s driving.

12

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.

—ARNOLD H. GLASOW

Tyler did talk to me. Many of my friends knew that my father was an alcoholic, but Tyler knew details. I’d even told him about Dad and the intelligence services. I trusted Tyler with my life.

He called me one Saturday afternoon in January and asked if we could hang out. It was freezing, so sitting at our favorite spot on the docks at Riverside Yacht Club wasn’t an option. Tyler suggested we go to the barn where Young Life meetings were held. The people who owned it usually kept it locked, but sometimes they forgot. Tyler turned the knob and pushed on the door, and it opened. “Sweet,” he said to no one in particular.

While Tyler turned on the gas heater, I looked around for a place to sit. There was old furniture everywhere, so I randomly picked a green couch to sit on. It was riddled with holes, stuffing pouring from every gash in the upholstery. I perched myself on the arm, and Tyler sat on the opposite one so he could face me.

He took a deep breath. “Ian, you’re my best friend, right?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So I can shoot straight with you?”

I shrugged. “Sure,” I said, my stomach turning.

“You haven’t had it easy with your dad. I’ve seen how he can act when he’s loaded, so I know.”

Tyler was the only friend I would let come to my house when my father had been drinking. My father could be charming when friends were around. By my senior year, he even let us drink and smoke with him while he held court. But Tyler had seen the dark side once or twice, and it was hard to forget.

He took another deep breath and went on. “Even with all the crap you’ve had to deal with, you’ve gotten solid grades, played guitar in a cool band, starred in a few musicals, and held it together. That’s amazing.”

This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d figured Tyler was going to ream me out for what happened the night of the Steve Miller concert. But instead of letting me have it, he was saying things no one had ever told me before. Not a soul had ever said to me that they knew what I was going through and admired me for not just holding on for dear life, but for making life work in spite of it.

“The night we went to the Steve Miller concert was the first time I watched you party when I wasn’t doing it with you, and I saw something …” He paused and looked away. I sensed that he was deciding whether to say what was on his mind or not. I wanted to tell him it was okay to tell me, but I was afraid.

He turned back and looked me squarely in the eye. “You turn into your dad when you’re drunk.”

My back straightened and I started to protest, but he held up his hand. “Let me finish,” he said. “You get the same creepy look in your eyes. You talk too much. You treat people like you’re more important than they are. You lie about things to make yourself look cool. You even hold your cigarettes and walk like him.” Tyler shook his head. “Ian, don’t become your dad. You’re way too good for that. ”

I stopped breathing. I stared at Tyler and he at me. A gust of January wind put its shoulder to the side of the barn and tried to push it down. Instead, it found a crack in a beam and settled for making it whistle. There was no other sound—until I bowed my head and cried.

There are acts of love so subtle and delicate that the sweep of their beauty goes unseen. I know of none more miraculous and brave than that of a seventeen-year-old boy coming to his friend’s side to take his tear-soaked face to his breast.

Three days later Tyler picked me up and took me to Young Life. It was dumber than I’d thought it would be. Despite my efforts to not look amused, the ridiculous stuff going on up front made me smile from time to time. I’d forgotten the goodness of laughter when it wasn’t tethered to cynicism.

What brought me back to Young Life every Tuesday were Mike and Derek. Mike was the full-time Young Life area director. Derek was a carpenter by day to support his work as a Young Life volunteer. Mike was the definition of stud. He was an All-American lacrosse player, good-looking, and hilarious. When he visited the student center, he’d be mobbed by throngs of kids like he was a rock star. Derek’s appeal was more subtle: his gentle humility and his ability to be fully present to whomever he was with drew kids to him right away. I couldn’t wait to see the two of them every week because they made me feel as if they couldn’t wait to see me. In a room filled with a hundred kids, one or both of them sought me out. It was intoxicating to have two older men see me—I mean really see me. If they’d just left out the talks about Jesus, Club would’ve been perfect.

Since my car was history, I had to rely on Derek or Tyler to get me to Club and back home. Some nights, Derek and I would sit in his car in my driveway and I would talk about my dad or about anything going on in my life. If empathy had a face, it was his. I wanted to tell him every story and every hurt feeling I’d ever had in one shot. Some nights he’d even drive me around until 10 p.m., when I knew my dad would be asleep. And then he would wait in the driveway with his lights off until he saw my bedroom light go on, the signal that all was well inside.

One Tuesday night, Derek and I arrived at my house to find my brother Phillip’s red Toyota Corolla in the driveway, its exhaust concealing his left taillight. These visits from Phillip were becoming a regular event. My mother would call home from wherever she happened to be on business and talk to my dad. If he sounded nutty or belligerent, she would call Phillip to drive over and intercept me before I went into the house. He would drop me off at Nanny’s, which meant a long walk to school the next day.

Nanny would be hospitable, but I would have to listen to her enumerate every one of my father’s sins and faults while she made up a bed for me on her inexpensive green plaid couch, which even with a sheet was scratchy and smelled like Scotchgard.

“You going to be all right?” Derek asked, eyeballing my brother’s Toyota.

“Yeah,” I said, reaching for my book bag in his backseat.

“You sure?” he said. “I can take you someplace else.”

I sighed. “Derek, this is business as usual,” I said, opening the door.

Derek leaned toward me as I stood beside his car. “Let’s talk tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay,” I answered and walked to my brother’s car.

My brother’s window was open. “What’s up?” I said, though I knew the answer.

“Same old. Get in and I’ll take you to Nanny’s,” he said, looking straight ahead. He wasn’t happy about being enlisted to pick me up.

I looked back at Derek, who was still waiting for me, and gave him a thumbs-up sign. He blinked his high beams at me and left.

I looked at the house. It was pitch-black. “How long ago did Mom call?” I asked.

He looked at the clock on his dashboard. “I don’t know, maybe two hours ago,” he said.

“Phillip, I can’t spend the night at Nanny’s again. The house looks quiet. I bet he’s gone to bed or he’s sleeping in his chair. Let me go in. If you see my bedroom light go on, it means everything’s cool.”

“Forget it,” Phillip said. “Mom wanted you—”

“I know. But you have no idea what a drag it is spending the night at Nanny’s.”

My brother was quiet. He ducked and leaned over his steering wheel to cast an eye up at the house. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds. “It’s your life.”

I crept into the house, closed the door, and listened. If I’d heard so much as a floorboard creak, I would have hightailed it to my brother’s car and gone to Nanny’s. But the house was still. In the hours since my mother had called, my father must have crashed—just as I’d suspected. I tiptoed up the stairs, avoiding the ones I knew creaked, went down the hallway, and slipped into my room. I turned on the light, opened my curtain, waved at my brother, and heard the sound of his tires crunching loose stone and gravel as he backed out, and finally the acceleration of his engine as he pulled away.

My room looked like JC Penney after a Black Friday stampede. I trudged through a debris field of dirty clothes to grab my toiletry kit. Halfway to my dresser it hit me that I couldn’t brush my teeth. The bathroom was down the hall, and the sound of running water might wake my father.

“This is so screwed up,” I said to myself. It was the little indignities that were hardest to forgive.

I took off my clothes, scootched between the sheets, and turned off the lamp on my bedside table. Before I was too comfortable, I remembered the hook-and-eye lock I had put on my door a few days earlier. It was more symbolic than anything else. I was seventeen; I wanted a space I could claim as my own. I got up and carefully negotiated my way to the door. It was dark, but I groped around the doorframe till I found the hook and placed it into the eye as stealthily as a bomb squad expert defusing a bomb.

Lying in bed, the afterglow of being at Young Life and my time with Derek returned. I hadn’t even taken offense when he questioned me about my continuing to party, or when he pressed me to come to a small-group Bible study for guys he led before school once a week. A trustworthy and predictable man valued and perhaps even treasured me, and that covered a multitude of sins.

I never had trouble falling asleep, and once enwrapped in slumber, it was hard to pull me from its arms. But the sound of someone battering my bedroom door ripped me awake. I sat up straight, begging my mind to awaken fully so I could get my bearings. I groped for them like a man with poor vision searches for his glasses. In between thumps, I heard the old brass knob on my door being yanked and shaken. It was a miracle that it held together, given its age and flimsiness.

“Do you have a lock on this door?” the attacker yelled. I couldn’t even be sure it was my father. It wasn’t his voice. It was someone or something I didn’t recognize.

“Answer me! Do you have a lock on this door?” he roared. Now he was kicking the bottom of the door.

On the other side of the door lay uncertainty. I now knew it was my father, but also not my father. It was a menacing variant. Nothing in me was willing to go toward the door.

“It’s just a latch!” I yelled. “A stupid latch.” My shout left a burning patch on the wall of my dry throat.

“In my house? You put a lock on a door in my house!?”

“Dad, I’ll take it off in the morning,” I pleaded.

There was a final blow, and the molding around the door cracked with a sound like a gunshot. The small eye I’d screwed into the wood shot across the room. The door flew open. I threw myself back into the space between the bed and the wall. “Get out!” I yelled.

He said nothing. Guided by the hall light now dimly illuminating my room through the open door, he stormed my bed and loomed over me and grabbed my shoulder with one hand. Then he alternately punched me with a closed fist or thrashed me with an open hand. I was tucked far enough away into the corner that he couldn’t land a blow to my head or face, but everything else was fair game. I blindly tried to block the attack with my hands and arms while turning my face toward the corner in the wall to protect it. If he said anything, I don’t remember it. I only recall the noise of his labored breathing, interrupted by staccato grunts that accompanied each strike of his hand. When it was over, he turned and left the room, slamming my door behind him. He said nothing on his way out. He’d said what he’d come to say; anything else would be editorial.

How long I remained balled up in the corner next to my bed, I don’t know. Like a sonar man listens for the ping of an enemy sub, I strained to hear the possible sound of returning footsteps. My stomach ached as if I’d performed a thousand situps. My sheets were damp from sweat, but I was too chilled to take them off.

At first my heart was pounding in terror and shock. But eventually, with time, a warm calm crept over me. I was no longer listening for approaching footsteps. It was the sound of wind ruffling the top of the giant oak on our front yard that captured my attention. Now and then its leafy branches passed in front of the streetlight that stood across the road. The dappling light trembled on my bedroom wall. I listened to the wind and gazed at the light show until I surrendered to their invitation to sleep.

In the early 1970s, a religious revival broke out at a small Episcopal church in the hyper-affluent community of Darien, Connecticut.

Even God was surprised.

Lots of kids from Young Life were regulars at the Sunday evening service at St. Paul’s, and Tyler called one Sunday afternoon to see if I wanted to join them. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been inside a church in a long time and didn’t know if I ever wanted to again. Derek had, a bunch of times, “shared the gospel” and asked if I wanted to pray to receive Jesus into my heart. I had finally asked him to stop. I liked him, I liked Club, but I didn’t like Jesus.

With the exception of Tyler, I knew that some of the other Young Life kids didn’t think of me as a friend as much as a challenging evangelism project. They knew getting me to become a born-again Christian would be like the CIA successfully recruiting Soviet Premier Brezhnev to work as a double agent for our side.

Going to Young Life hadn’t stopped me from partying. Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch was my beverage of choice. When I arrived at a big party, kids would chant, “Red! Red! Red!” until I pulled a bottle of it out of a bag and held it high in the air like it was the Stanley Cup trophy. There were other drinks I liked more, but Johnnie Walker had the cool, Striding Man logo that gave off an air of sophistication. Only in Greenwich, Connecticut, could a seventeen-year-old build his social brand around drinking expensive whiskey, but that’s what I’d done. If I became a Christian, it would be a big win for the Jesus camp.

You’d think that being treated like a project versus just one of the crowd would’ve bummed me out, but it didn’t. I enjoyed the attention my heathen celebrity afforded me, but I knew it wouldn’t last long. I wasn’t a kid who had read a Sartre novel in Honors English and decided it would be hip to become an atheist. I believed that God had betrayed me, that our estrangement was his fault. As a child I’d loved God not because I’d wanted things from him; I’d loved him just for who he was. My affection was disinterested. Despite that unqualified love, he’d abandoned me. It was Jesus who deserved to hear the cock crow three times, not me.

“Now, Ian, this might be different for you,” Tyler said, draping his arm around my shoulder as we walked through the parking lot. Everywhere I looked there were packs of people speed-walking toward the church. I guessed they were hoping to get the last seat or maybe a space along the sanctuary wall to lean against. There were lines of cars still coming up and down the street, policemen directing traffic with lit yellow batons. There were even tour buses filled with people who’d traveled from hours away to see “the miracle in Darien.”

“What do you mean different?” I asked.

A girl named Melissa I’d met earlier that night came alongside me and threaded her arm through mine, bookending me between Tyler and herself. I liked how outgoing she was. “The worship is hard to describe,” she said. “You just have to … go with it.”

Melissa looked like Linda Blair, the teenage actor from the film The Exorcist. Despite projectile vomiting and making her head do 360s in the movie, Linda Blair was incredibly hot. I would’ve followed Melissa into the church if she’d said the service involved sacrificing puppies while singing “Amazing Grace.”

We weren’t in the foyer more than a minute before it was clear that we would not make it into the sanctuary. It was wall-to-wall people. In the distance I could hear the sound of a worship band and people singing. But Tyler, Melissa, and the two other kids with us were not to be thwarted. They were determined to get me into that church to hear Terry Fullam and to experience for myself what they’d been talking about. Tyler was built like a refrigerator, so he was able to clear a path for us by elbowing and shoving his way through the crowd, saying, “Coming through, praise the Lord.”

The service had already started when we got into the sanctuary. I was there all of five minutes before I realized that Tyler’s explanation about this experience being different was grossly understated. Episcopalians pride themselves on restraint and single-digit golf handicaps. They don’t jump, sing, and wave their hands over their heads unless they’re being electrocuted or thrown from a plane. Neither do Episcopalians frolic around sanctuaries, brandishing on raised poles big banners with tongues of fire and doves embroidered on them. Their services don’t include generously proportioned middle-aged women leaping like impalas down the aisles, trailing colored streamers in their wake (“dancing in the Spirit,” as Tyler called it). I saw investment bankers speaking in tongues and women dressed in boiled wool suits who resembled Barbara Bush being “slain in the Spirit.” It looked to me like a mob of well-sugared five-year-olds dancing the hokey-pokey, only less organized.

When Father Fullam got up to speak, the place went quiet. I’d expected a slick and handsome priest, but Father Fullam looked like one of the physics teachers at Greenwich High, not a man some people had traveled hours to hear. He was slightly overweight and wore thick glasses but spoke with the confidence and eloquence of the Harvard-educated, former college philosophy professor he was. He wasn’t halfway through his first sentence before I knew he was special. Knowing nothing about the Bible, I didn’t understand half of what he said, but I could tell the guy packed a big gun intellectually. At St. Mary’s, half the men snuck outside to smoke during the homily while kids and moms stayed behind to make sure old people didn’t keel over and hit their heads on the marble floor when the colorless drone of the priest’s voice lulled them to sleep. The music at St. Paul’s won me over as well. I’d never been in a church where people sang with so much enthusiasm. Catholics don’t sing—we murmur, then look surprised if a melody emerges.

All was well until Father Fullam invited people who felt moved to stand and give brief “testimonies.” Tyler leaned over and explained to me that giving a testimony meant sharing what God had done in your life, not confessing prosecutable crimes. Person after person stood and spoke about physical healings, being given a new gift of the Spirit, and announcing how members of their families had dedicated their lives to Christ that week. People cried, clapped, or whispered prayers of thanks with heads bowed and eyes closed. I think these testimonies were intended to encourage the faithful and to inspire unbelievers to give their lives to Jesus. But I thought I’d gag if I had to hear one more story of how Jesus answered someone’s prayers. I wanted to jump to my feet and say, “Hi, everyone. My name is Ian. When I was a boy I loved Jesus, but I begged him to help me a million times and he never showed up. I prayed that my father would stop drinking, but that didn’t happen either. If you were God and a kid asked you for that, wouldn’t you give it to him? So you can sing another chorus of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ but you’re complete morons if you think it’s true.”

I breathed a sigh of relief when the testimonies were finished. But then Father Fullam donned his chasuble and went behind the altar to begin the liturgy for the Eucharist. I put my hands on the pew in front of me and rested my forehead on them.

“You all right?” Tyler whispered in my ear.

I nodded yes without lifting my head, but something was wrong. Some gland in my body had gone berserk and was shooting adrenaline into my bloodstream. My heart was beating so hard and uncontrollably it hurt my ribs. I couldn’t get enough oxygen to satisfy my lungs. It felt like a dry-cleaner bag had been pulled tight across my face. Was I having a heart attack? Losing my mind? Could this be God’s punishment for blasphemy and my insolence? I waited it out as long as I could, but when the people in my pew pulled down their kneelers and knelt, it was time to make a run for it.

Just as I was about to jump onto the vacant pew and sprint for the door, the panic engulfing me distanced itself and became unimportant. My interest was drawn to the altar where Father Fullam was elevating the Eucharist. He gazed upward at it, then broke the Host in half, saying, “Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” Then he held the silver paten filled with consecrated Hosts at eye level while an assisting priest held the matching chalice at the same height. “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving.”

I closed my eyes and saw a fawn.

The fawn looked at me, head cocked to the side, ears twitching. When he turned and leaped through the undergrowth, his hoof snapped a branch. I saw a small boy standing on a kneeler, watching his family walking down the nave to take Communion, yearning to join them. He danced around a pillar of fire, set up a Communion altar in the woods, and traced the outlines of a water stain on his bedroom ceiling with his index finger.

These visions weren’t moving so much as curious. I remembered my mother’s Brownie Hawkeye. Finally, memories were tumbling out.

But what came next was a voice, not a vision: “Forgive me, Ian,” it said.

The voice was so close and real that I raised my head and looked to either side.

“I’m sorry, Ian. Please forgive me,” I heard the voice repeat.

“Help me, I can’t,” I whispered.

“Will you pardon me, Ian?” the voice repeated.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then we are both forgiven,” the voice replied.

A giant knot made of thick ship’s rope, whose twists had become so complicated that I’d lost hope of ever disentangling it, loosened to the point that I could now see light coming through the gaps. It did not unravel, but it relaxed enough that I believed the work of untying it could now begin.

I knelt beside Tyler, my forehead still resting on the back of my hands on the pew in front of me.

“Are you going up?” Tyler said.

I looked to my left. He and ten other people were waiting for me to stand and get into the line for Communion, or at least move out of their way so they could. I sat back as they squeezed by. Tyler waited at the end of the pew to let the other people from our pew go ahead of him. He was waiting for me.

“Are you coming?” he asked again.

I stood and edged into the aisle to join the line of all the other knotted hearts limping toward the bread of new and unending life.

For many years I puzzled over whose voice I’d heard apologizing to me at that Communion service at St. Paul’s. Was it an imagined conversation between my father and me? An apology I was making to myself? Or did I dare believe what I suspected— that it was Jesus? This was a theological impossibility, wasn’t it? What could a perfect God have to apologize for? I asked a few PhDs what they thought, and I was given a wide range of eloquent opinions, but it was Miss Annie who solved the mystery.

Miss Annie was an elderly black woman we’d met at a church we attended in Denver, where I was in seminary. During services, her large lap was a revolving rest stop for no fewer than three children at a time. Miss Annie and I were standing at a grill, flipping burgers and cooking chicken at an all-church barbecue, when I told her about that night at St. Paul’s.

“Miss Annie, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?” I asked her.

She frowned and shook her head, “Lord, what do they teach you at that school?” she said. Then she faced me head-on. “Did God humble himself by becoming a man?” she asked, every word spoken more loudly than the one before.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I’d never used the word ma’am before, but it seemed an excellent time to start.

“Did he humble himself by dying on the cross to show us how much he loved us?” she asked, waving her spatula at me.

My eyes widened and I nodded, yes.

Miss Annie’s body relaxed, and she put her hand on her hip. “So why wouldn’t Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?” she asked.

“But if Jesus is perfect—”

Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. “Son,” she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, “love always stoops.”

13

Addicts are frustrated mystics waylaid by spirits.

—CARL JUNG

It was a Friday afternoon in early May, a day so perfect that staying indoors felt like it should be a criminal offense. I rushed home from school, threw my book bag on the couch, and hurried to make a sandwich before heading out to pick up Tyler. My parents were in Florida for a few weeks, so I not only had full run of the house, but I also had my father’s royal blue Triumph Spitfire. Tyler and I planned to put the convertible top down and drive around the beach in search of girls to impress. I’m told male peacocks do the same thing, but with tail feathers.

My mouth was jammed with food when the phone rang. I would have waited to answer, but I assumed it was Tyler.

“Hummo?” I said, trying to speak around the wad of ham and cheese now passing my larynx.

“Is this Ian?” My eyes widened and I scrambled to find my drink. It wasn’t Tyler. It was Mrs. Price, my guidance counselor.

I washed down my food with a quick swig of water. “Sorry, Mrs. Price,” I said. “You caught me with a mouthful of sandwich.”

She laughed. “Ian, I just spoke with James Fitzpatrick,” she said.

James Fitzpatrick … James Fitzpatrick. I scrambled through the Rolodex in my head. The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“From Bowdoin, Ian. James Fitzpatrick is the admissions director from Bowdoin.”

I dropped into the chair behind my mother’s desk and rubbed my temple. My guidance counselor was talking to me on my home phone. I liked her, but not in my house. She was telling me about a conversation she’d had with the admissions director from Bowdoin. This was even odder. College rejections came in the mail. Had the decision to remove my name from the wait list and reject me once and for all been so enthusiastically endorsed and celebrated by the faculty, administration, and students of the college that this guy thought a call to my guidance counselor was warranted?

“You got in,” she said.

I placed one hand on the desk to steady myself and stood up. Maybe I’d misheard. “I’m sorry—what?” I whispered.

She giggled, all sparkly. “You’re going to Bowdoin.”

Winthrop Hall, a four-story brick building constructed in 1823, was my freshman dorm. From the outside it was unadorned, New England plain, but its history was anything but.

“The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived in this dorm,” the upperclassman greeter told me as he showed me my room, “Nathaniel Hawthorne, the guy who wrote The Scarlet Letter, was in Longfellow’s class as well.”

This was heady information for a kid who came to college knowing he would major in English.

“That building over there is Massachusetts Hall,” he said, pointing at another red-brick building on the quad. “That’s where the English department is,” he said, opening the window to let fresh air into my room. “You’ll spend a lot of time in there.”

And so I did.

The next four years were a feast. Writers like Camus, Greene, Dostoevsky, Blake, Faulkner, Donne, Beckett, Wilde, and Strindberg redrew the map of my world. Some authors were like boxers. They took me down slow, landing one left hook after another one inch under my rib cage. Other writers were more precise, like surgeons, cutting through flesh and bone until I was laid bare to myself.

Spiritually, I’d arrived at Bowdoin with a shallow root system. I’d gone to Bible studies and discipleship groups in the last half of my senior year in high school, after the St. Paul’s experience, and got more involved with Young Life, but even then I’d had trouble not slipping back into partying.

Most seniors put quotes under their yearbook pictures like, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by.”

My senior quote read, “I’ve got a few reasons for drinking, and one has just entered my head. If a man can’t drink when he’s living, how the hell can he drink when he’s dead?”

Not quite Robert Frost.

I vowed to God that once I got to college, I’d walk the narrow road.

I wasn’t there a week before I was on a five-lane interstate. The rope tied around my waist never let me forget it was there. It was long and let me wander far, but it was fighting genetics and temperament. Let me explain.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who have dimmers and those who have on-off switches.

People who have dimmers can regulate how much they drink, smoke, exercise, have sex, eat, work, or play BrickBreaker on their BlackBerrys. They can “dial it back.” They can “take it or leave it.” Their motto is “Moderation in all things.” We need these people. They become actuaries and veterinarians. Our pets would die without them.

Other people are born with on-off switches. They are all the way on or all the way off; there is no in-between. Their motto is “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” They drink like the Taliban have taken over the country and plan to turn every liquor store in the nation into a mosque. They can’t jog the occasional two-miler. They won’t be happy until they cripple themselves overtraining for an Ironman. They can’t eat one Oreo. They have to eat twenty, like a Hoover set on deep shag. If the doctor prescribes one Percocet every eight hours, they take two every four and sit drooling on the couch, watching Jeopardy reruns. My four years at Bowdoin confirmed that when it came to partying, or anything else, I was an on-off switch.

Bowdoin had a reputation for rigorous academics and serious drinking. In my sophomore year a New York Times best seller entitled The Official Preppy Handbook ranked Bowdoin the second hardest drinking college in the country, just behind Dartmouth. I joined a fraternity that partied like this ranking was a personal affront. Some nights I drank until I dropped facedown into the carpet. These revels were followed by epic hangovers. Some mornings I’d have to lily-pad from one piece of furniture to the next to steady myself as I tried to make my way across a room. Did I party more than my friends? No. But in the end it was not the quantity but the ambition of my drinking that was my undoing.

My sister Caroline’s move from Paris to New York City during my sophomore year didn’t help. She was young, beautiful, and a model at the top of her game. One Christmas, walking around New York City, I couldn’t shake her. As the face for a well-known line of skin-care products, she was in every magazine, on full-page ads in the New York Times, and in store windows and counter displays. Even creepier, a picture of her face filled the side panels of the giant shopping bags given out by department stores all over the city. It’s hard to explain what it’s like to walk down Madison Avenue and see hundreds of people carrying your sister.

Some weekends Caroline would foot the bill to fly me from Maine to Manhattan to play for the weekend. She’d hire a driver for the night, and we’d hop from one club to the next. Because she was so well-known, we never waited in a line or paid a cover charge anywhere.

If drinking was politics, then Caroline was a moderate and I was an anarchist. Three sheets to the wind, I danced with Truman Capote to the music of the Village People at Studio 54. (That requires more explaining than we have time for right now.) Another night, I drank copious amounts of Aquavit at the bar at Elaine’s and got into an aria-singing competition with a bearded opera star from the Met wearing a floor-length mink coat, who wanted to impress my sister. I had a great time losing. We might rush to the Limelight for last call before heading back to Caroline’s First Avenue apartment, a block away from the United Nations.

Vacations were more of the same. I had three friends, Landon, Terrence, and Mark. One summer we made a pact to meet up and party in the same bar every night for a month. How do you celebrate an achievement of this order? Have another drink?

Drinking is fun until it isn’t.

Landon and I were in a small town near the University of Connecticut, when we stopped for a beer in a bar full of locals that had a pool table. A couple of guys came to our booth and asked if we wanted to play a game or two for beers and shots. We told them we hadn’t played much, but we’d give it a go.

If you pulled the camera back, the scene would have looked hilarious: two college kids in khakis and Izod shirts playing pool with thick-bearded men in brown Carhartt overalls covered with grease stains. You also would have known the odds were good this wouldn’t end well.

To our surprise, Landon and I played like we’d gone to pool camp as kids. We won a lot of beer and shots. After four or five games, our opponents began muttering under their breath.

“You’ve played pool before, you little snots,” one of them said.

I laughed. “Seriously, it’s beginner’s luck. “The next round is on us,” I said. “Then we’ve got to hit the road.”

“I don’t think so,” the guy with the scraggly red beard said. “Now we’re playing for money.”

My palms were so sweaty the pool cue kept slipping out of my hand. I was trying to get Landon’s attention to tell him by wink or nod to lose the game on purpose so we could pay these guys and get out. But he was leaning on his cue, looking everywhere but at me. I tried to throw the game, but I couldn’t make enough intentional bad shots to negate Landon’s miraculous performance. We beat them again.

“Do all rich punks from downstate think we’re stupid up here?” one of them said.

“Give us our money back,” the other said.

Customers at the bar looked disappointed when Landon and I both laid twenties on the table, which included a tip for not killing us.

“You guys ought to go before we take your money and kick your butts,” the red-bearded one said.

I left first, speed-stumbling in the general direction of where I thought I had parked the car. Landon sprinted past. “Why are you running?” I said, beginning to speed-stumble a little faster.

He held something up between his thumb and index fingers. Under the parking lot lights I saw what it was.

I felt sick. “Landon, no,” I said.

Landon had stolen the cue ball off the table—apparently without anyone noticing, since I hadn’t heard any gunfire yet. We jumped into the car and bolted out of the parking lot, but not before I looked in the rearview mirror and saw the front door of the bar fly open and men pour out like angry ants. That’s the last thing I remember.

The next morning I woke up in the backseat of the car and had no idea where we were or how we’d gotten there. I shook Landon awake, and he gave me the play-by-play. The guys from the bar had chased our car for a few miles, during which we’d passed a truck at seventy miles per hour and come within inches of hitting an oncoming car. We’d finished the night having more drinks in an all-night diner. Landon complained that he’d left the stolen cue ball on the seat of the restaurant booth.

I started the car and looked around. We were in the parking lot of a strip mall. It was 9 a.m. and customers were arriving. “Where are we?” I asked. Every car had a license plate I didn’t recognize.

“We’re in Rhode Island,” Landon said.

I whipped around to face him. “We’re in Rhode Island?” I said.

“Don’t you remember how we laughed our heads off when we saw the ‘Welcome to Rhode Island’ sign?”

I swallowed hard. “No,” I said.

“You should. You were driving.”

The red warning light indicating that I’d experienced a blackout flashed on my brain’s dashboard for days until I reached behind it and ripped out the sensor. Life is easier when you refuse to know what you know.

I lived with the dissonance and torment of this double life from the day I arrived at college to the day I left. I’d go to the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship one night and be smashed and dancing on tables at my fraternity the next. I took comfort in the knowledge that St. Augustine had suffered similarly. He was the guy who wrote the famous prayer: “Lord, make me chaste— but not yet.”

I totally got it.

The Bowdoin Christian Fellowship totally got it too. Bowdoin had roughly twelve hundred students; maybe thirty were members of the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship. Given the ratio, you’d think I could duck them, but they were everywhere.

“We’re praying for you, Ian,” one would say passing me in the lobby of the library.

“How’s your walk with the Lord?” another would ask in a cafeteria line.

One of the leaders of the Fellowship stopped me on the quad. “We’re always here for you if you need us, Ian,” he said.

A few of them were overzealous. Some were gloomy, and others were way too nice, like Walmart greeters on Adderall, but not one was insincere. They were fine souls who sensed the anguish of my dividedness and wanted to help.

There was one girl in the Fellowship who turned my head. Her name was Anne Nelson. She was the quintessential Colorado tomboy type. She’d been a cross-country ski racer in high school and climbed fourteeners on the weekends. Every time I saw her, she was either cooling down after a long run, or heading to her dorm, sweaty and red cheeked from playing a field hockey or soccer game. Her laid-back personality masked a crazy competitive spirit. She hated to lose more than she loved to win, and I was smitten. People in the Fellowship couldn’t figure out why a sweet, Christian girl like Anne would want to be with a backsliding sinner like me.

For some, the question persists.

I’m told that under certain conditions it takes a large ship several miles to make a complete turn at sea. It’s slow, one degree at a time, hardly noticeable. That’s how my drinking changed. What had once been occasional recreation was now a daily ritual. I drank to get buzzed, and usually no more during the week, but I started obsessing about that buzz around lunchtime. If I came home and discovered there was no beer in the fridge, I’d simmer and go out to buy more. One night I made a beer run in a blinding snowstorm because my housemates and the neighbors had sucked the house dry before I’d made it home. There was a Nor’easter blowing outside, and my friends wondered why I would go out in it just for a couple of six-packs of beer, but I wasn’t to be dissuaded. By morning we might be housebound by the storm, and the idea of a house empty of anything to drink made me antsy.

A Christian friend astute beyond his years told me he wouldn’t drink with me anymore.

“We’re talking a few beers a night,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”

“It’s not how much you drink, Ian,” he said. “It’s how important it is to you.”

I was spiritually tone-deaf, but God still found ways to speak to me. My English professor, Lawrence Sargent Hall, was one.

I’d seen Larry, as he let students call him, walking around campus. If Moby Dick were produced for Broadway, Larry would have been cast in the role of Captain Ahab without an audition. He had a deeply grooved, sea-weathered face framed by white muttonchops. If a pipe wasn’t in his mouth, a cigarette was. He wore a beige felt slouch hat, the type where the brim droops on one side while the opposite side is pinned against the crown. He wasn’t hard to spot in a crowd.

To get away with being eccentric, though, you’ve got to have talent and a few achievements to back it up; otherwise, you’re just a kook. Unlike other professors, Larry didn’t just teach about great writers; he was a great writer. His short story “The Ledge” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Collection in 1960. John Updike said it was one of the best short stories of the twentieth century. A year later, he wrote the novel Stowaway, which won the William Faulkner Award for best debut novel.

I was a freshman when two other English majors, Chris and Rollo, both upperclassmen, relayed an experience they’d had with Larry earlier that day.

“We got to class and Larry was sitting in his chair at the head of the oval table, staring at the blackboard on the other side of the table,” Rollo said.

“It’s like he was hypnotized. He didn’t even say hello when we came in,” Chris said.

I frowned. “What was he looking at?” I asked.

“Eight lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Four Quartets,’” Rollo said.

“So the class sat and waited for him to say something,” Chris said.

“And?”

“He made us sit there for fifteen minutes before he said a word,” Rollo said.

“What did he say?”

Chris smiled and lowered the pitch of his voice to sound like someone much older. “‘Well, men, I don’t know what it means, but it’s one hell of a great poem,’” he quoted, snorting and laughing.

“Then he said class was dismissed,” Rollo added.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

Rollo shrugged. “Neither did we,” he said.

I was a senior before I took classes with Larry. I don’t recall one thing I learned in them, but I did solve the mystery of what had happened in Chris and Rollo’s class three years earlier. Larry wasn’t embarrassed to admit to a group of twenty-year-olds who worshiped his genius that he couldn’t always plumb the meaning of a great piece of writing. He was an internationally recognized authority on literary criticism, but he never made up an impressive-sounding but hollow answer to impress or to protect his reputation. More than once I watched him recite a flawlessly written passage from a classic, then place the book on the table, fold his arms, and gaze out a window for a minute or two.

It was better than church.

I was one of a handful of students Larry would invite to his home on Orr’s Island for drinks and dinner. These parties often turned into drinks, immediately followed by after-dinner drinks, with no dinner in between.

One night he took six or seven of us out to his writing cabin. He’d named it Fishouse, because it had once been used for codfish-drying. He explained to us why he intentionally misspelled the name of the cabin, but the story eludes me now. The pale glow of the moonlight that evening revealed the hut to be no larger than eight feet by eight feet, the plank siding made gray by the salt air and wind. Tall wisps of phragmites stood guard on either side, and the roof was crowned by a stovepipe that from fifty yards looked like a witch’s hat threatening to blow away in the gusty northerly winds.

Inside Fishouse was a chair, a plain table with an ancient typewriter on it, a thesaurus, a picture of his dog Jack, and a decanter filled with an amber liquid. A short stack of firewood sat next to the black stove. Larry had worked in that cabin for fifty years. Those of us who came in last stood on our toes and looked over the shoulders of those in front of us, vying for a glimpse of the ancient typewriter on the table, on which “The Ledge” and Stowaway had been birthed.

“Larry, what do you think Conrad was trying to say in Heart of Darkness?” a clueless kid asked from the back of the cabin. He was leafing through a copy of the book. I suspect it was a signed first edition.

Larry parted us like the Red Sea. He gently lifted the book from the boy’s hand and returned it to a crude pine shelf. Then he looked at the boy. “Sometimes it’s wiser to reverence than to parse,” he said.

The Fishouse went quiet. In the distance a foghorn sounded its plangent tone like a rabbi blowing a shofar, to call us to prayer.

There were kids in the Bowdoin Fellowship who were C. S. Lewis and Josh McDowell addicts, eager to develop a rational case for the faith so they could defend it against the intellectual objections of pagan professors. I wanted to fit in with them and enjoy discussing apologetics, but it was thin gruel to me. I didn’t want to parse God—I wanted to be swept up in his glory. I didn’t want to understand the Holy One; I wanted to be consumed in his oceanic love. I yearned for heaven, and as long as it remained beyond my reach, my life was tinged with disappointment.

How could I know that my growing attachment to drinking was nothing more than a displaced longing for this kind of ecstatic experience of God?

Besides, what would I have done differently if I’d known? I would have tried to figure out a way to have both Spirit and spirits. How else can I explain a twenty-year-old trying to swim in the depths of God, while clutching a glass of Scotch over his head?

14

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

—MAYA ANGELOU

In 1959, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin was flying his supersonic jet at forty-eight thousand feet when it suffered a catastrophic engine failure. He was forced to eject from his aircraft over a cumulonimbus—a gigantic storm cloud that gives even seasoned pilots the willies.

You’ve seen one. When fully mature, the cumulonimbus is a cauliflower-shaped cloud with billowy towers and turrets that can reach altitudes of seventy-five thousand feet. On its peak sits its distinctive anvil-shaped top. When a group of cumulonimbus clouds get together, they form menacing supercells. You don’t want to attend this party unless you’re one of those supernaturally stupid people on the TV show Storm Chasers.

Colonel Rankin is the only man to fall through the “king of clouds” and live to tell the tale. In the center of the cloud, Rankin was met by rising air blasts that shot him heavenward, then hurled toward earth by brutal downdrafts. Large hailstones at the mercy of the same forces pummeled the helpless pilot. Bolts of lightning passed frighteningly close, followed by thunder so fierce that Rankin claims he felt it more in his body than in his ears.

“This was nature’s bedlam,” he said, “an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics … beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.”

This is what 1986 felt like to me.

It began the night my father died.

He’d been in Greenwich Hospital for a month, rallying one day, declining the next. Some combination of us played Scrabble and gin rummy with my mother in the family room to pass the hours. One afternoon, after his vital signs had improved for the hundredth time, the nurse on duty suggested I go home and get some sleep. “You look exhausted. I’ll call if anything changes,” she said.

I looked at my mother. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Phillip is here. I’ll be fine.”

The nurse called at 3 a.m. “His vitals are dropping quickly,” she said. “It won’t be long.”

I topped ninety miles per hour on the Merritt Parkway, but it wasn’t fast enough. My father was dead when I arrived. I stood in the hallway outside his room until my mother came out.

I hugged her. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She hugged me and rubbed her hand in a circle on my back. “Me too.” She looked back toward the room. “They’re going to take him soon,” she said. “Would you like to say good-bye?”

I don’t know what I was expecting to see when I walked into his room, but it wasn’t this. I glanced at his body, then leaned back against the wall to prop myself up. On TV, dead people look like living people, only sleepier. This isn’t true in real life until they’ve been worked on by a mortician. At the moment of death, a person’s jaw muscles relax completely. My father’s mouth was misshapen, a gaping, black yawn. To amplify the already grotesque, a harried nurse had put his dentures back in, but only halfway. He looked like one of those ancient statues you see in the Met of a Roman warhorse screaming in terror.

I took deep breaths until my head cleared, then went to the foot of his bed. I felt the need to say something meaningful. I considered kneeling and praying, but what would I say? Hadn’t I seen a movie where a kid lays his head on the breast of his dead father and pours his heart out to him? Maybe I could riff on my memories of that scene for a while until it jump-started an emotion that would inspire me to say something from the heart. Nothing came to mind. I couldn’t recruit even one feeling, much less an outpouring of feelings to mark the solemnity of the moment.

My father’s medical chart wasn’t hanging on the foot rail of the bed anymore. Thick with a month’s worth of notes, the clipboard was now lying on the white dresser by the window. At the bottom of it, the attending nurse described my father’s death as a “Negative Patient Care Outcome.” Hemingway, the master of minimalist prose, would’ve surrendered his Nobel to whoever authored that pithy phrase.

I had expected to feel grief, at least for what our relationship wasn’t.

I hadn’t expected to feel nothing at all.

I left Bowdoin clueless about what I wanted to do with my life. I returned home and applied to the Yale Drama School but didn’t get in. I hand-delivered a vocal demo reel to every jingle house in Manhattan, hoping to get work singing radio and television commercials. While my friends were in training programs at Wall Street investment banks or going to law school, I was auditioning to sing a “Learning by Numbers” segment on Sesame Street. I was all kite and no string.

On a Sunday in early September, I went to my old church for the first time since arriving home from college. I ran into my former Young Life leader Mike at coffee hour. He asked if I was busy on Tuesday nights, and did I want to play guitar and help lead singing at Club? I just about kissed him. Anne still had two more years at Bowdoin, and I needed a community. If I became a volunteer leader with Young Life, it would give me something to do while I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. It might also keep me out of trouble.

It’s often a chance encounter that maps your future. Mike became my champion. He tended the long neglected garden of my talents with great love. He blew on the glowing embers of my passion for writing and performing music, my gift for communicating the gospel with humor, and my increasing love for God. What I thought would be a brief stint helping out a youth group turned into a vocation.

In the months following Dad’s death, I got married. Anne and I moved to a new community, and I took the helm of a youth ministry that needed a fresh start. It was a lot to absorb in one year, but exhilarating. Marrying my college sweetheart; settling into an idyllic yellow house in New Canaan, Connecticut; and watching my ministry take off was thrilling. I stood on the porch with my coffee some mornings and compared where I was at that moment with the end of the movie Rocky. I’d survived fifteen rounds with a nutcase. It was time to have the life I’d dreamed of living.

Six months later, my heart started a prison riot in my chest. I woke to it shaking and pounding my rib cage like a prisoner demanding to see the warden now. I sat up and put my hand on my chest. Was I having a heart attack? Had I drunk too much coffee before bed? Once my fear of dying passed, I realized that the only other time my body felt like this was when I was furious about something. I replayed the events of the previous day but couldn’t think of anything that would make me feel this angry. I turned on the light and read for a while until I fell asleep again. It was probably nothing.

A few nights later, a sharp pain in my chest awakened me, and again I sat up. A primitive tribesman was hollowing out my chest with a chisel to make a canoe. Every sliver of wood sliced away brought a deeper feeling of sadness. I sat up against the headboard of our bed and tried to trace the feeling back to a recent incident. But nothing had happened to elicit this kind of profound melancholy.

I woke Anne and described what I was feeling.

“I think it’s stress,” she said, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. The bedside light I’d turned on was making her squint.

“It’s scary, Anne. I feel like I’m losing my grip.”

She squeezed my hand. “If it’s not better tomorrow, we’ll call the doctor,” she said.

The next morning I felt better, so I put off making an appointment to see someone, but I was starting to dread the night.

A few days later, I became the second man to fall through a cumulonimbus cloud.

I was wracked by bouts of panic that lasted only a few hours, but the rest of my day was spent anticipating the next attack. I began to know when one of them was ramping up. A wave of anxiety would jerk my heart rate upward, which meant the free fall of sadness would soon follow. When this happened, I’d throw on my sweats and rush out to take a run, hoping that exercise would diminish the dizzying effects of my descent. As I ran I composed a list in my mind of all the reasons I should be happy, hoping to extinguish the spreading fire of anxiety and sorrow. But I could no more talk myself out of one of these episodes than I could contain a four-alarm fire with a squirt gun.

One would think that as the time between these bouts shortened and their intensity amplified, I would see a doctor, but I was too proud. I knew how to plow through hard times. I’d always figured things out on my own. I excelled at my job despite my fear that my inner scaffolding was collapsing. I’d grown up rising to the challenge. As the child of an alcoholic, I knew how to smile and work a room like someone running for reelection, even when there was a spear sticking through my head.

I was also too scared to ask for help. On one hand, I wanted a name for whatever it was that had taken over my life, a name more accurate than my self-diagnosis of “rapid-onset madness.” On the other hand, I sensed that I might be better off if I didn’t know what it was. What if they told me I was in the early stages of becoming the person my father had been, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it?

I just wanted it to go away.

I had a dream. I dreamed that Anne and I had just gotten engaged and we’d invited friends over to celebrate. We were sitting around the kitchen of my old house, laughing and talking. I was putting the linguini into the boiling water when a noise louder than AC/DC doing a sound check threatened to take out the foundation. My friends leaped to their feet. They put down their sloshing glasses of wine and gawked at the shaking linoleum floor.

“Dude, what’s in your basement?” Jim asked. We’d been good friends in college.

I looked over my shoulder at him. “Basement? I don’t have a basement. I don’t even have a crawl space.” I was happy and unconcerned. I had just dipped my wooden stirring spoon into the marinara sauce and tasted it. It was going to be a great dinner.

Moments later, AC/DC’s run-through of “Highway to Hell” was augmented by the din of smashing glass and hundreds of aluminum garbage cans being thrown against walls. The house shook until cracks appeared in the plaster walls.

“Ian, can’t you hear that? It’s got to be something in your basement.”

I whipped around. It was my boss, Mark, wincing and plugging his ears. “I’m telling you I don’t have a basement,” I said, thrusting my spoon in his direction.

“If you don’t have a basement, then where does that go?” It was my first-grade teacher, Sister Margaret. Where had she come from? Who invites a nun to their engagement party?

I checked the bread and slammed the oven door shut. “All right, I have a basement!” I said. “Is that a crime? Now, everyone sit down and eat.” One of my eyelids was quivering.

Anne went to the basement door and laid her hand on it as if she were about to pray for God’s healing. “Ian, let’s go downstairs,” she said.

I clenched my fists. “I’m not going down there!”

In the dream’s final scene, I was positioned like someone in a leg press machine at the gym. My back was pressed flat and straight against the basement door, and my feet were pushing against the wall opposite. Something was smashing against the basement door, and it wouldn’t be long before its hinges blew off. Whatever was down there wanted to kill me. And I was on my own—my guests had left.

Anne found me crying on the couch in the living room. I’d woken from the nightmare overwhelmed by another feeling I’d never experienced. Grief. My soul was a ghost town on a bleak and wintry plain. The buildings were still standing, but close to falling down. I was out of my depth.

The next morning I called my internist, Dr. Ashwood, and told his secretary it was an emergency and I needed to see him that day. She said to come during his lunch hour. When I think of what doctors might have been like in the 1950s, I imagine Dr. Ashwood. His hair was silver and always looked like it had just been trimmed. He did things with an unhurried deliberateness, and that included taking time to listen to his patients. I sat on the examining table and described my symptoms. I looked down at the black-and-white octagonal tiles on the floor. Eye contact was out of the question. Falling apart and failure were synonymous in my book, and I was riddled with shame. Dr. Ashwood asked me what life had been like over the last year. He gave me a thorough physical, drew some blood to test my thyroid for something, then told me to get dressed and meet him in his office.

When I came in, he was sitting at his desk, writing something. I was tucking in my shirt.

“Ian, I want you to see my friend, Daniel Barnigan,” he said, stretching across his desk to hand me a piece of paper.

I read it and slumped. “A psychologist?”

Dr. Ashwood leaned back into one of those ridiculously expensive chairs for people with bad backs. “He goes to my church. I think he’s one of the best.”

“I’m mentally ill?” I asked.

He chuckled. “No, but you have been through a lot of transitions in the last eighteen months. I want you to talk with someone before we approach this medically.”

I shook Dr. Ashwood’s hand. “I’ll give it a shot,” I said, avoiding having to look at him.

As I turned to walk out, Dr. Ashwood said, “If it’s okay, I’d like to call Dan before you see him.”

I stopped, surprised. “How come?” I asked.

“It’s not unusual for an MD to call a psychologist about a patient’s medical history. If you have no objections, stop and sign a release on your way out.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

When I pulled into my driveway, I leaned my forehead on the steering wheel. Hopelessness had spread from my mind to my body. The journey from the car to the front door was like slogging a mile through a swamp of molasses. I felt old.

I called Barnigan, and he agreed to see me the next day. It was 3 p.m. I drank a few beers and went to bed.

Dan was seventy, his body forty, and his eyes eighteen. He radiated a child’s optimism that something exciting was about to happen but maintained the centered calm of a cloistered monk. The framed photos of him crossing the finish lines of several triathlons explained why he was so trim.

He invited me to sit on a red leather tufted couch. He sat across from me in a matching chair, one leg corkscrewed around the other, his foot hooked behind his calf. He wore a blue-and-yellow striped bow tie, a white shirt, and a black V-neck cashmere sweater. I soon learned that cashmere V-neck sweaters and bow ties were his trademark apparel.

“So what brings you here?” he said.

I stared out the window. “I’m falling to pieces,” I said, not wasting time. I described my fitful nights, the anger I couldn’t connect to anything, my vivid and petrifying dreams, and the suffocating sadness and anxiety that had become my constant companions.

“I thought these would be the happiest days of my life,” I said. “Instead, I’m afraid I’m losing it.”

He bit his lip and nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What you’re describing sounds awful.” He picked up a legal pad and pen from the floor next to his chair. “Tell me about your family.”

Tell him about my family?

I stumbled around trying to find the trailhead where the climb up this huge mountain was supposed to begin, and then a voice in my head whispered, I’ll take it from here. The narrative had waited so long to be told that it had taken on its own life.

Once it left the station, there was no slowing it down. Several times when I told specific stories from my childhood, tears welled in his eyes and I’d stop.

“Go on, go on,” he’d say.

I spoke for two hours. He stopped me two or three times to ask for a clarification; otherwise I don’t remember him even moving.

“Sorry for rambling,” I said.

Dan uncrossed his legs. “I want to sit quietly for a moment to honor the story you’ve just told. It was sacred,” he said, taking a deep breath and closing his eyes.

Honor the story. It was a phrase that brought to consciousness something deep within me. It was like peering through the vision-test machine the optometrist uses, only I wasn’t looking at an eye chart, but at my life. As he said those three words, a new lens clicked into place and things looked different, not better, just different somehow.

When Dan opened his eyes, he sat up straight.

“Do you have any questions for me before you go, Ian?” he said.

“What’s happening to me?” I said. I couldn’t leave without knowing.

He looked into the distance for a moment. I sensed that he had gone hunting for just the right word. Finally, his eyes gleamed.

“You’re waking up.”

15

Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation.

—MOTHER TERESA

Dan was less interested in my words than in the spaces between my words. What I chose not to say captivated him more than what I said.

Several months into our work together, I arrived for our weekly appointment and Dan was already in his chair. Though my depression and anxiety continued, there were periods when the darkness thinned and shafts of light broke through the cloud. No matter how brief, the appearance of those beams kept me going.

Dan gestured to the couch and held his finger to his lips to remind me we were beginning our session with silence. There was a grandfather clock in the corner behind my couch. The steady thrum of its pendulum was soothing. Three minutes later, Dan took a deep, cleansing breath and exhaled loudly enough to signal that our time of quiet was over.

“Ian, I want to speak to you about your drinking,” he said.

My throat tightened. “Why?” I asked.

“Dr. Ashwood told me that during your physical he noticed that your liver was enlarged.”

I shifted positions to try to get more comfortable. It didn’t work. “So?”

“He thinks you drink too much,” he said.

“When did he tell you this?”

“He called me before your first visit.”

I opened my palms toward Dan. “So why didn’t you ask me about it the first time we met?”

He looked deep into me. “Would you have come back?” he said.

I couldn’t argue the point.

“So let’s begin again,” he said. “Tell me about your drinking.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “I don’t drink as much as my father did,” I said.

“He’s our benchmark?” he asked. Dan was never sarcastic. It cut.

“I don’t drink much,” I said. Then there was silence, followed by more silence until I couldn’t endure it. “I’ve had times when drinking was a problem and times when it wasn’t,” I said.

I’d never used the words problem and drinking in the same sentence before. “When was it a problem?” Dan asked.

I pressed my eyes with my fingers. “The first time I tried it was a problem,” I said. I gave him the blow-by-blow of that story. “I was afraid of drinking after that, so I smoked pot instead.”

Dan laughed. “Healthy alternative,” he said. The humor was a welcome relief.

“And then I stopped both for a few years,” I said.

“Why?”

“Dan, I love getting high. I actually looked forward to getting my wisdom teeth out because I knew they would give me Vicodin after the surgery. But partying was also about me looking for attention from my father. It didn’t work, so I decided to become a star student.”

“When did you start drinking again?”

“I don’t know—end of my sophomore year, maybe the beginning of my junior year in high school. Somewhere around then.” I fingered one of the buttons on the arm of the couch.

“What prompted your picking up again?” he asked. I’d heard the phrase “picking up” a week earlier, when I’d seen my former drinking pals Terrence and Landon. It had been over a year since we’d hung out. They were both in recovery. Terrence had joined AA around the time Landon’s parents checked him into a rehab in Minnesota. He’d been sober for six months.

I stood up and walked behind the couch, placing my hands on the back of it. “I made friends with a bunch of guys who were really popular. If you wanted to hang with them, you had to party. I already told you that drinking made it easier to face my father when I came home at night. What else do you want me to say?” I asked.

Dan ignored my question. There was little hope I could wrest control of this conversation from him.

“And why are you drinking so much now?” Dan asked.

In the years between college and starting my full-time work in youth ministry, I worked to contain my drinking, with the occasional slip. I hadn’t touched drugs since college. It’s hard to make a case for social drugging.

I never drank and got behind the wheel. My ministry would be finished if I got caught. If I was lit or worse, I’d be sure Anne drove. But if the police could bust you for DUI in your house, I’d be screwed. The anxiety and depression had made keeping a lid on drinking more difficult. I told myself that I needed several more drinks to sleep through the night. Now drinking was both recreational and medicinal.

I came to bed one night with a glass of white wine.

Anne’s face darkened. “What are you doing?” she asked. “You said you hated that wine the other night.”

“It tastes better with ice,” I said.

“Ian, that glass is huge,” she said. “And I’ve never seen you bring a drink to bed.”

“It’s mostly ice,” I said. I’d purposely put ice in the glass, hoping it would disguise how much wine was in it.

“We need to talk about this,” she said.

Our premarital counselor had advised us not to tackle heavy issues in bed, but rather to wait till morning.

God bless him.

Dan put his legal pad and pencil on the antique side table next to his chair. “I won’t see you again until you stop drinking,” he said.

I sat back down on the couch. “Why?”

“Three reasons,” he said. He held up a finger to enumerate each. “First, you’re an alcoholic. Second, you’re an alcoholic. Third, you’re an alcoholic.”

The first time he said it was the knife going into my abdomen. The next time twisted the knife. The last time was the upward thrust to ensure that my survival was impossible.

I leaned forward. “That’s crap,” I said. “Do you have any idea what a real alcoholic looks like?”

He didn’t blink. “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” he said. “I’ll have thirty years of sobriety next year.”

“You go to AA? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The second word in AA is Anonymous, Ian. I don’t tell people I’m in recovery unless I feel it will help them get sober as well.”

I fell against the back of the couch and looked up at the ceiling. I was pinned. There was only one way out. I sat forward again. “Maybe we could use a break,” I said.

I had expected Dan to back down or ask me to reconsider. Instead, he stood and extended his hand before I had time to get up. “Call when you’re ready to see me again,” he said.

As I walked down the hall, I heard him close the door to his office behind me. The sound reverberated down the hallway. Taking a break is a good idea, I thought. I rolled my shoulders like a defiant boxer readying himself to get back into the ring.

My heart skipped a beat as I realized I was now fighting alone.

It was New Year’s Eve. My sister invited Anne and me to join her and a group of friends to celebrate. The night started on the wrong foot and ended with no footing at all. I didn’t realize what an anchor Dan had been. After a month of not seeing him, I’d stretched further from my mooring than I realized. My depression and anxiety had crawled back into my life, and my emotions were brittle. I’d begun hiding bottles in the garage to make sure there would always be alcohol on hand. As usual, Caroline had brought together a group of smart, interesting, and fun people. One of them had brought two magnums of expensive champagne as a gift. I enjoyed drinking most of one, and my sister and the remaining guests the other.

One of her friends raised his glass to me. “Your brother loves champagne,” he said.

My sister arched one eyebrow at me. “Apparently,” she said.

Anne glowered. She had been watching the speed and quantity of my consumption and was running a flag up the pole to say, Slow down or else.

Too late. We’d boarded an express train, not a local. It wasn’t making stops.

It was a classic blackout. The next morning I couldn’t remember anything that happened after arriving at Caroline’s apartment. But Anne and Caroline were only too happy to fill in the details. It had been only 10 p.m. when my livid sister called a limousine service to drive her incoherent brother and his humiliated wife from Manhattan to Connecticut.

“Stopping isn’t one of Ian’s gifts,” she’d told her friends as she helped Anne pour me into the back of the car.

She called the next day to tell me I was “socially indigestible.”

Anne said the ninety-minute drive brought fresh meaning to the expression “hell on wheels.” I threw up several times out the car window, and I wouldn’t stop apologizing to her and the scowling driver. He told Anne that if she weren’t in the car, he would’ve left me on the side of the Cross Bronx Expressway.

“You call Dan and make an appointment, or I will,” Anne said.

I went to the bedroom and called him. He sounded neither surprised nor unsurprised when I called; he was simply gracious.

“You’ll stop drinking, at least while we’re continuing to meet?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Excellent. I keep an office at my church. Can we meet at five thirty? I have an appointment there at seven,” he said.

I was hesitant. It was an Episcopal church several towns away, and I knew people there, including the rector. I didn’t want anyone knowing the Young Life guy was seeing a psychologist, but I didn’t feel like I was in a position to push back.

“I’ll be there,” I said.

When Dan opened the door to his office and hugged me, I was so surprised and warmed by his kindness that I forgot to raise my arms to embrace him in return.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.

As I’d expected, Dan had us begin with a time of silence. I missed the soothing sound of the grandfather clock at Dan’s other office, but the quiet alone was calming.

Dan crossed his legs. “Let’s begin where we left off,” he said. “I asked you the question, ‘Why are you drinking so much now?’”

I’d spent a month thinking about that question.

“I have all these feelings, Dan,” I said. An upsurge of despair rose suddenly from the depths of me unlike any despair I’d experienced—and that’s saying something. My sobs came from my core. By the time I could speak again, my stomach muscles were cramped and sore.

“I failed,” I said. “I never got him to love me, and now he’s dead. All my life, I felt that it was my fault he was an alcoholic. It was up to me to get him to stop. If only I’d been a better son, a smarter student, a more talented musician, maybe he’d have found the will to turn his life around so he could show up for mine. Is there something so rotten and hateful about me that he couldn’t bring himself to see me, to love me, to even touch me? My head knows it wasn’t my fault he was an alcoholic and that it wasn’t up to me to fix him, but my heart doesn’t believe it. He’s gone. Now there’s no hope of making him love me. Ever.”

I buried my face in my hands. Soon I felt someone take a seat next to me. Dan placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Ian, look at me,” he said.

I raised my head and turned. I expected to find Dan’s eyes spilling over with empathy. Instead, I found something more: the sort of eyes God gives only to seventy-year-old men who have faced their own demons and survived.

“I see you,” he said, “and you’re beautiful.”

Any carnival worth its salt has a Whac-A-Mole game. The Whac-A-Mole machine is a waist-high cabinet with five holes, inside of which there are plastic moles that randomly pop up with increasing speed. The object of the game is to force the moles back down their holes by whacking them on the head with a soft mallet handed to you earlier by the carnival employee, who is also the last remaining person on earth who smokes Kools. In order to win, you need to reach 150 points in the allotted time.

As a kid I learned to manage my feelings according to the rules of Whac-A-Mole. When an emotion like anger, sadness, disappointment, grief, or even happiness popped up, I whacked it back down its hole as fast as I could before I could feel it or, worse, express it. If I wanted to survive the unpredictability of my father’s craziness, I had to push my feelings underground. I had to numb them, deny them, bury them, or minimize them. How could I endure the barrage of disappointments and trauma if I let myself feel them?

After a while, I clobbered my feelings so many times that some stopped coming up altogether. Now and again one would try to claw its way up, but it would be so slow and woozy that I could hardly bring myself to whack it again. But rules are rules, so I had to let him have it.

After my father died, and Anne and I were settling into a stable home, my emotions decided it was safe to wake up and start the game over. To make up for lost time, they started popping up faster than I could whack them. I was flooded with emotions I couldn’t contain anymore, and the result was overpowering anxiety and depression.

Of all the feelings that awakened in me, grief was the hardest. I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to face the backlog of my losses: the father I wanted but didn’t have, the wrecked holidays, the loss of a reasonably normal childhood, and the loss of trust in myself and other people, to name a few. Dan and I did the hard work of unearthing memories and giving them the tears they deserved. I can’t get a refund for the Christmas Eve when Dad fell through the decorated tree, but I can honor the story by telling it, and that is its own reward.

It’s been twenty-four years since my last drink. My children have never gone to bed wondering if I love them. They have never heard my approaching footsteps and felt afraid.

My greatest sin now is how infrequently I say, “Thank you.”

Years ago I met a retired psychiatrist named Dr. Carlton who told me he’d treated my father in the 1970s. He told me my father had suffered from a serious illness called narcissistic personality disorder. There are competing opinions of how someone develops NPD. One is that narcissists experienced profound emotional deprivation as young children, destroying their self-esteem. They compensate for the absence of self-worth they feel by acting as if they have an overabundance of it. They are grandiose, they expect to be treated as superior to other people, they act entitled, they can’t admit wrongdoing, they never apologize because they’re never to blame, and their hunger for admiration and attention is insatiable. The one trait all narcissists possess is the inability to recognize or give importance to other people’s emotions and feelings. They are incapable of feeling empathy, so they can’t love, not even their own children.

I asked this psychiatrist how my father could hold down important jobs or work for the CIA if he was so ill.

“At first blush, full-blown narcissists are charming; they come off as competent and confident. They are natural entertainers, outgoing and flattering,” he said. “Half the entertainers you love, and even some of the people who run our government, have more narcissistic traits than the average person. More than a few are pathologically narcissistic.”

“What about my dad’s work in the intelligence services? How did he fool them?”

“I know a number of men who worked for the CIA in its early years. I’m told it was loaded with alcoholics. No one can compartmentalize his life or live secretively as well as a good alcoholic. And I imagine people who can’t feel empathy must come in handy when certain tasks have to be performed.” He paused for a moment. “Ian, your dad was miserable. He was empty, self-loathing, and more fragile than you can imagine. It wasn’t about you.”

It wasn’t about you. Shame, the belief that God regrets creating you, is like a weather pattern that descends upon a mountain. I once believed I was the weather. Turns out, I’m the mountain.

16

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

—MAYA ANGELOU

My children call their grandmother “Gaga.” They love her. She has been seventy-nine years old for several years, and she gets away with saying so. She is radiant, bigger than life.

When she comes to our house, she flings open the front door, and in a husky voice she cries, “Helloooo! Helloooo!”

I remind her that we do not live in a group home for the deaf.

She places her leather-gloved hand on her breast. “Why don’t you love your mother?” Then comes the kiss that leaves a perfectly shaped, bright red imprint of her lips on my cheek. This is how my mother brands her cattle.

Hours later the cheerful Pakistani man behind the register at Cumberland Farms will hand me a wet wipe and point to the place on my cheek where it looks like Bette Davis assaulted me. I chuckle and wipe it off. “My mom did that,” I explain, putting down a five-dollar bill for a quart of milk.

He winks. “If you say so,” he says, handing me my change.

Twenty-five years after my father’s death, my mother has become someone I wouldn’t have recognized as a boy. She shows up wearing sneakers with multicolored spangles on them and beautiful clothes that don’t always coordinate—all this from a woman who at one time wouldn’t be caught dead without high heels, even at the beach.

My mother hugs longer. She laughs louder. She’s graduated her ghosts.

Our parents are mysteries to us. No matter how close we think we are to them, we cannot know the content of their hearts. We don’t know the disappointments, or the scars and regrets that wake them in the night, or the moments for which they wish they could get a do-over. I’m not persuaded we should know them better than that. In our therapeutic age, it’s commonly said that we’re only as sick as our secrets. But there are secrets that we should keep only between God and ourselves. I don’t trust people who tell you everything. They’re usually hiding something.

There’s plenty I don’t know about my mother. She is rock and flower, steel and clouds. She wasn’t a perfect parent, nor would she claim she was. There were times, however, when she was brilliant beyond words.

“Darling, wake up.”

I sailed slowly upward as if in a hot-air balloon, pushing away the gossamer that formed the ceiling of sleep. I opened my eyes and saw my mother’s face only a few inches from mine. She was leaning over me, her hands on her knees, smiling. I was nine years old.

“Put some clothes on,” she whispered.

“What time is it?” I asked, looking around and scratching my head. My room was dark except for the light that came through the crack of the door of my closet.

“Nine o’clock,” she said, pulling a pair of blue jeans and a shirt out of my dresser and placing them on the end of my bed.

“What are we doing?” I said, swinging my legs out from under the covers so I could sit on the edge of my bed and stretch my arms.

“You’ll see,” she said, turning and leaving.

As I put on my clothes, I heard my mother talking to my sister in the bedroom next door, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. My sister’s tone of voice told me that she was as confused as I was.

My mother had checked my father into a hospital. Between his depression and his drinking, he’d been unable to get out of bed for a month, and my mother didn’t know what else to do. It was a Friday night; my older brothers were probably out with friends. So it was only my sister, Nanny, and me my mother ushered into the car.

“Where are we going?” my sister asked, closing her car door.

“On an adventure,” my mother said. My sister and I smiled at each other. Nanny smiled as well.

As we pulled out of our driveway and drove down our street, I grabbed my mother’s headrest and pulled myself toward the front seat. We didn’t wear seat belts in those days. Parents smoked with the car windows closed too. Humans should be extinct.

“Will it take long to get there?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes,” my mother replied. I fell back into the seat and heaved a sigh of protest. This was intolerably long.

But I was struck dumb with astonishment when we pulled into the entrance of Rye Playland. Opened in 1928, Playland was proof positive that Eden might have been a real place. To a nine-year-old, it was 313 acres of paradise. The park sat on the bank of Long Island Sound, and it was so chock-full of rides and games that you couldn’t do everything you wanted in any single visit. It had a carousel with hand-carved horses sporting blankets for saddles, armor, and pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. It had another carousel called the Derby Racer that circled at twenty-five miles per hour. Its horses went up and down and side to side, simulating the experience of galloping on a real steed. It sounds harmless, but going in circles for five minutes at twenty-five miles an hour would’ve made the famed astronaut Neil Armstrong feel queasy. You didn’t want to ride the Derby Racer behind the kid who had just eaten cotton candy and the popcorn drenched in artificial butter.

There was an ice rink, lake boats, putt-putt golf, restaurants, and game booths like the one where you could shoot BBs at painted tin deer that jerkily traveled around on a track. There was a small roller coaster called the Crazy Mouse, the 1928 Kiddie Coaster, bumper cars, the Ferris wheel, the Magic Carpet Fun House, and the Whip, a ride that in 1928 lived up to its name, catapulting some poor man to his death, a fact we discussed every time we got on it.

I had never been to Playland after dark, so I had never seen the thousands of lights of every conceivable color that made the park glow so bright that you couldn’t see the stars through the ambient light. Some lights were blinking; others stayed on permanently; others were burned out, leaving gaps in the chains of lights that seemed to border everything.

Any confusion about why we had been awakened in the middle of the night to go to Rye Playland evaporated in our excitement about being there at all. The Dalai Lama couldn’t have been more in the moment than we were that night.

“Follow me,” my mother said, which seemed funny since she had already grabbed our hands, leaving us little choice.

“Mom, slow down,” Caroline said.

My mother was walking quickly and deliberately. She was on a mission. After stopping at the ticket booth, she walked us toward the line for the Dragon Coaster. No one can understand how exciting this is unless they lived near Rye Playland and knew the mythology behind this ride. The Dragon Coaster was a celebrated wooden roller coaster built in 1929 as part of the original park. It is 3,400 feet long and at its peak is 85 feet high. Does it compare to Kingda Ka at Six Flags in New Jersey with its 418-foot drop? Is it as fast as the Top Thrill Dragster roller coaster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, that travels at 120 miles per hour? Is it as long as the Steel Dragon 2000 at Nagazhima Spa Land in Japan—8,133 feet long? No. But among true roller coaster connoisseurs, it is a beauty, a classic that must be ridden before one dies. A few years back, it was designated a Landmark Coaster by the American Coaster Enthusiasts.

Kingda Ka will have to wait in a long line for that honor, thank you very much.

Until that night, I had never been allowed to ride on the Dragon Coaster, probably because I was too young or didn’t meet the height requirement or both. On the rare occasions when we went to Rye Playland, the rest of my family would get to ride it while I stood with Nanny at the bottom, pouting and watching. Nanny was glad for the excuse of needing to stay behind with me. She would no more have gone on the Dragon Coaster than put on a leather helmet and goggles and gone wing riding on a biplane. Tonight, however, I was growing up.

When we got to the front of the line, my mother pushed me into the car before the guy operating the brake lever could stop us and make me stand next to the height board that daily dashed the hopes of small children. The man began to object until my mother gave him a look that would have spooked Stalin.

He shrugged. “He’s your kid,” he muttered.

The Dragon Coaster at that time was still outfitted with the original 1928 wooden benches that had flimsy seat belts and no lap bars. It did have metal rods that splayed out from the tops of the wooden sides of the cars. They were psychologically comforting, but they wouldn’t help you if you had a seat belt malfunction on one of the drops.

Like I said, humans should be extinct.

“Ready?” my mother asked. She was sitting between my sister and me. I was holding the back of the bench in front of me for dear life. I could feel my pulse racing in my temples. I was finally riding the Dragon Coaster. When the brakeman pushed the lever forward, the string of cars lurched forward, eliciting the first round of screams, outing the more anxious riders. Wooden roller coasters are loud creatures. They are mechanical, not pneumatic. They creak and groan. They rattle and grind. They are barbaric in their simplicity.

The ride began with a short curve into an immediate ascent. I looked down and saw Nanny wringing her hands and peering in the wrong direction to catch sight of us as we waved and called out to her. For one second at the top of the hill, I had a glimpse of the whole of the world, as I knew it then, before we took a quick dip that gave the string of cars a burst of momentum. I knew from having heard people talk about the ride what was coming next, the eighty-five-foot drop.

“Hold on!” my mother yelled. This was an unnecessary instruction.

At the bottom of the drop, you were thrown skyward and then down in a double-dip drop that sent you careening toward the pinnacle of the ride. One might think the high point of the Dragon Coaster was the eighty-five-foot drop that we’d just completed, but that wasn’t the climax at all. The double dip gave you the speed to enter a tunnel through the mouth of the dragon. As you approached it, the dragon’s eyes lit up, and a fog machine shot smoke out of his nostrils. The condensation from the fog machine produced water that dripped on your head like dragon drool.

It was all too much. Passing through the inside of the dragon tunnel was terrifying. It was pitch-black, and there was an earsplitting recording of a roaring creature that about made you wet your pants. You had no idea what would happen next. Would there be another stomach-dropping plummet? A sudden turn that defied the laws of physics? When we finally came out the tail of the dragon, I knew what Jonah must have felt like when the whale spit him out on the beach. I couldn’t recall everything that happened after we came out of the dragon’s tail—only that I was glad to see the boarding station where you got off.

“Don’t take off your seat belt,” my mother said.

My eyes furrowed. “Why not?”

My mother laughed. “Because we’re going again,” she said.

“Seriously?” my sister said.

“Absolutely,” my mother replied.

This was not welcome news. I was glad to have survived the Dragon Coaster once, but my stomach was knotted, and I wanted nothing to do with a second pass. When we pulled back into the loading station, my mother handed the brakeman three more tickets.

“Mom, I don’t want to do this,” I said.

My mother looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s not as scary the second time.”

I had been taken hostage by Willy Wonka.

My mother was right; the ride wasn’t as frightening the second time around. Now I knew where most of the curves and dips were, and the eighty-five-foot plunge didn’t give me that pukey feeling I’d had before. But there was still one section that scared the pants off of me: passing through the tunnel of the dragon. I am right-brain dominant. This is the highly imaginative and creative side of our minds. If you were to perform an MRI on my head, you would discover that the left side of my brain, the part responsible for analytical thinking, reason, and logic, is woefully smaller than its counterpart. As we approached the dragon’s mouth, with his huge green blinking eyes, my little left brain tried to convince my overactive right brain that killing visitors was probably not good advertising for an amusement park and therefore not something the management would set out to do, but there wasn’t time to call a jury to settle the argument. I closed my eyes and quietly invoked the name of the Holy Family as we blew into the dragon’s mouth and whipped around in the darkness. It was just as bad as the first time.

When we pulled into the loading station, my mother handed the brakeman three more tickets. My sister and I leaned forward and looked at each other, our eyes wide with confusion. Maybe Mom had finally gone over the edge. Maybe she was possessed and we needed Father Durcan to perform an exorcism on her.

“Are you sure, lady?” the brakeman asked.

“Quite,” my mother said.

“It’s gotta be your last time,” he said, pointing backward with his thumb. “I got a line.”

“Mom, are you crazy?” I asked.

She put her arm around my scrawny shoulders, and my sister’s on the other side, and snuggled us into her. “A little,” she said.

As the train lurched forward, beginning our third excursion, I thought about having to pass through the dragon tunnel again and shuddered. I asked Jesus to miraculously make it disappear and replace it with something more like the It’s a Small World ride they have at Disney World, where all those happy automated creatures sing while you sail safely and slowly down a calm river. My left brain told me this wasn’t going to happen.

Every other part of the ride was fun now. I knew what to expect and laughed my way through it all. As we went into the double dip that came just before the dragon’s mouth, my mother let go of me and my sister, and I just about cried.

“Throw your hands in the air and scream!” she yelled.

I could barely hear her over the soundtrack of the roaring dragon. “What?” I cried back.

“Throw your arms up in the air and scream!” she yelled again, throwing her arms into the air.

I wasn’t keen on taking advice from a woman who had taken us on a roller-coaster ride three times without stopping, but what choice did I have? Just as we passed into the dragon’s mouth, I threw my hands in the air and I screamed. Halfway through the tunnel it happened. The scream turned into a howl of glee.

I was laughing in the dark.

We pulled into the unloading station and undid our lap belts.

“Thank you,” my mother said to the brakeman.

He shook his head. “Don’t mention it,” he said.

“What’s next?” my sister said.

“Time to go home,” my mother said.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“No games?” my sister asked.

“We’re not going on the Whip?” I asked.

“No, just the Dragon Coaster tonight,” my mother said, waving to Nanny to join us.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I looked back through the rear window to see the fireworks display that Playland put on every weekend night in the summer to signal that the park would soon close. The Dragon Coaster dominated the skyline of the park, and I saw the colored lights following the outline of every turn. And I saw the dragon himself, his incandescent green eyes looking at me.

By the time we arrived back home, I was asleep in the back of the car. My mother woke me and told me I was too heavy to carry in and that I had to get up and walk inside. When we came into the house, it was quiet, and the air, moth gray with sadness, still filled every corner. Nothing had changed—except us.

I have a photo of my mother with my children on the beach near a house we once owned in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. She’s in her midseventies, wearing her oversized Jackie O glasses and a scarf on her head, the back of it fluttering in the breeze. She’s wearing casual pants and a silk blouse to protect her fair Irish skin and is on her knees, digging a sand castle with her grand-kids. Pearls and gold necklaces dangle from her neck. My daughter Maddie appears to be dancing, while Aidan and Cailey are considering what needs to be done next. I remember my mother was telling them about the days when we lived in England and describing Windsor Castle. This was what they were building, she said.

There are no salmon-orange-stained lifeboats on this beach, and I know who’s taking this picture. It’s me.

My kids are never happier than when they are with my mother. We used to leave them with her when Anne and I would go on vacation. One time we called from Bermuda to ask how things were going. Aidan answered the phone, and when we asked what they were up to, he said, “Gaga is teaching us how to play poker and smoke cigarettes.”

In the background I heard my daughter Cailey call out, “That’s not true. Gaga told him to say that.”

“We are playing poker, though!” Maddie chimed in.

No one ever wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I want to marry an alcoholic who will make the next thirty-three years of my life hell on earth.” You marry someone because you are twenty-two, are in love, and think you can make a life together. But love-struck twenty-two-year-olds don’t always have eyes that see and ears that hear.

The insanity of living with an addict rolls into your life like fog as you stand on the shore of your hopes about the future. Then the tide begins, imperceptibly at first, to rise. Over the years, the water gets higher and higher, the fog continues to thicken, and one day you realize you’re lost, over your head, and even the calling of gulls has stopped.

Do I wish my mother had left my father? Yes. Did I find it hard to understand and forgive that she didn’t? Yes. One day Dan said to me, “Forget your mother. Can you forgive your children’s grandmother?” When the front door is locked and you have no key, check the slider on the porch. It’s open.

When their grandmother makes her grand entrance, my kids run to the door to be branded and fight over who sits next to her on the couch. They wait for her to screw up movie titles.

“I saw the movie Drastic Park last night,” she tells them.

“Gaga, it’s Jurassic Park,” they howl.

She rolls her eyes. “Close enough,” she says, then explains that her error is called a malapropism, a word they should know.

I can see the couch from the kitchen. I stop cutting parsley and remember that she taught me how to ride the Dragon Coaster and what to do when you’re flung into the mouth of whatever it is you think will kill you. Throw up your arms and laugh until you come out the other side. That lesson has saved my life once or twice.

My children call their grandmother “Gaga.” They love her.

They should.

17

We cannot help but tremble on the brink of surrender.

—ALAN JONES

In 1735, an enterprising New Englander named Isaac Underhill opened the first marble quarry in the United States. It’s nestled on Route 30 in Dorset, Vermont, two miles from our summer home. Before it shut down operations in 1917, it provided the marble that was used to build the New York Public Library, the Harvard Medical School, the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, and other equally impressive places. After the quarry was abandoned, it filled up with cold, spring-fed water and became the world’s finest swimming hole, bar none. Did I mention that it’s cold? You have no idea how far a man’s testicles can recede into his body until you have jumped into the Dorset Quarry. Mine once retreated behind my pancreas and refused to come down until I promised them I would never go into the quarry again, unless I did so gradually and with ample warning.

On a hot day, the quarry is like a “Where’s Waldo” poster. All of humanity is on display. I have seen hundreds of people wandering the grounds at the same time—boarding-school kids wearing J. Crew swim trunks and Vineyard Vine polo shirts; men with no front teeth throwing back Bud Lights and hugging their cackling girlfriends, who wear cutoff jeans and smoke Newports; local toughies with more tattoos on their bodies than a passel of Hindu gods; grandmas in stretch pants and flip-flops, sitting in old beach chairs with bent aluminum frames, telling their blue-lipped grandchildren to come and wrap themselves in towels; and stick-skinny kids whose complexions are so white you can almost see their central nervous systems with the naked eye. Every so often a group of adults with Down syndrome come and sit on the grass to eat PB&Js for lunch, getting grape jelly all over their faces. Packs of cyclists from Europe in yellow-and-black spandex biking outfits stop to cool off before they continue on their cross-country trek, and a few African-American Fresh Air Fund kids from the Bronx stand at a distance and wonder how in the world they ended up spending their summer break in the second-whitest state in the country. Heck, I once saw a group of Buddhist monks from Tibet wearing maroon robes, sitting and cooling their feet along the bank of the oblong-shaped quarry.

UC Berkeley can’t rival this kind of diversity.

The only place to sit and watch the goings-on is a small grassy knoll on which giant slabs of white marble lay willy-nilly on the grass. Some are freestanding, and some are sloppily stacked on each other, like the artist Andy Goldsworthy and a group of drunk trolls placed them there. Otherwise the water is surrounded by an almost uninterrupted white-and-gray marble wall that changes heights depending on where you are on the perimeter. The owner of the nearly two-hundred-year-old Dorset Union General Store told me that that the water is eighty feet deep in the center. Well-worn paths wind all the way around the edge of the wall, making it possible for you to get to the different heighted ledges from which you can leap into the water.

The first time we went to the quarry, my daughters, Cailey and Maddie, were fourteen and eleven, and my son, Aidan, was eight. I worry about my kids. A lot. They have an incredible mother who was raised in a pretty normal family (whatever that means). Anne has a sense of what she’s doing with kids and making a family. She knows when kids need to get to dentists and doctors, when she needs to go down to the local rec center to sign them up for soccer, and what level of propulsive bleeding warrants a trip to the emergency room. Their father, on the other hand, learned about responsible parenting from watching Modern Family and from the occasional reruns of Eight Is Enough on late-night cable.

Our first summer in Vermont, the focus of my anxiety was my son, Aidan. He seemed so fearful and uncertain. Like me at eight, he was small and not very athletic. We once signed him up to play in a little-kid soccer league when he was five. Instead of jumping into the fray and chasing the ball in one of those huge amoeba-shaped scrums that five-year-olds form when playing soccer, he stood in the middle of the field, holding the coach’s hand and sucking his thumb. If he did play, he would sometimes stop altogether and begin looking up at the sky and the wind blowing through the trees like he was having a mystical religious experience. My self-referential narcissism told me that this was all a sign of my utter failure as a dad.

The problem with growing up with a crappy father is that it makes you neurotic as heck about raising your own kids. I have no model of what a father is supposed to do or be. I had the anti-father. How can I give something to a son that I myself never received? I want my son to know how to be in the world; how to love himself; how not to settle for too little; how to walk with God with humility, compassion, and a heart that makes room for everybody; how to never hide his true self because he’s afraid. In other words, I want to give him an absolutely perfect childhood.

Is that too much to ask?

Whenever I make a mistake with him or my daughters, I excoriate myself. One time I got stuck in traffic and missed one of Aidan’s choral concerts. Guilt oozed from every orifice. I apologized so many times he finally told me to shut up. He was six.

To complicate matters, he has untraditional parents. I love fourteenth-century choral music and poetry. I don’t know the rules to football or baseball and couldn’t care less about having a television so I can sit on the couch and watch ESPN on Saturdays. I tried golf once but broke a car windshield in the country club parking lot driving off the first tee.

My wife, on the other hand, was, in high school and college, a downhill ski racer and a star in lacrosse, soccer, and field hockey. She runs marathons and at forty-six still has six-pack abs. What makes it worse is that she is genuinely humble about it. Jealous twenty-five year olds have keyed her car in the fitness club parking lot. Do I do the “dad thing” and coach my son’s teams? No, my wife does. I bring orange wedges, juice packs, and a well-highlighted copy of Soccer for Dummies. Shame, shame, so much shame.

Our family made our first visit to the quarry on a hot Fourth of July. The place was packed. So many people were jumping into the water from all the different ledges that it looked like lemmings committing suicide en masse. All the locals know that there are four jumps at the quarry—the ten-footer, the eighteen-footer, the twenty-three-footer, and the mother of all jumps, “the Forty.” There is also a three-foot jump that no one bothered to name until my son Aidan drew people’s attention to it. Until then it had simply been a few rocks one stepped on when approaching the water.

“Dad, I want to jump in, but my instincts won’t let me,” Aidan said, standing on the recently named three footer.

I nearly burst out laughing. “Aidan, jumping off your bed would be more dangerous, and you do that all the time. Just jump,” I said, standing in the water up to my waist.

“What if there are snapping turtles or big fish down there?” he asked, peering over the side and shivering.

“Then they’ll bite you,” his sister Cailey said, frowning impatiently.

I gave her the death-ray look. “Thanks, Cailey. That’s really helpful.” I turned back to Aidan. “Buddy, Dad will be standing right here in the water when you jump in. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

An hour later I was still standing in the freezing water.

My testicles were very, very angry.

Maddie and Cailey are more like their mom. I once had to beg Anne not to bungee jump off the bridge over Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

“Honey, this is 365 feet,” I pleaded, looking over the side while she counted her money to pay for the jump.

“It’ll be awesome,” she said.

“Listen, Anne,” I said, taking her by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. “My parenting skills are only slightly better than Nicholas Cage’s in Raising Arizona. If you get killed and I have to raise our kids alone, they’ll all end up as ax murderers.”

She relented.

Like their mom, Maddie and Cailey are fearless. They would jump into the quarry even if it didn’t have water in it. The cool thing is that my kids really love each other. Yes, there are the periodic battles over who would get what if Mom and I died, but on the whole they are tight. Maddie and Cailey worked for hours with Aidan, trying to get him to make this three-foot jump into the water. I eventually wandered off to read a copy of The Drama of the Gifted Child so I could figure out where I had failed him.

After nearly a full day at the quarry, Aidan still hadn’t jumped, and he was crestfallen. Finally his sisters, his mom, and I all got into the water and formed the equivalent of one of those booms they use to contain oil spills around the place where he would splash down. The only way he could have gotten hurt is if all four of us had simultaneously died of heart attacks while he was in midair. With only moments to spare before we went home, he closed his eyes and leaped. The muscles in his neck were so taut that they could have snapped. It was not a bold, joyous, or soaring leap—it was more like he slithered down the side of the rocks—but we called it a jump and cheered like he had performed a perfect triple-gainer at the Olympics. Even a few grandmothers in beach chairs held up their bottles of Snapple iced tea with NASCAR foam holders and cried, “Way to go, kid!”

On the ride home, Aidan couldn’t stop talking about coming back the next day so he could jump off the ten-footer.

“Thank you, Jesus,” I whispered under my breath.

The next morning Aidan jumped into our bed in his damp bathing suit and insisted we get up so we could go to the quarry. I told him that we should wait until it was light out. By the time breakfast was finished, the weather was as beautiful as it had been the day before. We packed our lunch, leashed our Portuguese water dog Hobbes, and got to the quarry by 9 a.m. This time it only took Aidan a few minutes to make the three-foot jump into the water, which he did several dozen times to be sure he really had it down. There was only one condition: I had to be close by when he jumped.

“I think I’m ready for the ten-footer,” he announced.

“Are you sure?” I asked. My wife glared at me. This response wasn’t a confidence builder.

The five of us swam across the quarry and scrambled up the marble wall to the ten-footer. Anne jumped. Cailey jumped. Maddie jumped. Aidan stood on the ledge and quaked.

“Dad, you have to go in and wait for me at the bottom. I won’t jump unless you do,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll be waiting for you,” I said, leaping in.

There was a line of kids behind Aidan, waiting for him to jump. So he let a few others go ahead of him while I treaded water, waiting for him to leap.

“Aidan, Dad can’t do this forever,” I said through chattering teeth.

This time Aidan didn’t close his eyes, nor did he limply dribble down the side of the wall halfheartedly. He made a full-blown jump, a screaming, leg-pedaling, arm-flailing jump. When he came up, he was more than a little pleased with himself.

“Woo-hoo!” we all yelled.

“Aidan, are you ready for the eighteen-footer?” Maddie asked.

“Skip the eighteener. Let’s go to the twenty-three-footer!” he said like a man filled with a double dose of the Holy Ghost.

When we arrived at the twenty-three-foot ledge, however, Aidan’s courage quotient diminished significantly. So did mine. Jumping twenty-three feet sounds doable in the abstract. Heck, my adjoining living room and dining room are twenty-three feet long. Of course, I have never stood them on end and jumped off them. Even my daredevils Maddie and Cailey were hesitant at first. Their mother was the one who broke the impasse. She walked over to the ledge and without fanfare performed a full forward flip and finished with a headfirst dive. This inspired her daughters to jump in after her. I vowed to key her car.

Aidan was biting his nails. Half his hand was in his mouth. “Dad, you jump and wait for me at the bottom,” he said.

If my wife hadn’t smacked me down by performing this perfect flip in front of my kids and half of Vermont, I might have opted out, but I had to jump just to save face. So off I went.

Maddie, Cailey, Anne, and I treaded water and waited for Aidan. He wasn’t the only person thinking twice about the wisdom of jumping the twenty-three-footer. People of all ages were mulling around, eyes furrowed and pacing. My favorites are the guys who tell people they’ve done it a million times before, but “just don’t feel like it today.” Then there are the kids who announce that this time they are going to do it for sure. They lurch forward but at the last second pull back and scream, “I can’t do it.” Then their brother or sister comes up and says, “Let’s hold hands, count to three, and do it together.” Sometimes this strategy works, but more often than not the kindly sister or brother ends up betrayed. They count to three and leap, but Judas shakes his hand free and doesn’t jump. I feared Aidan would end up in this camp. He had been afraid to jump three feet the day before; where on earth would he find the courage to jump twenty-three feet only one day later?

Aidan pulled away from the ledge and disappeared. I thought he was tossing in the towel.

Hey, the kid is eight years old, and this is twenty-three feet. He should be proud of jumping the ten-footer, I told myself. Just because there are eight-year-old girls jumping off the twenty-three-footer doesn’t mean he’s a failure. It doesn’t mean that a mob of angry child psychologists should stone me to death for being a loser as a father. Just as I was wondering if my Greenwich therapist could do a phone appointment with me, I looked up. I found out why he had disappeared. He had decided to make a running start before jumping. Aidan came off that ledge like Evel Knievel flying his motorcycle across the Snake River Canyon. He screamed triumphantly all the way down. Or at least he screamed.

As we pulled ourselves out of the water to go off the twenty-three-footer again, Maddie asked, “Dad, can we do the Forty?”

I looked across the quarry at the Forty. Just looking at it gave me that lower intestinal cramp feeling. “Not on my watch,” I said.

“But Dad—”

“Not another word, Maddie. Besides, it’s time to go home,” I lied, diving in to head back to shore.

I thought the conversation about jumping the Forty was behind us. Until Anne and I were doing the dishes that night.

“Honey, you should let the kids jump the Forty,” she said.

This suggestion came out of left field. I hung the dish towel over my shoulder, crossed my arms, and leaned against the counter, watching her wipe down the countertop and rinse out the sink.

“Not a prayer,” I said, finally.

“Why not?” she asked, turning her attention to scrubbing off something stuck to the stovetop.

I sighed and ran both my hands through my hair. “I don’t know. Maybe they can do it next year when they’re a little bigger. Jumping twenty-three feet is plenty of accomplishment for one summer.”

Anne stared at me. “Ian, what’s really going on here?”

I tossed my dish towel onto the counter.

“Look, kids get hurt doing crap like this; that’s what’s going on here. Forty feet is a long way to fall,” I said.

Anne’s face softened, and she placed her hand on my cheek. “Ian, they’re not falling; they’re jumping.”

I had trouble sleeping that night. I couldn’t help thinking about what Anne had said about the difference between the kids jumping and falling. My childhood had been an emotional and spiritual free fall. Often there was no net, no soft landing in the water with a parent waiting, and I got hurt. Some of that hurt came at the hands of others who should have known better, and some of it came because I made my own self-destructive mistakes. Regardless, I didn’t want my kids to know what it meant to fall from a cliff or from anything else, for that matter. Ever.

But Anne was right. There is a big difference in life between a jump and a fall. A jump is about courage and faith, something the world is in short supply of these days. A fall is, well, a fall. Maybe I was supposed to teach Maddie, Aidan, and Cailey about how to do both well. Maybe that’s what parents do. Still, I wasn’t sure I could let them jump the Forty. Waiting till next summer seemed the more responsible thing to do.

I had hoped for rain the next day so we could hang out at the Dorset Library and read instead of going to the quarry. Unfortunately, it was another perfect day. God and my wife were conspiring against me.

We hadn’t been at the quarry long before we had already made our jumps off the ten-and twenty-three-footers. I knew what was coming.

“Dad, please let’s jump off the big one,” Maddie said, pointing to a group of college boys wending their way down the brushy path to the Forty. Maddie is my mellow, go-with-the-flow middle child. The problem is, she doesn’t believe in mortality.

“Maddie Cron, this is the tenth time you’ve asked me if you can jump off the Forty, and I’ve told you I’m not comfortable with it. I told Mom last night you can do it next year.”

Maddie put her hands on her hips and stuck out her lower lip. “Why not?” she asked.

“Because I don’t want to push you around in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, that’s why,” I said. I’m not Jewish, but I am the archetypal hovering Jewish father. I make Woody Allen look like a wingsuit diver.

Maddie rolled her eyes and looked at the line of tan, shirtless boys in cutoffs walking through the brush like extras from the movie The Last of the Mohicans. She was itching to join them.

“Can’t we at least go see it?” she asked, twirling the ends of her hair with her fingers. She all but batted her eyes. I have seen her pull this I’m intolerably cute, so do whatever I ask act before.

It works.

Everything in me said walking over to “just see” the Forty was a bad idea, but the kids and their mother had worn me down. Besides, part of me was annoyed and wanted to see this jump. Everyone spoke about it the way climbers talk about K2. It couldn’t possibly be that imposing.

I sighed. “Aidan, do you want to come?”

“Sure, but I’m not jumping,” he said.

I put my arm around his tanned bare shoulder. “Trust me. I ain’t jumping either, pal.”

When the five of us got to the Forty, there was a group of ten college-aged boys peering over the ledge, debating whether to jump. Apparently, they had been having this debate for a long time. Forty feet is equivalent to the height of a four-story building. Falling forty feet onto pavement would leave a big wet mark at the point of impact. For me to even think about jumping off a forty-foot cliff would require two milligrams of Xanax and a diaper.

“You go first,” one of the college boys said to one of his pals.

“I’m not going first; you go first,” his friend replied.

“It’s not that high,” another kid chimed in, peeking over the side.

“Then you do it,” a tall kid said, pretending he was going to push his friend in. The kid quickly jumped backed from the edge.

There were four boys below, sitting across from the Forty on a small island made up of large marble blocks stacked on top of each other. They were taunting their friends. They had already made the leap and were trying to shame the guys at the top into joining them.

“Jump, for crying out loud,” one yelled, taking a swig of beer.

“Once you step off, it’s nothing,” the guy sitting next to him added.

“How many times do your arms go round in a circle before you hit the water?” a kid on the cliff called down through cupped hands. Apparently this data point provides an accurate measure of how high a jump is.

“Maybe three times and then you’re in. No big deal,” said the kid drinking beer.

“Three arm rotations? That’s pretty far,” someone whispered behind us.

The guys at the ledge were not effete choirboys. I learned that the group was made up of Division I lacrosse players from a nationally ranked college team. They were buff, as my daughters would say. Given their physical prowess and toughness, I would’ve thought they would be doing double-gainers off this thing by now.

“How long have you guys been up here debating this?” I asked.

“About half an hour,” they said.

My eyes widened. “And you still haven’t jumped?”

The kids folded their arms and stared me down. “Take a look,” they said.

I moved through their huddled group and peeked over the edge.

It was K2.

I immediately stepped back two feet, afraid that some smart-aleck college kid would shove me in as a beta test, the logic being, “Let’s see if a middle-aged man can survive the plummet. If he does, then we’ll do it.”

I crept slowly forward and looked over the ledge again. It looked even higher than I had anticipated. It was seventeen feet taller than the twenty-three-footer we had been jumping off of twenty minutes ago, but it might as well have been a mile. A breeze moved across the water below, gently roughing its surface. Sunlight danced on the crests of the tiny swells.

“Yeah, that’s pretty far,” I said.

“Ya think?” one of the offended lacrosse players said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Maddie walking forward. She comported herself with the proud and sure stride of a Masai tribeswoman with a fruit-laden basket on her head. She held her head high; the motion of her brown legs was fluid and strong. She was the embodiment of Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, Joan of Arc, and Sacagawea.

“Maddie, don’t you dare—” I said, but it was too late. As calm as a bird taking flight, she leaped off the Forty without one iota of hesitation. She descended like a pencil weighted at the tip, her body rigid and straight; her arms tight to her sides to minimize impact and limit the possibility of a belly-flopping rotation. She barely made a splash. When she came up out of the water, she was smiling from ear to ear.

“Dad, it’s awesome! You have to do it!” she yelled up, swimming a backstroke toward the island where the other jumpers were sitting.

I snorted. “Not a prayer,” I yelled. “And by the way, you’re freaking grounded until you go to college.”

Maddie giggled. Then she squealed with laughter when her sister Cailey made the jump while my back was turned. I’d lost authority. It was mob rule.

It was then that I felt someone tugging at my swim trunks. It was my eight-year-old son, Aidan. He looked up at me with brown, doelike eyes and said, “Dad, if you do it, I’ll do it.”

There are moments in a father’s life when he realizes that he is facing a decision of irreducible consequence. At first blush, the event might appear trivial, but in his gut the father knows that what he says or does next will determine whether his child will be going to Harvard or riding out his twenties working at the Gap to pay for therapy. This was one of those liminal moments. Even the college boys around us knew something sacred and momentous was happening. One of them shushed the others, while the rest of the group ogled me like a Greek chorus waiting for the hero’s decision.

I looked over the side and noticed that small shrubs and oak saplings were growing horizontally out of the cracks on the face of the cliff wall. You’d have to make a serious leap to clear the vegetation. “I don’t know, Aidan,” I said, my knees beginning to wobble.

Aidan looked over the side, took a deep breath, and blew out. Then he looked at me and said again, “I mean it, Dad. If you jump, so will I.”

The next thing that happened made me believe that maybe some of the more fantastic Bible stories are really true. Maybe the power of the Lord can embolden a kid to kill a giant with a slingshot. Maybe grace can make a rascal noble or a coward brave, even if it’s only for a moment.

I walked off the ledge.

The college kids were wrong. It was four full arm revolutions before I hit the water. The drop was high enough that the impact hurt the bottom of my feet. A belly flop from this height would liquefy your internal organs. But it was exhilarating as all get-out. I was twelve again.

But then I remembered Aidan.

I looked up to see my eight-year-old boy, peering down at me. Around him was the Greek chorus of lacrosse players, fascinated by the family drama playing itself out in front of them. What I realized as I looked up at Aidan was just how high this jump really was and how letting him make the leap might be a really bad idea. He was so small. What if he landed wrong and did some serious damage to his neck or back? What if he accidentally hit a slab of marble no one knew was just below the surface? What if a condor snatched him midair and took him to its aerie to feed him to its condor babies? These are the kinds of things that go through my mind even now as an adult.

Aidan smiled at me, and I knew in my heart that everything in his life and in mine had always been leading up to this moment. He jokingly made the sign of the cross three times fast and then jumped. Like his sisters, he hit the water so perfectly that his entrance into the water barely disturbed the surface.

“Yes!” I cried, and waited for him to come up. But he didn’t. After three or four seconds of waiting, I looked over at Maddie and Cailey. The two college boys on the island peered into the water to see if they could see him any better from their angle than I could from mine. Nausea engulfed me. I imagined one of his feet caught in an angry crib of branches and crisscrossing logs that had long been waiting on the quarry bottom for a victim such as this. I visualized Aidan’s frightened eyes and felt his struggle to get free. I was just taking a deep breath to go down to search for him when, two feet in front of me, a sixty-five-pound blond rocket shot up out of the water. If his eyes had been any wider, they would have fallen out of their sockets. He’d lost a few baby teeth that summer, so when he smiled, he looked like a drunken pumpkin. He was laughing, coughing, and blowing water out of his nose all at once. The cowardly group of twenty-year-olds cheered, albeit ashamed of themselves for being shown up by an eight-year-old.

“Aidan! Aidan! Aidan!” Maddie and Cailey chanted and danced from the island.

Aidan and I looked into each other’s eyes, and a wonderful admixture of joy and grief arrested me. I had witnessed a death and a birth. Looking into his face, I knew that the boy who had gone into the water was not the boy who had come out. The old things had passed away; behold, all things were new.

He threw his arms around me while I treaded water to keep us afloat.

“Dad, I did it,” he said into my ear.

“I know,” I said, my throat knotting with joy.

All around us now were the screams and splashes of college kids jumping off the cliff, not to be outdone by the daring bravery of an eight-year-old.

“Hey, mister, is that your kid?” It was one of the college kids sitting on the island.

“He sure is,” I said.

“How old is he?” he asked, taking a swig of beer and wiping his mouth with his forearm.

When I told him, he shook his head and held his beer up to Aidan in a toast of respect. “Kid, you’ve got big balls.”

Aidan pulled away and looked at me, eyes afire like diamonds, his arms still around my neck. “Dad, did you hear him?” he asked.

I laughed. “Yeah.”

He hugged me again. I felt his wet, smooth cheek pressed against my own. “I’ve got big balls,” he whispered in my ear.

“Big brass ones,” I whispered back. And we laughed and laughed and laughed until it felt like the water and the marble cliffs and all of creation was laughing with us.

I commissioned a local artist to paint an oil of the quarry on a typical summer’s day, brimming with people of seemingly every tribe and nation. If you look closely in the left-hand corner of the canvas, there are three kids in midair, holding hands. They have just leaped off the Forty. One is blond, one is brunette, one a redhead. These are my children.

They have jumped, not fallen.

18

And now the boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried.

—ELIE WIESEL

It is 7 a.m. I am in the sacristy, where our vestments are kept. The early morning sun is barefaced. It blazes through the window, the sash bars splitting the gleaming light into slanting shafts that reflect off the polished gold chalices and candlesticks kept on the shelf reserved for altar furnishings. Even as the priest, I do not have to be at the church this early. The Holy Eucharist is not for another hour and a half, but this is the first time I will be at the altar as the celebrant. In just ninety minutes I will make my maiden voyage, leading the people through the liturgy of the Great Thanksgiving, the prayer of thanks the priest says on behalf of the congregation, asking the Spirit to mysteriously knead his presence into the bread and wine. Then we feed the kneeling faithful.

I have carried a paten and distributed the bread before. It’s always moving. Young couples come up, arms loaded with squirming babies. They look tired. I want to tell them it’s okay to come back to the rail if they need seconds. Some parishioners are old and palsied, and I worry they’ll splash the blood of Jesus all over themselves when their shaking hands grasp the chalice. Then I think, Worse things could happen than being old and drenched in the blood of Christ, and I stop worrying.

I have introduced and served Communion a thousand times in nondenominational churches. Those times, I made up the Communion prayer as I went along, and there is something wonderful about that kind of heartfelt spontaneity. But this is a high-church Episcopal parish where the liturgy is more like a choreographed ballet. For well over a thousand years, priests have said and used nearly the same words and gestures I will say and use this morning. Folks come to this church to meet God in a way that is continuous with this long history. They won’t be impressed if I get flustered and start winging it, no matter how authentic and earnest I sound. Some might ask for a refund if I screw it up. I wouldn’t blame them.

Earlier in the week, I shared with an elderly cleric my anxiety about serving as the celebrant. He told me of a young priest’s debut as celebrant that he’d witnessed some years ago. This young guy liked himself a lot. He believed he possessed great liturgical chops. He spoke in a booming, affected voice that sounded more like the English actor Kenneth Branagh performing King Lear than a young priest from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, celebrating his first service of Holy Eucharist.

There is a solemn moment in the liturgy when the priest lays the large priest Host on the altar and briefly bows over it, in a gesture of reverence. While bending over the Host, this kid’s sweaty forehead accidentally made just the slightest contact with it. When he stood up again, the congregation gasped. His sweat had acted as an adhesive, and the Host was now squarely stuck to the center of his forehead. Even worse, he didn’t know it. Red faced, he scrambled around for several minutes, searching for the Host, before it finally fell off his forehead and plopped down on the altar. The old priest thought the people had left him swinging in the breeze because he had been so pompous.

“Can you imagine what was going through that poor kid’s mind when he couldn’t find the Host?” the old priest said, laughing and wiping a tear out of the corner of his eye. “Maybe he thought he’d caused an ascension or something.”

I’m sure he thought the story would get me to loosen up about my first time as celebrant, but when he was finished, I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my hair. I added this story to the growing catalog of potential disaster scenarios that had been roiling around my head all week.

Now the day is here, and I am surprisingly serene. I am savoring the time of preparation for the service of Holy Eucharist. For a priest, leading worship begins in the sacristy. A colleague gave me the prayers that are traditionally said by the priest as he or she dons each vestment. Not knowing them by heart yet, I read them off index cards.

First, I wash my hands and whisper, “Cleanse my hands, O Lord, from all stain, that, pure in mind and body, I may be worthy to serve Thee.”

I pull on my alb. I tie the internal string that secures the all-white garment to me; I fasten the three buttons around my clerical collar while praying, “Cleanse me, O Lord, and purify my heart, that, being made white in the Blood of the Lamb, I may attain everlasting joy.”

Then I tie the cincture, a braided rope, the symbol of chastity, around my waist and pray, “Gird me, O Lord, with the girdle of purity, and extinguish in me all evil desires, that the virtue of chastity may abide in me.”

As tradition dictates, I kiss the cross that is stitched on the part of the stole that rests on the back of my neck. Before draping it around myself, I intone the words, “Give me again, O Lord, the stole of immortality, which I lost by the transgression of my first parents, and although I am unworthy to come unto Thy Holy Sacrament, grant that I may attain everlasting felicity.”

Finally, I pull the sleeveless, poncho-like vestment called the chasuble over my head and adjust it so that it sits evenly on my shoulders. Only the celebrant gets to wear this vestment. All the other priests wear plain albs with stoles. It is Pentecost, so the chasuble is red, and the gold satin lining makes it heavy. On the front there is an intricately embroidered dove fashioned from silver thread soaring like a rocket out of orange and red tongues of fire. It’s no wonder the vestment makes me feel so warm. I look at my card and whisper the prayer, “Lord, who hast said, ‘My yoke is easy, and My burden is light,’ grant that I may so bear it, as to attain Thy grace.”

Now I am ready.

I look in the mirror and pick a piece of lint off my shoulder. I don’t recognize myself. I am someone else, but altogether me at the same time.

“It’s all come down to this, hasn’t it?” I say to my reflection. I nod. This is the life to which God has asked me to say yes.

The Eucharist has followed me through life like my own shadow. It is the string on which the pearls of my life’s experiences, burnished white and dirty gray, have been strung. I still feel out of true. Is there any other way for us to be in the world? Yet when I kneel with palms upturned to receive the bread and then drink deep from the chalice, I feel the crooked made straight, the uneven made smooth, and the torn, patched. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue,” wrote Eugene O’Neill.

This is my glue.

God is present in that bread, but he is not alone. Beside him is the unrelenting grief of the parents seated in the last pew whose son was killed in Iraq last year. Five rows in front of them is the young couple with hollow eyes who learned on Friday that their in vitro procedure failed again. Present in that Host is the Scripture reader’s struggle to accept his gay son. We stretch forth our hands and take not only God but a portion of each other’s burdens as well. Life is hard enough. No one should eat alone.

I go into the church to be sure that everything I need is there. As I check to make sure we have enough Communion bread, I am reminded of a time when I did the unthinkable.

One day, after serving as an altar boy, I stole one of the leftover consecrated Hosts that Father Durcan hadn’t consumed after the Mass yet. I knew it was terribly wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. For a week I carried that Host in my pocket everywhere I went. It was a secret between me and God, who as far as I could tell didn’t mind the adventure. At night I’d place it in a small white cardboard box that a pair of my mother’s earrings had come in, and I hid it in the tight crevasse between my mattress and the wall. In the morning I would take it out of the box and carry it with me to school. I relished the idea that I had God in my pocket and no one else knew about it. After a few days, though, the Host started to get squishy and dirty from my touching it over and over to make sure it was still there. It was starting to have the consistency of soggy Wonder Bread.

I began to fret about Jesus.

One night I fell asleep in my clothes, and Nanny undressed me and tucked me into bed. The next morning I awoke in a panic. I hadn’t put Jesus in his box. Where were my pants? Was the earth still on its axis? Had the heavens fallen? I opened the wicker clothes hamper, but it was empty. I ran downstairs to the kitchen and asked Nanny what she had done with them.

“I put them in the wash,” she said.

I crumpled to the floor. Jesus was gone. She’d drowned him.

The gravity of this sin was too much for me to bear. The next morning I went to the rectory and asked Father Durcan if I could talk to him.

He was seated at a small writing desk in his study. He turned his chair around, and I stood in front of him.

He smiled. “What is it you need, Ian?”

“Father,” I blurted, “Jesus was in my pocket all week, but then my Nanny drowned him.”

Father Durcan cocked his head to the side, the way Labrador retrievers do when you ask them if they want a treat.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his eyebrows furrowed.

I paused to take a deep breath. “I stole a Host after Mass last Friday and brought it home,” I said, my gaze cast downward.

Father Durcan became quiet. “Why did you do that?” he asked gently.

Oddly enough, I hadn’t thought about why I’d taken the wafer until he asked. Then it was clear. “I wanted him with me all the time,” I said, now choking back tears.

Father Durcan took both my hands into his. “Where is the Host now, Ian?”

“My Nanny washed my pants,” I cried. “She didn’t know she was sending Jesus down the drain. It was my fault. I’ll never do it again, I swear, Father,” I said, taking my hands from his and covering my face with them.

Catholic priests get a bad rap these days, and yes, there are those who have heinously betrayed their vocations. But there were and are some good ones, men who are wise and saintly, like Father Durcan.

He gently pulled my hands away from my face and held them again. “Ian,” he said, “you don’t need to carry a Host in your pocket to have Jesus with you all the time. He’s right here,” he said, placing his warm hand over my heart.

This was good news, but I was not interested in theological propositions. My mind was consumed with a vision of Jesus bobbing around in Long Island Sound like a discarded wine cork. This demanded swift action.

“But Jesus went down the drain. What about the Host?” I asked.

He squeezed my hand and winked. “Ian, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. I think he can swim.”

Would that I would grow to be this wise.

I am at home behind the altar. I breathe deeply the faint scent of incense that remains from a previous service. It smells like my boyhood. We have arrived at the moment in the service when I say, “Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing this hymn to proclaim the glory of your Name …”

This is the cue for the choir and congregation to sing the ancient words called the Sanctus. As tradition dictates, I bow as it’s sung, and I choose to close my eyes.

Then it happens.

I hear Nanny.

I see her crazy eyes and bluish hair. I smell the lavender-scented powder that came in the round plastic container with a puff inside that I gave her every year on her birthday until I was twelve. I am surprised to see the gentle faces of Father Durcan and Sister Margaret with Bishop Dalrymple beside them. The rope he tied to my waist long ago proved strong, and it has led me home through many storms. I even imagine the voices of Dennis Coughlin, Billy Dempsey, and John Babcock, who might as well be dead for all the years I haven’t seen them. They are all gone now, but their voices reach me from that better country, the one whose map I saw in a water stain on the ceiling over the bed where I slept as an eleven-year-old boy.

And then I hear him.

Though his voice is only one among the uncountable saints, I would know it anywhere. And yet it is different than I remember, not cutting or arrogant, but brimming with kindheartedness. Only a soul who has learned to love and be loved can sing so sweetly. I am glad for him.

How can you tell when you’ve crossed the meridian that divides hatred and forgiveness? Is it when the dirt path beneath your feet, frozen hard by winter’s bitter wind, softens under summer’s grace? Or is it when words you’ve worked so long to free stroll out of the prison of your heart without your help and to your amazement speak themselves?

“I wish you well,” I whisper.

And with an exultant swell, the choir replies:

“Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”

NOTES

The phrase “through a glass, darkly” on page 4 is taken from 1 Corinthians 13:12 KJV.

“This is a memoir, but please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are false … we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened, or what should have.” Quoted on page 4, taken from John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), 5.

The reference to “the years when God restored to us what the locusts had eaten” on page 10 is adapted from Joel 2:25.

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.” Quoted on page 47, taken from Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: HarperCollins, 1973), 39.

“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” Quoted on page 68, taken from Bhagavad Gita, trans. Swami Nikhilananda, chapter 11, sections 12 and 32, pp. 256, 261 (1944), as quoted in Marta Weigle and Peter White, The Lore of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 21.

The reference to “saints who felt like ‘aliens and strangers on the earth’ and who lived through hardship, all the while ‘longing for a better country’” on page 100 is taken from Hebrews 11:13 NIV.

The quote “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country” on page 100 is a paraphrase of Proverbs 25:13.

“Lord, you now have set your servant free … For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior.” Quoted on page 114, adapted from The Book of Common Prayer, http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/formatted_1979.htm.

“‘This was nature’s bedlam,’ he said, ‘an ugly black cage of screaming, violent, fanatical lunatics … beating me with big flat sticks, roaring at me, screeching, trying to crush me or rip me with their hands.’” Quoted on page 191, taken from Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotters Guide: The Science, History and Culture of Clouds (New York: Perigee Trade, 2007), 55–56.

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” Quoted on page 248, Eugene O’Neill as quoted by Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), 129.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My children, Cailey, Maddie, and Aidan, endured me as I wrote this book. My wife, Anne, was a saint. It belongs to them as much as it does to me.

My heartfelt thanks to my agent, Lee Hough, at Alive Communications; my editor, Dave Lambert; my publishers, Matt Baugher and Mike Hyatt; Rick and Carol Bond; Eric Broadbent; George and Marabel Baker; Nita Andrews; Father Jim Lemler and the people of Christ Church Greenwich, Connecticut; Father Jerry Smith and the people of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Nashville; Jim Chaffee at Chaffee Management; Deborah Royce; Les Clairmont; Gareth Higgins; associate professor of theology Dr. Steve Guthrie and professor of English Dr. Robbie Pinter at Belmont University; Nordeck and Mary Claire Thompson for opening their beautiful home at Round Cove to me; and my friends in Franklin and Nashville who have graciously received and loved my family.

Finally, thanks to Chuck Royce, Rick Woolworth,

Hillary Bercovici, and Rob Mathes, without whose friendship

my life would be sorely impoverished.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

IAN MORGAN CRON is an Episcopal priest, speaker, and acclaimed author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale. His literary debut received accolades from the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; Brian McLaren; Fr. Richard Rohr; Phyllis Tickle; Tony Campolo; Brennan Manning; and artist Makoto Fujimura. Ian is currently the curator of the Conversations on Courage and Faith Series at Christ Episcopal Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a doctoral student at Fordham University, where he is studying Christian spirituality.

Ian enjoys reading, hiking, traveling, and kayaking. He and his wife have three children and divide their year between homes in Connecticut and Tennessee.

Ian is an engaging and poignant speaker who inspires listeners at churches, universities, retreats, seminars, and conferences around the world. For booking, contact Chaffee Management Group (email: booking@chaffeemanagement.com; phone: 615-236-1686).

www.iancron.com