almost two thousand children.
No seal today. We keep walking. Chris says, “The Last Fez.”
I say, “About the Constantinople mission? We were sworn to silence about that.”
Chris says, “Remember that night we crossed the Bosporus? With that surly boatman?”
“Ali the boatman?” I say. “How could I forget?”
It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son, Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.
Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”
Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.
Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.
She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.
Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said importantly. If they found the time, he said, they’d drive up to County Limerick and maybe look up whoever was left of the ancestral Morrissey family.
“That’ll be nice,” Breda said.
In the early seventies, she and Patrick’s father, Tommy, had taken the kids to a wonderful-sounding but actually sour-looking village near the Shannon River, and had met remote Morrissey cousins of his, amorphous types who led unimaginable existences in cheap modern homes at the edge of the village and were nonplussed by their visitors. As she looked down at the clouds, Breda recalled two big things about that trip: it had rained the whole time, and everywhere they ran into people named Ryan. “It’s raining Ryans,” Tommy joked. “It’s Ryaning hard.”
Tommy, who a week after Patrick’s wedding quit his biotech job and ran away to Costa Rica with the German woman. Packing his bags, he was the wronged furious one. “You make me feel like I’m vermin,” he said, scrunching into his suitcase underpants Breda had just ironed. “With Ute I can bring up anything, absolutely anything. I can be anything. Jesus, I never knew what it was to feel alive. To think I’ve wasted all these years being made to feel a jerk, a creep. You want to know what we talked about last night? We talked about cunts I have known. Cunts I have known. How they smell differently, how they’re shaped differently, how they behave differently. Including your cunt. Oh yes. Do you know how special that is? Do you realize the level of trust and intimacy that takes?” On and on he went, appalling her. He began to shout. “Remember when I was alone in the Ukraine? All alone in that goddamn hotel and I get on the phone to my wife, my fucking wife, my one and only partner till death do us fucking part, and I asked you to say something for me, something with feeling, something that might connect us, anything at all. I’m not telling you to scrub floors or stick your hand in a pile of shit. I’m not ordering you to do anything. I’m asking. I’m begging for a sentence or two, that’s all, just a few words, words a husband is entitled to expect from his wife. What do I get? Nothing! ‘You know I don’t do that kind of thing, Tommy.’ That kind of thing? I’m howling for a drink in the fucking desert and you give me that shit? Well, fuck you, you uptight daddy’s girl.”
Breda was reexperiencing this horrifying episode because something about her son’s recent harangues had put her in mind of his father.
As for the daddy’s girl taunt, that went back forty years, to 1967, the year Breda traveled to Notre Dame for Tommy’s graduation. Notre Dame was so Catholic and male that people on campus mistook her for a nun. After the ceremony, she and Tommy—they’d met six months before, at a wedding in Newport—set off on a cross-country drive to San Francisco. The plan was to return east in the fall so that Breda herself could start college. She started to feel sick just west of the Indiana border. At first she thought it was the weed they’d been smoking, or maybe carsickness, but by the time they reached Missouri she knew she was pregnant. To celebrate, she and Tommy drove on to Reno and got married. When Breda rang home, her father answered the phone. He was a Boston lawyer. He found the whole thing—the trip to California, the jokey shotgun wedding, the long-distance pay phone shenanigans, the premarital sex—shocking. “Goddamn punk bullshit,” he said, and hung up with a sob. When Breda tearfully redialed, her mother answered. “You’ll have to forgive your father, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s just that these things have consequences. Maybe that’s something you can’t really understand at your age.”
Breda patched things up with her parents, who came to see that she had married Tommy out of a sense of responsibility and not out of romantic whimsy. “It’s a wonderful thing,” Dad said when she became a mother. “And you’re a wonderful girl.”
Siobhan was born in the spring of 1968. Patrick came along two years later, named by Tommy for his father even though, to hear Tommy tell it, Grandpa Pat had barely acknowledged his own son. “He’d treat you like you’d treat a dog: ruffle your hair, take you for a walk in Van Cortlandt Park.” This conversation took place one night soon after her father-in-law’s death in 1975, when Tommy and she lay in the darkness of their Santa Barbara bedroom. “The best thing about
