The Good Father (11 page)

I sat at the kitchen table and drank a cup of tea, listening to the night sounds of the house. The forced-air system came on. The refrigerator motor idled. My knees cracked when I stood up to rinse out my mug. This is what happens when you age. Your body, which has felt for years like a safe and comfortable home, begins to turn against you. You lose the ability to maintain your core temperature. In the last six months I began to notice that I was always cold. I had become a wearer of sweaters. At home the children complained because I kept the thermostat at seventy-two degrees. I was turning into my grandfather.

The first weeks after Danny’s arrest had been a blur of busywork. Fran and I had answered questions from every law enforcement agency imaginable. We had held press conferences and issued statements. We had told the world that we saw Senator Seagram’s assassination as an abomination. That we grieved for his family. But, we’d said, we loved our son. And we believed he was innocent. We were positive that a jury of his peers would find him innocent, and we could only hope that Seagram’s real killer was caught quickly and punished for what he’d done.

Overnight we became public figures. I turned down interview requests from every major network magazine show without hesitation. Fran supported me. We would not turn this family into a circus. There were two more children to protect, children who couldn’t go to school without being pestered by reporters. So Fran took them out of school and started teaching them from home. Now they took classes with names like “Books We Have on Our Shelves” and “Math My Mom Can Do.”

Fran had yet to complain about the strain our family was under, though there were times I heard her crying in the bathroom. Mostly late at night. But she kept the door closed, and I wanted to respect her privacy, so I didn’t knock or ask if she was okay.

Every day, as usual, I rose and took the train into the city. I needed my work now more than ever. I did my early rounds and often late rounds, too. I listened to breath sounds and read X-rays. But I found myself
distracted. My mind wasn’t making the connections it used to. I found myself spending more time at the hospital talking to patients about their families. I wanted to hear happy stories, to see wallet photos:
my son the doctor, my son the lawyer
. I wanted to experience the positive, happy children who grew up to be heroes.

My patients, for the most part, were unaware of my other identity, as the father of a now world-famous criminal. They complained of spinal pain and heart murmurs without ever realizing to whom they were speaking. They complained of the tragedies of their lives without ever imagining what stories I might tell. When a patient recognized me, I tried to change the subject, to steer the conversation away from my son. It wasn’t hard to do. Illness makes narcissists of us all. When we are suffering, in pain, afraid, we turn inward. Faced with our own mortality we cease to care about the daily dramas of the world.

The doctors were another matter. Colleagues of mine, men and women I had known for years, stopped talking to me. They took the stairs to avoid riding the elevator with the father of the accused. When I first returned to work, the chief of medicine stopped by my office. He wore a serious expression.

“Look,” he said, “you and I both know, whatever your son did—if he’s innocent, guilty, whatever—it doesn’t change your standing at this hospital. But at the same time, I’d appreciate it if you’d try to keep a low profile for the next few months.”

I had been drafted earlier in the year to give a talk at the hospital’s annual fund-raiser. But after Seagram’s death, my name was quietly taken off the program, and I was encouraged to stay home. Part of me was furious. I had given more than ten years of my life to the hospital, had saved the lives of some of the world’s most important men and women, only to find myself shunned. But another part of me was grateful. Grateful to stay home, grateful to skip the knowing glances, the awkward silences, the exaggerated small talk.

On the subway one morning a woman, a stranger, grabbed my arm. When I turned to face her she hissed at me. “Shame,” she said. “Shame.”

A nurse at the hospital burst into tears when I spoke to her in the break room. She recoiled when I tried to console her. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

A surgeon I had played squash with several times approached me at
a restaurant. He had been civil to me when we saw each other at the hospital. But now he had been drinking. He came up to the table where I had just been seated with the few friends Fran and I had left who would be seen with us in public.

“You should know,” he said, “that nobody at the hospital can look at you without seeing what he did. I hope you’re happy.”

For good measure, he added “cocksucker,” then stumbled off to the men’s room.

My friends tried to console me after he left. To tell me that he was drunk and stupid, and not to listen to him. I told them it was fine. I said, “Everyone is entitled to their opinion.” And then I stopped going out to eat.

Reporters called, their numbers blocked, and tried to get quotes. They asked provocative questions trying to get a rise.

“How does it feel to know that so many people hate your son?”

“If they execute him, will you go to the prison to watch?”

I stopped answering the phone. Its ring became a sound to fear, a mechanical scream that set my pulse racing.

I had talked to Danny only twice in the last three months, both times by telephone. As we spoke a mechanized voice kept reminding us that the call was being recorded for security purposes.

“I can’t tell you where I am,” said Danny, “but I will say it’s hot.”

“It’s August,” I said. “It’s hot everywhere.”

“I think I want to come home,” he said.

“You think? You’re in prison. You’re supposed to want to come home. Are you okay?”

“They keep the lights on all the time. I have to sleep with my hands over my face.”

“That’s illegal,” I said. “They can’t do that.”

Danny didn’t say anything for a minute, then: “My lawyer says I should think about pleading not guilty on account of insanity.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I think this call is being recorded for security purposes.”

After we hung up I sat in the kitchen and watched my teacup spin around in the microwave. I no more accepted my son’s guilt now than I had that day, but doubt crept in from time to time. The photograph of Danny holding the gun was a compelling argument for guilt, but I knew
that just because something looked like a cancer, it didn’t mean it was. I tried to quiet my anxiety with work. My son was good. He was kind. And if a person like this was capable of a crime like that, then I knew nothing about human beings.

At night when I couldn’t sleep I scoured the newspapers for clues. Stories about Danny were clipped and placed into a file. I spent hours online searching for details, witness statements, anything that could shed new light on what happened that day. I was building an archive. I had become the keeper of the case. Any new detail would be cataloged. If there was something significant I would call Murray, rousing him from slumber.

“Jesus, Allen,” he’d say. “It’s a quarter to three. Call me tomorrow. The hooker’s gotta go home in fifteen minutes.”

I had sent him the
Times
article in which witnesses said they saw Danny wrestling with another man. At the top I wrote
Can we find him???
Whenever I saw an image or statement that raised questions about the official story I sent Murray a text or e-mail. At first he responded at length, but over time his responses grew sparser, eventually becoming just a single word:
Interesting
.

After I told Murray about the other man, he did some digging—calling the reporter who wrote the article, and approaching the witnesses himself—but no clear details about the wrestler emerged, other than that he had been tall and wearing a dark jacket.

The first conspiracy theories broke within days of the shooting. Seagram had been chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He had spent the days before his death garnering votes for a bill that would have forced the administration to cut military spending by 30 percent. It also required a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the private security firms who were getting rich off the conflict. The bill signaled the end of an era of war profiteering. But then Seagram was killed. And when the vote was finally held a week after his murder, the bill was defeated, and a new bill was introduced that earmarked an extra one trillion dollars for military spending. Clearly, wrote the bloggers, the administration had him killed to protect their war. Or the military-industrial complex had executed him to protect their boondoggle.

Then there was the army corporal who swore he’d seen Danny on a secret military base in the New Mexico desert three months before
Royce Hall. Corporal Walter Hannover said he’d been a guard at a top-secret Special Forces training facility. He said he’d seen Danny being driven onto the base last March. Once there, Hannover said, my son had been trained in small-weapons handling and infiltration techniques. Hannover claimed to have seen Danny six times in three months. The claim caught on with several national papers and was trumpeted on talk radio. The army denied that such a base even existed. Hannover took a polygraph, but the results were inconclusive. Then the army released Hannover’s records and the world learned that not only had he never served on any base in New Mexico but he had been dishonorably discharged from his posting at Fort Stockton for huffing gasoline stolen from the motor pool.

Some claimed Hannover’s records had been doctored by the army to protect the truth, but most legitimate news organizations closed the book at that point. Like all other data about the case, the articles were dutifully clipped and the online back-and-forth was bookmarked. I wrote
New Mexico?
on a piece of paper in my journal. I was creating a patient file. Each symptom was cataloged, each test result. In this way I was building my differential diagnosis.

In August I saw an article in
The Washington Post
that there’d been a fire in a Justice Department evidence room. Several boxes of evidence from numerous active cases had been destroyed. I became obsessed with backing up my records, pausing every thirty minutes to do both a local and online upload of my work.

Fran said she was worried about me. It wasn’t healthy to fixate this way. I needed sleep. I told her he was my son. What was I supposed to do? She told me I needed to think about making peace with what had happened. It was time I accepted the fact that Danny might be guilty.

“What about the wrestler?” I asked her. “Two witnesses said they saw Danny struggle with another man right after the shooting.”

“That was a Secret Service agent.”

“No. These two witnesses specified it was a different man. Before the agents got there.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “There was a lot of chaos. People running.”

“I know what I read,” I told her.

She sighed, trying to be patient. She knew that in a very real way the
future of our marriage would depend on how we navigated conversations like this.

“You’ve seen the photograph,” she said. “The Secret Service wrestled Danny to the ground. The murder weapon has his fingerprints on it.”

“Photographs can be doctored,” I told her. “Fingerprints aren’t as conclusive as previously thought.”

She put her palm on my cheek. Her eyes held nothing but sympathy.

“I think you should talk to someone,” she said. “A therapist. You need to accept that this wasn’t your fault.”

“That what wasn’t my fault?” I said. “That Danny went to a political rally? That he moved around a lot?”

“Paul,” she said. “I love him, too, but you’re making yourself sick over this. And your family needs you. I need you.”

But I couldn’t let it go.

By now I was used to seeing Danny’s face in the paper. It had lost its power to shock. Two weeks after the shooting I had taken the train to Washington, D.C., to attend a congressional hearing about the assassination. I walked the ten blocks from Union Station, having Amtraked south past brick cities and factories, past rivers and streams and rusting iron mills. The sun burst like a ruby in the sky. Leaving the station, the stately wide streets of the capital stretched out before me; shaded grass lawns, monuments landscaped with bursts of floral burn, a collection of momentary parks enshrouded by northern red and scarlet oak trees. Overhead, towering American flags snapped their red, white, and blue. Each building I passed seemed to have been deliberately constructed to inspire awe or dread.

I had never visited the Capitol building before, though I had treated several congressmen and senators in my practice. I had watched hearings on TV, of course, Watergate, Iran-Contra. I knew the power of those rooms, the crush of cameras, the weight of history, the expectation of the crowd.

Behind me a man on a cell phone said,
Sterility, but they think it’s treatable
.

I crossed D and C streets, noting the absence of litter and the usual entropic discoloration of cities, walked past the Russell Senate Office Building, past its members and staff entrance. Ahead of me, the floodwater
expanse of Constitution Avenue was patrolled by Capitol Police in white shirts and black hats. After 9/11 the driveways to all the federal buildings had been shielded by gateposts, walled off with concrete abutments to deter terrorist attacks. The footpaths had been plugged with planters, obese, concrete weeds fisting through the pavement.
This is what fear does
, I thought.
It makes everything ugly
.

On the back lawn of the Capitol, news crews had set up their lights and cameras pointed toward the dome. Seeing them I felt a flash of panic. I wanted to remain anonymous. Murray had gotten permission for me to watch the hearings from the back of the gallery. I wore a shapeless coat and a styleless men’s hat. I didn’t want to sit up front, caught by the cameras, a Chiron under my face.
PAUL ALLEN, FATHER OF DANIEL ALLEN
,
THE ACCUSED
. I pulled the hat down over my ears.