Truth in Advertising (31 page)

It's a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and it has my name on it, Catholic-school cursive, blue-ink pen. Inside, two sheets on white notebook paper, blue lined, unfolded. Where was he when he wrote it? What time of day? Was he wearing a robe? Did he have a cup of coffee in front of him?

Dear Finbar,

In early 1945 I was on a submarine that did patrols out of Pearl Harbor. We sailed north to the Aleutians, south to Australia. For over a year we never saw combat. In February, we were on our way back from a two-week patrol when we were hit by a Japanese destroyer. There was an explosion. Then another. And another. I was in the tiller room with signalman second-class Ralph Thomsen. We were both thrown. The sub rocked side to side with each new explosion. Ralph screamed. He screamed like I've never heard a man scream. The lights had gone out. I made my way to him, felt around, and realized that he'd been caught in the rudder ram and it was crushing his chest. He kept screaming. Please, dear God, help me. Help me. There was nothing I could do. I couldn't see. I had blood coming from a gash on my forehead. He just kept screaming. The door to the tiller room was jammed. He grabbed my hand and held it. He wouldn't let go. I don't know how long we were in there. Several hours. And I'm not sure when he died.

The rest of the war was different for me. I was terrified every day until the war ended. And then one day, on maneuvers an hour away from Pearl Harbor, we surfaced. I was the first man up. Another boat was signaling like crazy: “War is over.” All you think about when
you're in the service is getting out. But then I was out, standing in front of the Fargo Building in Boston, still in uniform, and didn't know what to do, didn't know where to go. Some guys, they got out of the service and they felt like they had a new lease on life. I never felt that. I just felt like I didn't deserve to live. I felt guilt at being alive. Can you understand that?

I am not sure you can point to a single incident in your life and say, “I am the way I am because of this.” I don't know. Maybe you can. My point is I take full responsibility for who I was. I am not proud of it.

I never blamed your mother for what happened with that man. It was a relief in a way. It's not that I didn't love her or you kids. As God is my witness. I was just different, after the war. I was afraid. That's why I went on the police department. I needed to prove to myself that I wasn't.

Sometimes, at the scene of an accident, I would watch the people who survived. They would sit with their head in their hands with this look on their face. And the look was always the same. It said, “Just make things go back to how they were before this happened.”

I heard about your mother's death. I felt responsible. When I came to the wake and saw you kids, I knew it was over. I knew there was nothing I could ever do to make it right. I thought it would be easier for all of you if I stayed away. I was dead to the four of you. I was dead to myself. All I can tell you is that I wish I had it to do over again. I am not proud of the life I have lived.

Why you?

Because Eddie would have thrown the envelope away without opening it. Kevin would have read it and thrown it away. Maura's more like me than her mother. So it will be you. If anyone does this thing, it will be you.

You owe me nothing. I know that.

I am not looking for forgiveness. I've been to confession. All I am saying is that I was changed by the war. I tried. I did try. But I failed. I don't know what else to say. Except that there is a part of me that wished it was me and not Ralph who died that day.

Your father,

Edward Dolan, Sr.

T
he plane lunges forward, gains speed. The power pushes me back in my seat. A small thrill. Kennedy has the third longest runway in the United States at 14,752 feet. Faster now. I place my feet flat on the carpet, sit up straight, as if at attention. It is a thing I do on planes at takeoff and landing. I am not sure why. A nod to humility, perhaps, to something greater than myself at a moment when humans transcend their limitations. The pilot eases back the yoke as he hits a ground speed of at least 150 miles per hour, thereby deflecting the horizontal control surface elevator on the tail. Up faster now, a steep climb over the water, over Queens, as he pushes out the engines, in the case of this plane twin Pratt & Whitney 4062s, engines with a maximum thrust capacity of 63,300 lbs. As I mentioned, we had the Boeing account awhile back.

The shoot starts tomorrow. I'm on the 7
A.M.
flight to Los Angeles, flying back in time. I like the idea of gaining time, as if I could undo or change or keep something from happening.

•   •   •

Today we have the pre-production meeting, a largely ceremonial gathering where all of the principals on the shoot—the director, producers, agency, and client—eat expensive, catered food and review the pre-production booklet, which includes the script, the locations, and the casting, as well as the name and phone number of every crew member, catering, and insurance company. None of it is news to anyone. It's the equivalent of that part during a wedding ceremony where the minister asks if anyone has a reason why these people should not be wed.

I take a cab to the production company's office in Santa Monica. A young assistant leads me through the cavernous space. It must have been a warehouse or storage facility at one point. A one-story cinder-block structure, a few blocks back from the beach. In a far corner is a glassed-in conference room. Alan, Jill, Ian, Pam, Jan, and Jan's team of perhaps six people. Ian and Pam flew out to L.A. two days ago to begin casting, wardrobe, set design. Alan and Jill arrived last night with the client. They have the underappreciated job of shadowing the client, Secret Service–like, throughout the process. Account service, to my mind, is the hardest job at an agency. Much of the blame when things go wrong, none of the credit when they go right. All of them appear to be listening to Keita, fake smiles plastered on their faces. He's wearing old-fashioned board shorts, a white dress shirt under a seersucker jacket, and Vans. He must have seen a Beach Boys album cover fairly recently. He waves to me and smiles. On a table at one end are sandwiches and bottles of water—sparkling and flat—from a natural spring in Iceland. I can't shake the bubble of tension in my abdomen. I'm sneezing and my nose is running.

Jan makes her way to me.

“Jan,” I say with a fake smile, kiss-kiss.

“Fin. How are you? How's your father?”

What if I went in for it, full tongue? I think that Jan is far more sexual than I give her credit for. Then I notice her shoes.

Ian told Jan my father was ill. I'd suggested it, as I thought it would create sympathy and make her more amenable during the shoot.

“He's much better,” I say. “Thank you. Would you believe he asked for a Philly cheesesteak when he woke up?” I smile and fake a laugh. Jan smiles awkwardly.

“Is he from Philadelphia?”

“No.”

“Strange. Are you close, Fin?”

“How do you define close?”

“We're all going through it, aren't we?”

“Yes.” I nod, though I'm not sure what she means.

“We think we're here for ourselves but we're really here for our children, aren't we? We're placeholders for the next generation,” she says with the head-tilted earnestness of a daytime TV talk-show host.

I'm nodding like a Hasid at the Wailing Wall. “I think that's right,” I say, though I have no idea what she's talking about. I think it's about dying and making room for others.

Jan says, “Fin, I had no idea Keita Nagori would be here. Did you see the
Fortune
story about him last year? ‘Samurai or Sap?'”

“I missed it.”

Jan tells me about the article, how Keita insisted that every office of Tomo shipping, advertising, and PR have Ping-Pong tables and half-day Fridays in the summer, apparently a very un-Japanese thing to do. An e-mail written to Keita by his father was leaked to the Japanese press (the story intimated that his father leaked it) savaging Keita, calling him stupid and incompetent, a spoiled playboy who didn't deserve to inherit a great company. The fallout was a massive public embarrassment for Keita.

Jan continues, her thin, glossy lips moving fast while I dial down the volume to almost nothing, the faintest sound of her voice in the distance. My own personal camera has zoomed in on Jan's mouth. I read a book awhile ago. It was by a Buddhist monk and it talked about how all you had to do—the secret to happiness in life—was to live in the moment. And the way to do that was to breathe and to focus on what you were doing. I'm breathing and I'm washing a dish. I'm breathing and I'm walking down the street. I'm breathing and I'm staring at a woman's breasts. And I tried this, breathing and focusing on the moment. But for the most part it never worked for me (which, let me just emphasize, is far more of an indictment of me that any shortcoming of Buddhism or meditation). Except this one thing did happen. The handful of times I tried, in that close-to-immeasurably small space of time when I was almost in the moment, all I felt was . . . afraid. I could see myself, as if at a great distance, completely alone in the world, and I could imagine my own death. Now, it may seem obvious by this point that perhaps I wasn't even close to being in the moment. But I was in
some
thing.

The headmaster of my high school used to give talks every couple of
weeks, before classes would start for the day. For some reason I always remember them taking place in the winter, when it was really cold and the sun hadn't fully come up yet on a raw, gray New England January morning. And he would say things like, “You are a speck upon a speck upon a vast speck.” Dust in the wind and how no one would remember us in one hundred years' time. But he said despite all that, we mattered, and that what we did mattered, that there was beauty in the small thing, the little achievement, even if we are destined to end up as ashes.

Jan's mouth continues to move silently, hands gesturing.

So why wouldn't I do it? Why wouldn't I find a way to get on a plane and bring his ashes to Pearl Harbor? What's the big deal? Because I don't want to? Because it isn't convenient? Because he disappeared? Because he drove my mother to suicide? But what does that have to do with now? With one hundred years from now? And yet my anger—when I let myself think about him, about what he left in his wake—is crippling. Again and again he hurts me, hurts us. Which is why I choose not to think about him.

In the nights before I left for L.A., the nights when I half watched reality television, waiting for Phoebe to call back, waiting for sleep to come at 3
A.M.,
4
A.M.,
5
A.M.,
and instead getting up and showering and walking to work, where I sat and stared out the window, the nagging, guilt-addled comeback was always the same.
Do it.

I had called Eddie the night before I left and asked him to FedEx the ashes to Los Angeles. It was around nine in the evening when I called.

I'd said, “I was wondering if you've called your guy yet. The VA guy.”

He snorted, a not-so-funny laugh. Mean-spirited Boston sarcasm. It's only funny if it hurts someone's feelings. He'd been drinking.

Eddie said, “There is no guy. I made that up. There's no
guy
.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

“Do you know where they are now? His ashes? They're in the trunk of my car. I can't bring myself to bring them into my home, I'm
that
sickened by the man. Can you understand that?”

“Eddie.”

“His ashes are going where they belong. In the garbage or out the
window as I'm driving over the Tobin Bridge or into a dumpster behind a Denny's.”

“Eddie. What are you talking about?”

“He
killed
her. He drove her to her death as much as if he was in the driver's seat of that goddamned Chevy Nova.”

Then he mumbled something about
ashes
and the
fucking Navy
.

I said, “Eddie.”

No response. Tinkling ice cubes.

“Eddie,” I'd said. “I hate him, too. But you're better than this. I need you to send them to me.”

Still no response. And now he has left me no choice. Eddie's Kryptonite.

“Ed.”

“What!”

“Mum wouldn't want this.”

“Fuck you. Fuck
you
for saying that to me.”

I heard a Zippo lighter open. It must have been close to the phone. Heard the tobacco burn as he inhaled. Heard the click of the lighter close. All one-handed, I'd bet.

He said, suddenly sober as morning, “I can't believe you're going to do this for him.”

I couldn't quite believe it myself.

Eddie said, “Why? Why do it?”

Until the moment he asked me I didn't have an answer.

I said, “Because I can think of twenty really good reasons not to but I still feel guilty. Because he was a sad, angry man but he was my father and our mother loved him once. Because he asked me. Because you're convinced it's the wrong thing to do. Because I'm tired of the way people treat each other in this family, especially when they're alive.”

The phone was quiet for a time and I thought he'd hung up until I heard what I realized was clapping.

“Bravo,” he said. “Spoken like the toilet-paper salesman you are.”

“Fuck you. Diapers.”

“Sorry. Huge difference.”

“What happened to you? What happened to this family?”

He said, “You know nothing. You were a child. You didn't live through what we lived through. You think I
want
to feel this way, that I
choose
to feel this way?”