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.