January, 1988, Portland, Maine
There’s more than meets the eye in every intensely human moment. The ones which shape us.
If a major event or a singular circumstance has the capacity to alter the core of a person’s reality and change the fundamental individual - to alter the future going forward - it is much larger than it appears.
The stakes are higher, experiences more visceral and palpable somehow, the possible consequences more dire, the tiniest most insignificant details catalogued carefully in the amygdala for future reference.
So much crucial emotion and enormous implication, and utter humanity, what makes it to the soul to stay and to store and to be searched or scrutinized and studied for however much mortality lies ahead transcends head and heart and becomes a piece of what our lives are, our existence the being. Important people and vital tests are involved, but they may not bear the same witness to change as the self. No two experiences can be similar, no pair of perceptions ever match up.
Ten years after the front-seat of the Cadillac in Kennebunkport happened, another moment like it occurred under very similar circumstances between my father and I when my brother Mark was killed.
I had swim team practice after school not far from where my father worked. He was running a supervised-release half-way house for men getting out of prison, and I swam for my high school team, which practiced a few streets away at a YMCA pool. Both places sat along the hill near Deering Oaks Park, so I would drive over after practice and pick him up from work. A sober workaholic, his nights were as late as I had to swim, and we’d drive home listening to the news on 560 WGAN and chit-chatting about the day at work and school and the next’s requirements. The drive from his office to home in South Portland never took more than fifteen minutes, or to his mother’s home on Reed Street rarely more than ten, but it was always just him and me in the car. We’d chat and listen.
Dad always drove, even if he would get out either of those places and I’d drive on to the other, or to my Mother’s house or to go take my girlfriend out to a movie. But when it was snowing, as it had been, heavily all day at the end of January in coastal southern Maine he’d always drive, he said, not because I wasn’t any good at it; because of how badly every other car on the road did in snow.
And so it went, during the school year, in the season when the swim team competed in the winter time in Maine on the cusp of my adulthood, he having rebuilt his life as I built mine. I was dating the young woman I would marry, and everything seemed to be racing forward smoothly and just fine.
The Y and the workplace were so close you could almost throw a rock between them, but a series of one-way streets meant circling the block. Practice parallel parking, leave it running to get the heat warm. I’d hop out of the drivers’ seat, snug in a parking spot in front of his office, dart up granite stairs in to the reception desk and let them know to buzz my Dad that his son was here and the day is done.
The building was a three-story, brick-built late-Victorian apartment house where the first floor was miniature offices and a tiny kitchen and break room. The half-way house did not feed the ex-cons, who lived on the second and third floors; there were common areas in the basement below. It was run by a non-profit and I could never guess who would be sitting at the minimalist secretary desk there. The man greeting visitors and residents just inside the front door had a more harried-than-usual look on his face, and he half-rose out of his cheap seat behind the battered old wooden teacher’s desk. His arm shot out toward me in an open-palm kind-of-warning, he was on the phone, but spoke to me.
“It’s going to be a minute. Go wait in the car. He’s got somebody in his office right now.” The place was always at least a little confused and had a day-late, dollar-short feel like many nonprofits, but this was uncharacteristic; the folks there knew me by now and we were usually quite cordial and friendly.
I shrugged off the curt, overly-cautionary dismissal and wheeled around back out the door, down the stairs and got into the passengers’ seat and listened to the news on the radio as the windshield wipers did away with the light snow falling in fluffy flakes which wanted to melt and go sled downhill.
It was a few minutes, but just a few, until my father made it out the front door, and carefully navigated the snowy steps, and dropped, heavily as usual in the drivers’ seat and shut the door.
“How was your day, Dad?” I said, typically.
“Not too good.” He saw a few ugly scenes now and then in his work with men fresh out of prison, and while I didn’t know any of them other than the first names of the more problematic, I had heard about a neighbor woman who undressed in her window, in full view of the sex offenders in Dad’s building.
“You son Mark was killed in an accident at work today.” He repeated to me the exact words he heard.
Mark was my brother, but his shock in hearing his son was suddenly dead was too much for him then.
Lawrence Patrick Michael Mahoney was always good in a crisis. My father was calm and sure, authoritative and as steady as a church , no matter what life threw at him. Absolute, total command. I never knew another instance of him to misspeak himself; this one I will never forget as long as I live.
Stunned, I sat mute in an agony of anxiety and disbelief as if hit by a hammer. A half-minute passed.
Dad had started driving, markedly more aggressively than his usual and much too fast for the snow.
“What ?!?” I got out, at last. “He’s dead?!?” This moment is another searing on my soul, more than I can corral, more than I can mentally contain or wrangle that I can do it justice with just these words.
Mark, my father’s second son, had taken a job at a railroad. He was working as a brakeman when an icy rail, a gentle curve, a sudden stop and a train too fast led to a derailment and Mark was killed.
“Oh my God!” I was crying already. We were not headed home. “Where are we going?” Still stunned.
We were going to my mother’s home, in the hopes that we could bear the bad news before she saw it on the nightly local television news. The men who had visited my father at his office were from the State Police, with a chaplain and somebody from the TV station, to make certain that next-of-kin notification had taken place, and they could go on the air live with the name of the dead man in the train derailment in Saco that afternoon, and that’s what they did, and that’s what my mother saw as my father and I raced up the Eastern Promenade in a futile effort to avoid exactly that very scenario.
We’ll get to that fiasco in a second, but after twenty years as a journalist I might just jump in here.
Naturally, on a much later day, my Mom would express her rage at the local media for what transpired in those few moments of the one in a billion sort, that once-per-lifetime thank goodness tragic event and the almost-too-big-a-coincidence-to-be-believed. She threatened to sue, but got talked out of it.
If it bleeds, it leads. That’s what they say in the industry. Deaths, disasters, catastrophe and scandal pay the bills, and once one looks at it closely enough, the audience is just as much to blame for it. My very own news career began before dawn at an apartment fire in a snowstorm nearby and I can report to you that the rush of adrenaline, attention, crisis and vertiginous stakes of live breaking news is a drug. As a lifelong consumer of the very same content (and from the front row of the show) I know if we didn’t demand the ugliest and goriest delivered the fastest and unvarnished, we narcotize dysfunction and sexualize our anguish, irrespective that the feeder and the eater both say “J’accuse!”
At my mother’s apartment, pandemonium. We barely caught my twin sister, Moriah, driving Mom’s car out of the parking lot, again, too fast for the weather. My dad and I dashed indoors to my poor aghast mother, Nancy. She was naturally beside herself, and very difficult to understand through her sobs. I don’t remember her words, except that my father hugged her as she wailed, and said the obvious.
Mo would race, in a daze, downhill to Portland’s Old Port where my brothers were also watching the news at a family business. Patrick owned and operated it, and was always at A Bar Of Soap, a laundromat and bar an a basement off Exchange Street. He was there, alright - until he heard the news about his big brother on TV and went running and shrieking into the snowy night, where he slipped as he ran and fell very badly and broke an ankle, which he didn’t notice in his rage, disbelief.
My father, good in a crisis, thought of Mark’s fiancee, Jane. He grabbed me and my mother to go to her home - which was across town, and just a few streets from my part-time home, his mother’s house on Read Street and not far from Cheverus High school. It was doubtful she had heard the news. My mother’s phone rang as we went for the door, and she chose not to go with us. Dahd and I broke the news to Jane, which one can imagine, made a few calls and we returned to my mother. By the time we got back across town, other siblings arrived and Moriah returned with Mom’s car, crying.
The family did not immediately cohere. In a frenzied raging crisis we immediately splintered and went our own ways. But like a fist thrust into a bucket of water, there’d be a brief and violent interruption of normal, and then before dawn the next day, we’d be back as a clan and come closely together again.
