Chapter Twenty

A note to my subscribers: usually I put the Thursday chapters behind a paywall, but I’m making this one free because it’s relatively short. It’s also something of a transition chapter. And who knows—maybe it will intrigue and inspire some readers to want to pay to read the whole thing. Happy reading!

Chapter Twenty

From the time I learned to read, I wanted to be a writer. Maybe it came from growing up in a house full of books, with a mom who was a reading teacher and a dad whose job required him to write and deliver the results of that writing once a week in the form of a sermon. After Dad died, I wrote to explore my feelings and make sense of my life. It wasn’t necessarily good writing, but it was cathartic.

I did it: I became a writer. Mostly of kids’ books, some of which have been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Russian. Clever Rachel was turned into a play.

When I chose journalism, I didn’t realize I was following in Dad’s footsteps, that he’d majored in journalism at Northeastern University. I chose it because even though what I wanted was to write books, Dad and Mom had impressed upon me that after I graduated from college I was expected to get a job that came with health insurance. I didn’t know any authors, but I was pretty sure that writing books did not come with health insurance. If I’d known that I was going to end up living in Canada, where health care is a right, not a privilege, I might have majored in creative writing, but that’s another story.

I knew nothing about journalism, but on an episode of The Waltons on TV one night, Ma and Pa gave John-Boy, their aspiring writer son, a lecture similar to the one I’d grown up hearing: writing books is no way to make a living. Get a job. John-Boy reluctantly put his dreams on hold. He went to work as a reporter. If it was good enough for him, I figured, it was good enough for me.

During my second summer working at The Cape Cod Times, I interviewed Richard Thomas, the actor who played John-Boy. He is an excellent actor: as John-Boy, he exuded sweetness. In real life, he was rude and unpleasant.

At The Daily Orange, Syracuse University’s student-run daily paper, I wound up as a news reporter, mostly because you had to go through the newsroom to get to every other department and on my first visit to the paper, I got waylaid there and never ventured further. By the time I learned there were multiple other departments beyond that first room, I had been assigned one of the best beats on the staff, covering the Student Association. There was no way I was giving that up.

Working at The Daily Orange made me feel better about myself than I had since before Dad died. I was doing something that came naturally to me, that I was good at, and that wasn’t hard the way so much else about my life seemed to be. I was still convinced I was fat, stupid, and would never have a boyfriend, but during those few hours that I spent being a reporter, I was someone else altogether: a person who asked questions that people answered and a competent writer who could turn those answers into a news story that editors praised and then ran on the front page.  

Utica was barely fifty miles east but emotionally it felt like I was in another universe, one that was light years better than the one I’d left behind. My last year at home before college had been more peaceful with Amy already at college, but it was a constant reminder of how decimated our family had become: we’d gone from four who were happy, to three who were volatile, to two who were sad and passing time until we could all get out of there.

I’d gone to Syracuse unsure of whether to major in journalism or music, but working in the newsroom with peers who appreciated me brought me a kind of joy that I didn’t feel at my violin lessons, where my teacher, a Russian immigrant, picked his nose while I played. I quit the lessons—Mr. S. was clearly a genius (an assessment I based mostly on my understanding that the famed cellist Mstislav Rostropovich had sponsored his immigration). I told myself that he shouldn’t be wasting his time on someone who didn’t take the instrument seriously. Also, the nose-picking threatened some of the newfound confidence I was developing at The Daily Orange. Was I that bad that Mr. S. couldn’t just pay attention to me?

Occasionally I strayed into the sports department at the paper looking for assignments, mostly because writing sports features gave me a chance to talk to athletes. After a lifetime of being the last kid picked for every team in gym class, I was in awe of them. I could not imagine what it would be like to go through life having fun participating in athletic activities rather than thinking of it as a form of punishment to endure until the bell rang and you could flee to Social Studies or English or even, heaven forbid, algebra. Writing sports features gave me an opportunity to ask people the kinds of questions that would have been considered too nosy in casual conversation, questions that helped me to understand something completely alien.

The summer after my freshman year at Syracuse, I got my first real newspaper job: as a proofreader at the Cape Cod Times. No writing was involved, but Bill Breisky, the editor-in-chief, was a Syracuse grad and wanted to give me the opportunity to prove myself. After I passed a typing test he gave me minor tasks, rewriting press releases and graduation and wedding announcements. In late July, the sports editor agreed to let me help cover the Falmouth Road Race, where I rode the press truck and met an authentically grizzled professional who gave me advice that I still use: “Don’t ask yes or no questions. You’ll never get good answers that way.”

In August of 1982, I was hired for my first full-time reporting job, covering high school sports at The Concord Monitor, the daily paper in the New Hampshire capital. To this day I feel I owe an apology to every sports fan in central New Hampshire who depended on me for their daily dose of high school sports news. I knew I was all wrong for the position. I didn’t even know what a touchdown was. But my classmates had secured jobs with health insurance months earlier. I was desperate. And the editor, Mike Pride, was desperate too, because his football reporter had just moved on to a bigger paper in a city with professional sports teams.

By March I was no longer a member of the sports department. I’d screwed up covering high school football and I wasn’t much better at the other sports I was expected to write about. But there was an opening in the newsroom, so Mike moved me over there with a warning:  “If it works out, after a month we’ll keep you on,” he said. “But if you keep making mistakes, I’m going to have to let you go.”

I survived probation, and so it came to pass that when I found the condolence cards in the closet in Cape Cod, I was a full-fledged news reporter. This meant that I was writing articles that had some resonance in my own life.

At the time I was working on a feature about a man who had chosen to die at home instead of in the hospital. Now his family was suing Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Hampshire to recover the cost of his home health care. Even though the man was dead, my editors suggested I make him the focus of the story, that I write about what kind of man would want to die at home and why. In addition to talking to relatives, I interviewed just about everyone who had ever cared for the man. By the time I wrote the story I felt as if I had known him personally.

This article ran on Oct. 19, 1983. I’m pretty sure it was a follow-up to the main story, which has disappeared from my files.

The experience got me thinking. If I could reconstruct a dead stranger, I could certainly reconstruct my own father. I could interview people who had known him at different stages of his life. I had no plans to write about Dad; I told myself the only reason for my investigation was to get information so I could know him in a way I never would otherwise.

The condolence letters—the good ones—had been tantalizing, but I wanted to see and hear people tell me what a wonderful, special man Elliot Waldman was. I wanted to be able to ask follow-up questions, to collect every available detail to bring him back to life, to bolster my conviction that I had been cheated, and also that those two letter writers were absolutely wrong that my father had been anything other than perfect and perfectly happy.

I discussed my idea with Eileen, the writing coach at the Monitor. Over lunch at a restaurant a half block from the newsroom, I told her my story, that my father had disappeared, his car had been found by a lake, his body had been found in the lake, the death had been an accident, and then I’d found those letters.

“It sounds like a good idea, a really good story,” she said, and then she issued a warning I was to hear from nearly everyone to whom I told my idea: “Be careful. You might not like what you find.”

I shrugged it off. What could I possibly find that I wouldn’t like? If I could handle those two letters, I could handle anything. And besides, those letters were wrong. I had plenty of evidence to prove that my father had not been depressed or suffering from a “sickness of the mind.” Dad was exuberant and always up for fun. He delighted in wordplay, making up absurd lyrics (“I want to hold your nose” to the tune of “I want to hold your hand,”) and joking about strange-sounding foreign names (I was probably the only kid in my junior high school class who knew that Kakuei Tanaka was the Prime Minister of Japan in 1974, although I thought his name was spelled Cockaway). Dad used to let Amy and me put a pot on his head (and call him Johnny Appleseed) or a colander, with toothpicks poking out of it (and call him a Martian). Then we’d parade him in front of Mom, to make her laugh, too. There was no way he was depressed. It was not possible that he had wanted to kill himself.