SHOOTING STAR IN A DAY SKY

My father and I are finishing our half mile swim, keeping a companionable pace. He churns through the water, splashing rabidly, while I swim with the elegant, efficient, almost splashless style I learned at Miss Carrington’s School for Girls—where I was swim team captain. It is late afternoon on the Sunday before Labor Day and the beach is nearly deserted because of the overcast sky and thunderheads lining the horizon. The tide is in and the waves crash into foam, filling my nose with a brackish sea smell. Overhead, the gulls squawk and wheel in advance of the storm as we pass the “Three Sisters” reefs and begin the final stretch toward shore.

Suddenly my father picks up speed, his lanky body kicking up white water and blistering past me. I dig in and swim harder, trying to catch the old bastard. But he surges out of reach and jumps out of the shallow water just before I pull beside him.

“Ha! Still can’t beat your old man,” he says, breathless and grinning wildly.

“Dad, what the hell?” I drag myself and my three-month pregnant belly out of the water. This is the only thing we do together anymore and he has to turn it into a game of one-upmanship.

He is gripping his shoulder, from an old hockey injury when he was the enforcer on the old New Haven Blades minor league hockey team. That was before James “The Hammer” Byrne became the mayor of New Haven for 16 years and had to tone down his act.

“70 years old and I can still beat you, even though I didn’t have the fancy training.” he says. “I learned by swimming across New Haven harbor.”

“Like you haven’t told me that five million times.” I mutter.

As he heads up the beach, I holler, “Don’t try to swim in your beautiful New Haven harbor now because it’s so damn polluted you’ll come out laminated! You’ll look like a fucking library card!”

My father doesn’t hear me because he is talking to an elderly woman in a blue flowered bathing suit and straw hat.

“Hi Vera,” he says. “Still embracing the dark side?”

Vera, who is deeply tanned and weathered, smiles uncertainly. After a beat, she says, “If you are asking if I’m still a Republican, the answer is yes, Mr. Mayor.” She jiggles a stick thin leg.

“Well, that’s a crying shame. I’m sorry for you, Vera,” my father says, his blue eyes glittering. He loathes Republicans, especially those who were once Democrats, as Vera was.

Vera seems to decide that this is a joke, and laughs. This happens all the time with him, which allows him to get away with murder.

Then Vera starts gathering her Agatha Christie book and sunscreen into a beach bag that has a picture of a sea lion on it. She attempts to rise out of her beach chair, stumbling slightly.

He takes her arm. “Can I help you out? Or, as Groucho Marx would say, ‘I’d love to help you out, which way did you come in?’”

Vera beams up at him, basking in the bright orb of his charisma. Because he can make people laugh, he knows he’s got them by the balls. That’s a lesson James Byrne learned early in his political career.

“I saw that you’re going to come out of retirement and run for governor now. Is that true?” she asks him, as they trudge through the sand.

“Maybe,” he says. “We’ve got this fake Democrat from Greenwich, Richie Rich, in the governor’s mansion and he’s a damn union buster.”

“Well, good luck,” Vera says, and gallantly makes her way toward her home, which sits on stilts atop the jutting brow of a small hill, a modest structure of mostly windows.

After she leaves, we sit on a wooden bench on this private beach which belongs to the people who live on the street where we have our summer cottage, in Madison, Connecticut. As I pull on my Elm City Community College sweatshirt, my father towel- dries his full head of gray hair. A few miles out, the lighthouse on Faulkner’s Island cuts a silent arc through the mist.

“Are you really going through with this hare-brained scheme?”

“Yes.” He narrows his blue eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Maureen.”

Just what the state of Connecticut needs: a 70 year machine politician emerging from his retirement to lead the state in 2024. Maybe he can even bring back Tammany Hall.

“Vera once worked on the Bobby Kennedy campaign,” my father says. “Now she’s voting for Donald fucking Trump. How the hell does that happen?”

“Please don’t talk about Trump around my baby.” I am shivering slightly in the cool, stiffening breeze. Further out, the waves are choppy and white capped.

“If I still had my sailboat, I might have taken her out for a spin right now,” my father says, and starts up the path through the marsh reeds. I follow his lanky frame, which I have inherited, along with his blue eyes. Despite the resemblance, I am a staunch member of Team Mom, not Team Dad.

When we arrive at our gray, clapboard cottage a few minutes later, the air carries the smell of grilling burgers mixed with mint. My mother’s best friend, Nell, who owns an herb farm, is doing the cooking.

“Christ on a cracker,” my father mutters. “I didn’t get here soon enough to start the grill. Now our food is going to taste like sticks of gum.”

Nell looks up and waves, jauntily wielding a long-handled barbecue brush. She is dressed in a jean skirt and turtleneck the same iridescent blue as her beret. After her husband died a few years ago, Nell reinvented herself and turned their house in a rural suburb of New Haven into the Candlewood River Herb Farm.

“I will have a plain hot dog, no herbs and no prosciutto,” my father calls over to Nell and then heads toward the outdoor shower. Nell watches him, frowning.

“Never mind him. He’s in a mood,” I tell her, as I sit on a blue painted Adirondack chair. Beyond the grill, my younger sister Elizabeth, nicknamed, “Wit,” has parked her giant white Mercedes SUV next to my father’s cherry red convertible Corvette.

Rosary beads dangle from the clothesline, the old Irish charm to prevent rain, which is like whistling past the graveyard today. A picnic table, with a red checkered tablecloth fluttering in the breeze, is set beside my mother’s yellow rose garden. In the back, the old oak is lightly haloed with yellow and gold leaves, the first glimmer of autumn.

“How are you feeling,” Nell asks.

“Lousy. I hate Labor Day weekend,” I say. “It always gives me a feeling of cold gloom in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it’s because it was the day we used to go back to New Haven and then Catholic school would start with those fucking demented nuns. And then later I was shipped off to boarding school at Miss Carrington’s, which was even worse.” This year my parents are staying a few weeks later because my mother, who is six months in from a stay at Silver Hill Alcohol Treatment Center, has always loved the beach cottage.

“Between you and Himself, this is going to be a fun picnic,” Nell laughs. She throws more coals on the fire and we watch it flare. Then she dips some day lilies in a batter and starts sauteing them in a cast iron skillet.

“Where’s my mom?” I say.

“Upstairs, taking a nap.” Nell avoids eye contact.

“Is she OK?” A sense of anxiety scrabbles in my chest.

“Yes, fine.” She moves the day lilies around in the pan and sprinkles salt on them. They smell like fried asparagus.

“I think the storm will hold off until after we eat,” Nell says.

“How are the isobars?”

Light sparks in her eyes as she scans the sky. Nell is a retired science teacher and she loves storms. “There’s a low pressure system coming in from the mid-Atlantic, and the isobars are packing together, which means some strong wind gusts are possible.”

“Did you send up your weather balloon to get the data?” Nell has an Army surplus weather balloon in her garage that she sometimes used with her students.

She laughs. “Not today. I used my weather app.”

The kitchen door bursts open and my sister Wit’s demonic three-year-old twins catapult out, shrieking and fighting over a tambourine. Jane, the alpha, wrests it away from her brother, Leitrim, which causes him to collapse in hysterics on the ground, screaming at a pitch that could melt your snow tires. Then Wit grabs the tambourine from Jane, holding it high in the air as Jane attempts to leaps up and snatch it, like a dolphin at Sea World.

“Mommy, she took it from me,” screams Leitrim, named after the county in I [cap I]reland where my father’s family came from.

“Then never play with her again.”

Wit tosses the tambourine inside her SUV and locks the door. Then she grabs a giant bag of potato chips from the picnic table, rips it open and gives handfuls of chips to each screaming twin. For the next step in Elizabeth “Wit” Byrne’s lesson in parenting, she takes my phone off the table, finds “Paw Patrol” and sits the twins at the picnic table with my damn phone.

“Hey!” I say, as the two anti Christs sniffle over my phone and clutch it with their greasy fingers.

Wit snorts. “Get used to it, Mo.”

“I’m hoping that my child won’t be born with 666 tattooed on her forehead.”
“Fuck you.”

“Jesus, Wit! Can you dial it down a notch?” asks Nell.

“Sorry,” Wit says, although she is smirking. She reaches into her pocket and lights a cigarette, taking quick, short drags.

“Could you please not smoke around my baby?”

She gives her trademark, mocking laugh, and walks away to finish the cigarette. Then she stubs it out into my mother’s yellow roses. Wit is dressed in the purple and pink Lily Pulitzer colors of the rich WASP girls with whom we went to boarding school—creating the effect of an Easter Bunny on acid. The WASP training worked better on her than it did with me, because she also adapted their insouciance and single-minded focus on acquiring wealth. Wit makes a killing in shoreline real estate, while I barely scrape by as an English professor at Elm City Community college.

“Is Mom sober?” Wit asks.

“Yes.”
“Why is she taking such a long nap?”

“When I saw her earlier, she was fine.” I don’t sound convincing.

“We’ll see,” Wit mutters.

“Where’s your hubby?” Nell asks.

“He’s on call today. He said to say hello and he’s sorry he missed everyone.” I know Wit is lying because she is very polite and sincere when she lies, unlike her usual demeanor. Her husband Luke is a pediatric dentist and assiduously avoids Byrne family gatherings—not that I blame him.

After I am showered and dressed, Nell and my mother, Maria, are starting to serve the food, which includes an herb souffle, a vegetable-cheese tray with a honey-tarragon dip, and a lemon pineapple punch, along with the burgers, hot dogs and fried flowers. I study my mother for signs of boozing, but she seems sober and clear-eyed, the beautiful architecture of her face re-emerging from the alcoholic bloat.

She and Nell move together like matadors, in perfect sync after nearly 50 years of friendship. They met when they took dancing lessons together as children, specializing in tap. Later they appeared in local musical theater productions, and both still have graceful dancer’s carriages.

My mother catches my eye. “Everything all right, Maureen?”

“Everything’s fine.”

Then Dennis “Ditto” McKernan, my father’s ineffably loyal aide from his eight terms as mayor, arrives, bearing gifts of Italian pastry. Short and stocky with thick, iron gray hair and a toothy grin, Ditto resembles a Kennedy genetic experiment gone awry. He has one glass eye from combat in Vietnam, so I never know where to look when I’m talking to him. One of my students told me about someone storing weed behind the glass eye, but I decide this is not a good question to ask.

My father shakes Ditto’s hand heartily and claps him on the back, his face brightening, the happiest he’s been all day. Finally someone is here who he actually likes. Ditto’s namesake was the aide of James Michael Curley, the legendary mayor of Boston. Like Curley’s Ditto, my father’s version echoes everything he says and howls at all of his jokes.

My father gets Ditto a Budweiser and passes him a burger.

“Thanks, I’m starved.” He takes an enormous bite, eating almost half at once, ketchup dripping out of the side of his mouth.

My mother averts her eyes, flinching slightly. A doctor’s daughter, she has never gotten used to the lousy table manners of my father and his friends.

“Save room for dessert,” Nell says. “I made a lavender cake with cream cheese icing an inch thick.”

Ditto tucks into another burger and then asks when is my baby due.

“In February.”

“I’m the labor coach,” my mother says. “Our baby is a girl.”

“Our baby?” scoffs Wit, who was afraid to leave her twins with my mother when they were babies.

“Wit, could you spare us the sarcastic attitude about everything just for today?” my mother snaps.

Wit gives her a black stare, filled with unforgiven grievance, as if she is still vomiting vodka onto the carpet in the elegant red room during Wit’s piano recital at Miss Carrington’s.

“Does your baby or our baby have a father?” asks Ditto. “Or is this like the Immaculate Conception?” An Irish bachelor who goes to Mass every Sunday, he wears a miraculous medal despite his liberal political bent.

“If it walks on water, we’ll know,” my father says. The two of them look like they can barely contain the hilarity. They seem to form a diabolical third personality together.

“If you really want to know, the guy who knocked me up doesn’t give a shit,” I say. “He’s just the donor.”

They laugh awkwardly.

“He works with you at Elm City Community College, right, Maureen?” asks Nell.

“Yes. He’s the head of the IT department.” Fred Mancini wears his handsome face like a mask that has nothing to do with him, and only comes to life when he’s trying to hook up with women or vanishing into some Internet world.

“Did you talk too much about all the crazy trivia that you have memorized about the Red Sox and Carl Yastrzemski? Maybe that turned him off,” says Wit, still simmering in her fugue of anger and competition.

“Yes I did. Yaz hit .557 during the last two weeks of the ‘67 season, on the stretch drive to the pennant, one of the greatest feats of clutch hitting in baseball history. Until Big Papi, of course. So what if I mentioned this? People should know this.”

“Maybe you scared him off, Mo,” Ditto chuckles. “Did you sing the Carl Yastrzemski song for him?” He casts a sidelong glance at my father.

“No, but I should have.”

“Maureen’s singing voice could shatter this crystal.” My father points to the Waterford pitcher filled with punch.

“To quote the great writer, Ring Lardner, ‘Shut the fuck up, he explained.’”

“That was ‘Shut up, he explained,’” my father says.

“Well Ring Lardner never met this spectacularly fucked up family.”

“Families help you get your edges sharpened so you’re tough when you go out into the world,” Ditto says.

“Yeah, right.”

The breeze has picked up, causing leaves to fall from the oak in golden flurries. There is a combative silence for a spell, punctuated by everyone chewing their food and loudly crunching the fried flowers. I can tell it’s getting on my mother’s nerves.

Then my father says, “I think we should bring back the patronage system. You vote Republican, you lose your damn job.”

“Yes,” Ditto agrees. “Remember when we told people that the machine makes a different sound if you vote Republican? No one ever dared vote Republican after that!” The two men howl, but no one else does because we have heard it so many times.

“It’s not that funny,” my mother sighs.

The twins finish eating their chopped up hot dogs and start demanding the tambourine again, so Wit takes it out of car and gives it back. Then they disappear into the house and then seem to be playing peacefully for a change.

“I wish they would always play this quietly,” Wit says.

“We have a saying in the Marine Corps—Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see what fills up first,” Ditto replies.

“Could we not talk about shit when we’re eating.” My mother sets down her fork.

Oblivious, Ditto says, “Hey, Maureen, you’re playing in the game next Saturday, right?”

“Yeah.” Every year I am the pitcher for the Democrats in the Democrat/Republican softball game that raises money for Healing Meals, New Haven’s community soup kitchen. Each player raises money on Facebook and so far I am up to $500.

“Oh, good.” After a pause, Ditto says, “What about you, Wit? Can you come?”

“What?” My father says. “Wit is the world’s worst softball player.”

“No, she’s not! Don’t say that, Jim!” My mother pats Wit’s arm, but she removes it. She is staring red-faced at my father.

“Maybe I can’t play softball, but I make a hell of a lot more money than you ever did, Mayor Byrne.”

As she stomps off toward the house, my father calls, “Oh, good. Then can you contribute $2,000 to my gubernatorial campaign? You won’t miss it.”

She slams the door behind her into the house.

“You really are an asshole, Jim,” my mother says.

A nest of confusion forms in his brow. She never used to talk like this to him. “I didn’t mean to upset her so much.”

“You don’t mean to do a lot of things.”

Suddenly a melee starts in the kitchen, with a thunderous clanging like something is about to explode.

“What the fuck is that?” My father hollers. “It sounds like it’s coming from the gates of hell.”

Then the ruckus stops, replaced by the twins shrieking again. Wit emerges, dragging them with her and carrying the dented tambourine.

“They put the goddamn tambourine in the dryer,” she says, through clenched teeth. After she packs them into their car seats, she hurls the tambourine into the rose garden and takes off, edges properly honed.

“You have to apologize to her, Jim,” my mother insists.

“All right, all right.” He shakes his head. “Christ, she’s like some kind of fragile orchid lately.”

Ditto looks like he wants to laugh and then quickly thinks the better of it. They grab beers out of the cooler and head to the front porch, probably to start plotting the gubernatorial campaign.

As my mother loads the dishwasher and Nell scrubs the pots and pans, the invisible shorthand between them seems fraught with tension.

“Should we call Wit?” I ask.

“No, let’s wait until tomorrow and let her cool down,” my mother says.

Thunder rumbles and rain starts to beat against the screens, filling the kitchen with a yeasty smell. After Nell and my mother go around closing the windows, Nell gets ready to leave.

“Thank you for everything, especially that cake, which I am going to eat for breakfast,” my mother says, hugging her.

When Nell leaves, my mother asks me to join her for some online baby furniture shopping.

“I’ll be right there.” I wait until she leaves the room and then I snoop around the kitchen for vodka bottles, out of habit. Under the sink I find an unopened gallon of Gray Goose vodka, and another unopened gallon behind the boxes of Quaker oatmeal in the cabinet. Tightening with familiar panic, I slam them both on the kitchen table.

“Mom!” I holler.

“Mother of God! What’s wrong?” My mother appears in the kitchen, breathless. She takes in the vodka bottles.

“What the fuck, Mom!”

“Your father has been putting them around the house.”

“What? Why?”

“Who the hell knows,” she says, evenly.

I am tempted to smash the bottles with a hammer, but instead I pour them out into the sink. Then I take the empty bottles and head for the porch to confront my father.

My mother grabs my arm. “Don’t, Maureen.”

“Why not?”

“Because two can play this game.”

“What sort of a game is it?”

“I don’t want you to worry about it. I mean it.” Her expression is still, glacially calm.

Reluctantly, I follow her into the den and sit beside her on the couch, where we browse through exorbitantly expensive “nursery décor” on their smart TV. The rain is pouring, driving against the windows in fierce sheets, and jagged heat lightning illuminates the sky from time to time. On the wall, next to my father’s blackthorn shillelagh collection and the mobiles my mother makes out of sea glass and shells, are photos of Wit and myself, JFK and Carl Yastrzemski. The centerpiece is a large wedding picture of my parents. They got married at Yale’s Woolsey Hall, and the photo was taken on the marble steps, under the gold domed roof with the Gothic columns. As I study it, my throat catches. It was like a royal Irish wedding in New Haven—the beautiful, dark haired daughter of a Yale-educated cardiologist and the brash, handsome young alderman with the rising political star. She wore an antique satin and Irish lace wedding gown, hand sewn with a rose pattern by a Kenmare lacemaker, while my father was dressed in a traditional morning suit, black swallowtail coat over pin-striped gray pants Her posture is canted toward her new husband, whose smile matches the lightness in his eyes—in a way it never does now.

“Maureen, are you listening?” My mother has found a $3,000 crib, dresser and rocking chair in “Belgium cream” and charged it to my father’s credit card.

“This will look lovely in your apartment,” she says, even though I don’t even know where it will fit in my small apartment in Stony Creek, which is overflowing with books and mismatched art deco furniture from my favorite consignment shop.

Then my mother makes us tea and turns on the TV classics channel, where “The Beverly Hillbillies” is on.

“I don’t know if I want to be an astronaut or a brain surgeon,” Jethro announces.

“It’s up to you boy,” advises Jed.

When I wake up, jolted by a sense of urgency, my head is on my mother’s shoulder. The lights are blaring, and it is still dark outside. The rain has tapered off, sluicing out of the gutters.

As I get up and wrap an afghan around my sleeping mother, I notice my father’s laptop on the coffee table. Why the hell not. Slowly I open it. He has signed off, so I have to figure out the fucker’s password. I try variations of JFK and Leitrim with Carl Yastrzemski’s number, 8. No luck. Then I try “Ballinamore8,” using the village in Leitrim where my grandfather came from. The computer clicks into outlook and my father’s email, which he has left open. The newest, unopened one is entitled, “Us,” from Judith Parsons, a skinny, forgettable blonde with a strikingly high forehead and too much gold jewelry who worked on my father’s campaigns.

“This is our time, Jim,” the email says. “Let’s make it happen. Let’s go to Paris for my 70th birthday. Love, Judith.” The signature is studded with heart emojis. My anger starts to flare and combust. So this is why he wants my mother drunk—so he can blame her, the bastard. Instead of a midlife crisis, he’s stupid enough to have a pathetic old age crisis. Paris, my ass.

I nudge my mother gently. “Wake up, Mom.”

She wakes up with a start, squinting at me in the bright, sudden light. “What’s wrong?”

“I just hacked into dad’s laptop and found out that he’s having an affair.”

“I know,” she says, evenly.

As I try to process this, I get a light headed sensation as if I’ve held my breath too long underwater. “Well, do you want to see the email? We can nail the bastard.”

“No.” She reaches out and snaps the laptop shut, her eyes hardening. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

At the East Rock baseball diamond on the outskirts of New Haven, the annual Democratic/Republican softball game is about to begin. We lost the toss, so the Democrats, a/k/a “Byrne’s Blue Aces” have taken the field first, while the GOP, or “The Pryce Is Right,” are about to step up to bat. They are named after the loudmouth RTC chair, Melissa Pryce, who is hollering “Let’s go!” from the dugout. Her voice is so high pitched and shrieky it seems to drill right into my fatigue headache. She owns a funeral home which is appropriate because it is a voice that could wake the dead.

The summer haze is gone and a coolness clears the air, gives it a luster. Riding on the light breeze is the fall smell of dusty leaves and Concord grapes. A few fine, thin clouds are etched against the sky, like blown glass. At the edge of the outfield, the tops of the sugar maples blaze fiery orange.

We are dressed in bright blue t-shirts, while our opponents are a sea of red, with a scattering of MAGA hats thrown in. They are keeping a low profile, maybe because they are nearly all white men, some geeky Yalies from the heartland or South who get their clocks cleaned by us every year. By contrast, most of the party leaders on our team are the members of New Haven’s powerful rainbow coalition. After the game, my father plans to announce his run for governor at the party, which I will not be attending.

He is at shortstop, eyes like bullets, crisply throwing the ball around the horn. He’s in his glory and I know he is getting ready to shellack the Republicans and mercilessly run up the score, even though the alleged purpose of this game is to promote a collegial, non partisan spirit. Fortunately his asshole girlfriend is not among the spectators in the bleachers because I told him I wouldn’t come if she did.

My rhythm feels strangely ragged as my warm up pitch of a two-seam fastball floats away from the strike zone. Asa Harris, the catcher, a beautiful, former Jamaican track star, calls out, “Settle down, Mo!”

I keep waiting for my pitching reflexes to kick in, but it’s not happening. As the lead off hitter is about to step up to bat, I try to focus, restlessly grooming the dirt around the mound, flicking away bits of gravel with my spikes. Everyone is pumped up and cheering but my nervous adrenaline won’t crank over into any kind of useful energy like it usually does.

Suddenly I notice a shining white object gliding across the sky like a star. As my eyes adjust to the sun glare, I see the ivory satin of my mother’s wedding gown glinting through the unmistakable Irish lace, billowing from the bottom of Nell’s red rubber weather balloon like a parachute. As it passes overheard, I hear a murmuring sound coming from the balloon, as if someone has turned on a cell phone audio remotely. The noise grows louder—panting, gasping, moaning. Then my father hollers, “Yes, Judith!” and she cries out, “Oh God, Mr. Mayor!”

Joan Lownds: Since focusing on fiction after a successful career as a journalist, I recently had a story published in the highly regarded literary magazine, "The Courtship of Winds." Also, the first draft of my novel was a semifinalist for the prestigious Eludia Award at Hidden River Arts. Currently I am working on the revisions. Throughout my career, I have worked as an award-winning writer and reporter for several newspapers and magazines, including "The San Francisco Chronicle," "The Litchfield County Times," "The Greenwich Citizen," "Fairfield Magazine," "The Yale Alumni Magazine," "Baseball Digest Magazine" and "New England Magazine." I am also the author of two acclaimed works of non-fiction, "Man Overboard: Inside the Honeymoon Cruise Murder," and "The Dogs of Camelot: Stories of the Kennedy Canines." (both published by Globe Pequot Press) "Man Overboard" drew high praise from such notables as Congressman Jim Himes and former Secretary of State, John Kerry. "The Dogs of Camelot" received a starred review from Publishers' Weekly and was lauded by the highly regarded novelist Tommy Hays as "a miraculous book." In addition, I have received fiction fellowships to The Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and The Wesleyan Writers' Conference.