The Good Father (13 page)

Modern science has yet to fully map the intricacies of the developing brain. Thinking back to that childhood malady I had to wonder: What if the fever had flipped a switch in my son that would have otherwise remained unswitched? What if that undiagnosed illness lay dormant in my son only to do some unseen damage later on? Parasites hide in intestinal linings, reemerging years later to wreak havoc. Malaria recurs long after its victims believe they are healed.

What if my son’s identity, his distance and need for isolation, was a product not of personality but of disease? Would that make him capable of murder?

I was sitting in the living room looking through old photo albums when Fran came downstairs. She was wearing a T-shirt that barely reached her thighs.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Late,” I told her.

She moved to the window, peered through the blinds. The shirt lifted up, revealing her rounded backside.

“They’re just sitting there like vultures,” she said.

“Nice ass.”

She turned, pulled the shirt down. Not a single muscle moved on her face, but I could see the smile in her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she said. “Come back to bed.”

I shook my head.

“We have to be up in an hour anyway,” I told her.

She came over, took the photo album from me, sat on the sofa, putting a pillow in her lap to protect her modesty. She flipped the pages.

“It’s always so strange to me, seeing her,” she said. “Your ex-wife. She exists out there like some kind of super-villain. My nemesis. I look at you and I think, how could you ever have been married to a woman like that?”

“Like what?”

“Restless, disloyal, flaky.”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She put her feet on the coffee table.

“Sometimes I think we shouldn’t be allowed to choose who we marry. My sister won’t date a guy unless he has a police record or a victim pit in his basement. My father’s on his sixth wife. Six wives.
Why do you keep getting married?
I ask him.
What can I say
, he says.
I’m an optimist
.”

I reached over and stroked her hair. My first marriage had ended thirteen years ago. It was as far from me as my medical residency, and existed less as an immediate memory than as a film I had seen several times many years ago—one I remembered well but had a hard time personalizing.

“She was a good mom,” I say, then rethink it. “She did the best she could.”

Fran flipped through the pages of the album. I moved closer to her and she put her head on my shoulder.

Looking at the photos of my family, fleeting emotions hit me—flashes of anger, of fear. These are the feelings that last—the extreme swings, the fights that burn themselves into your core. A decade later it is easier to remember the car crash than it is to remember the long drive leading up to it.

And yet I wanted to resist making this Ellen’s fault, wanted to resist demonizing the single mother who raised my son. Though I had fundamental problems with who Ellen was and how she functioned in the world, I recognized that my opinion of her parenting was just that, an opinion. What mattered was she loved Daniel, had always loved him—fiercely, maybe too fiercely—a single woman, raising a son who is forced to become the man of the house far too young.

But that too is just a symptom, a factor in who Daniel had become. He did not drop out of college because his mother loved him too intensely, just as he did not live in his car off and on for fifteen months simply because his father moved to New York when he was seven.

Fran reached up and took my hand.

“You’re a good dad,” she said.

I wanted it to be true. I rested my head on the back of the sofa.

“With Alex and Wally we kept a schedule,” I said. “In bed at seven thirty no matter what. A morning nap and an afternoon nap. Danny was a nomad, awake during the night, asleep during the day. There was no continuity.”

“Do you think that affected him later?”

“It’s hard to say. I think he learned early on that he couldn’t rely on anything. Not his bedtime or when he ate. Not even his parents. Change was inevitable. When Ellen and I got divorced I think she wanted me to take Danny, to have custody. But she knew how it would look, a mother abandoning her son. I got the job at Columbia. I wanted to take him. My mom was here. I could have hired a nanny. But Ellen refused to let me win.”

“Bitch.”

She smiled when she said it. It confirmed for her what she needed confirmed. That she was a better wife than Ellen, a better mother. That I was happy now. That our family would survive. That this would be my real marriage. She would be the woman who slept next to me in heaven.

Alex came down the stairs, bleary-eyed and rubber-legged.

“I’m trying to sleep,” he said. “Why is there talking?”

“Sorry, your majesty,” said Fran, moving over so he could climb between us on the sofa. He burrowed in and pulled us closer. He had always liked the feeling of being confined; tight spaces, weight pressing down.

“Who’s that?” he said pointing to a photo of Danny.

“That’s your brother when he was your age,” said Fran.

Alex pulled the picture closer.

“Did you always know he was broken?” he said.

“He’s not broken,” said Fran. “Why would you say that?”

Alex didn’t answer. He studied the picture.

“Who’s that?” he asked, pointing.

“You know who that is,” said Fran.

“Ellen,” said Alex, making a face.

“That’s right.”

He dropped the photo album on the floor and settled back in between us.

“Can I sit in the window when we go on the plane?”

Fran rubbed his head.

“You can take turns,” she said.

He yawned, then buried his face in her side.

“Don’t move,” he told us.

We watched him fall asleep. His steady breathing was like that of a small animal. When he was a baby, Alex liked to sleep facedown, his mouth pressed against the mattress. We never knew how he could breathe, but if we rolled him over he would scream until we turned him back on his stomach. Outside the sky was lightening. It would be morning soon. Fran and I looked at each other. There was love in this house, unity. It had been missing from my first marriage. That sense that no matter what happened we all wanted the same thing.

“I wish Danny could have had this,” I told her.

“I know,” she said.

John Hinckley was born on March 29, 1955, in Ardmore, Oklahoma. His father was an oil executive. His mother was afraid to leave the house. He grew up in Texas and attended Highland Park High School in Dallas. He was the popular quarterback of his elementary-school football team. In high school, however, he became increasingly reclusive. He spent hours alone in his room, playing his guitar and listening to the Beatles. His parents thought he was just shy. His classmates described him as “a non-guy.” As far as they were concerned he just wasn’t there.

In April 1976, at the age of twenty-one, he moved to Los Angles hoping to become a songwriter. The number-one pop song that year was “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain and Tennille. Paul Simon sang “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” One June night he went to a Hollywood movie theater and bought a ticket to see
Taxi Driver
. The movie starred Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a disgruntled Vietnam veteran who becomes obsessed with an underage prostitute named Iris, played by Jodie Foster. In the film Bickle starts collecting weapons and shaves his hair into a Mohawk.

He drives his cab through midnight streets.

“June twenty-ninth,” he says. “I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.”

Hinckley sat in the darkened movie theater, his mouth open. Every word seemed like it had been written just for him. The film ends with
De Niro lying on a brothel floor with a bullet wound to the gut, surrounded by the bodies of people he has killed. He presses a blood-soaked finger to his temple. The camera pulls up and from overhead we see policemen creeping into the apartment, their guns drawn.

Hinckley saw the film fifteen times that summer, sitting in a half-empty theater, an uneaten bag of popcorn on his lap. There was something happening. A transformation. On-screen De Niro straps spring-loaded revolvers to his forearm. He is taking control of the uncontrollable. He says, “The days go on and on. They don’t end. All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.”

At night Hinckley went home to a roach-infested apartment, like the one from the film. He sat in the dark and strummed his guitar, trying to channel brilliance. He wrote letters to his parents describing a made-up girlfriend he called Lynn Collins, based on one of the women in the film. The next morning he would get up early, so he could be first in line for the morning show.

A month later, Hinckley left California and went home to Texas. He worked as a busboy, trying to settle into a smaller life. But Travis followed him. The dark wet road of the male mind.

Hinckley took classes at Texas Tech in Lubbock. He tried to settle into a routine. He started drinking peach brandy and wearing a green army jacket. He made no friends. Classmates stated that they rarely saw him with other people. But Hinckley had a friend, one who lived on the screen.

“Loneliness has followed me my whole life,” Travis tells him, “everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.”

In August 1979 Hinckley bought his first gun, a .38-caliber pistol. He started target shooting, planting his feet, right hand clutching the pistol grip, left hand pressed flat beneath the gun butt to steady the kick. He chose targets that looked like people. He always aimed for the head, trying to empty his mind and pull the trigger the way a yogi falls asleep.

In December, Hinckley took a picture of himself with a revolver pressed to his temple. Late at night he would sit at his parents’ kitchen
table and load a single bullet into the chamber. The lights were off, the glow of a streetlamp casting shadows on the linoleum. Hinckley clicked the cylinder shut, spun it. He tried to be quiet. He didn’t want to wake his parents. When he pulled the trigger, the barrel pressed to his temple, he didn’t even close his eyes.

In 1980 he bought more guns. He started getting headaches. His throat hurt all the time. He went to see a doctor who wrote prescriptions for blue pills and yellow pills. They were supposed to help him sleep, make him feel better about the world. Sometimes he dropped them into a Coke and watched them dissolve.

In May he learned that Jodie Foster, the actress who played Iris, the child prostitute Bickle fell in love with, had been accepted to Yale University. Hinckley borrowed $3,600 from his parents and drove to Connecticut. He signed up for a writing class. During the day he walked the campus filled with confidence, knowing there were guns in the trunk of his car. He found out what classes she was taking. He spied on her in the cafeteria. She was so pretty it made his teeth itch. He left love letters in her mailbox. He wrote her poetry. In his mind there was nothing more poetic than the sound the pistol’s hammer makes when it collides with the flat back of a shell.

He was beginning to get a sense that history had a place for him, an elevated seat in the VIP section. A throne.

On-screen Travis goes on a date with Betsy, a campaign worker he meets in midtown, played by Cybill Shepherd. She is a nice girl, clean. He takes her to an X-rated movie. Life is beginning to feel more and more unintelligible.

On campus Hinckley got Jodie Foster’s phone number. He didn’t know how to talk to girls, and he stared at the phone for ninety minutes before dialing. Iris was so beautiful she made his feet feel too big for his shoes. Jodie. Her name was Jodie. Her voice when she answered was warm, open.
Did you get my letters?
he asked her. She was coy, a little flirtatious. It threw him. He told her he was not a dangerous person. Why did he say this?

It was an election year. Hinckley found he couldn’t take his eyes off Jimmy Carter when he saw him on TV. The president had teeth like tombstones, oversized, important. Hinckley went to the bank and took
out three hundred dollars. He bought a plane ticket to Washington, D.C. In D.C. he bought a ticket to Columbus, Ohio. He was following the president from campaign stop to campaign stop.

He wrote a poem called “Guns Are Fun!”

See that living legend over there?

With one little squeeze of this trigger

I can put that person at my feet

moaning and groaning and pleading with God
.

This gun gives me pornographic power
.

If I wish, the president will fall

and the world will look at me in disbelief
,

all because I own an inexpensive gun
.

Guns are lovable, Guns are fun

Are you lucky enough to own one?

In Tehran, Iran, fifty-two U.S. diplomats were being held hostage inside the American embassy. Hinckley sat in a window seat, flying from Columbus to Dayton. He composed letters to Jodie in his head. In the movie of his life he was the hero, the guy who got the girl. He had already conceived the act in his mind. He would walk up to the president and shake his hand. In the other hand would be a gun. Each shot he fired would be an angel that would sit beside him in heaven.

Later, video footage from the Dayton rally would show Hinckley standing less than twenty feet from President Carter.