Family of Spies
Patricia Mulcahy
Word Count 1377
In Catholic elementary school, we were taught that only God holds the secrets of the universe. Embracing the ultimate mystery, or at least professing to do so, was the key to getting an “A,” I figured. In fourth grade, I wrote a Christmas essay in the first-person voice of Baby Jesus. It was supremely presumptuous and not at all holy. I got an “A.”
Maybe this mystery thing could be finessed.
Mysteries at home were less easy to wrangle: Why was Dad so often unhappy and hard to deal with when he got back from work? What had I, or any of my five siblings, done to incite his wrath?
This type of mystery seemed impenetrable. To escape, I fancied myself a sleuth in the vein of my heroine, Nancy Drew. She always nailed the bad guy and wound up with the good guy.
In fact, I had a prime family mystery right in front of me but didn’t realize it until years later. In a sepia photo I saw only in my twenties, my father slouches in full suit and tie against a concrete wall on a German river across from two brick warehouses. He looks nonchalantly official, with a steady, resolute gaze. Trained in Army intelligence, Dad worked as an interrogator on the German/Polish border during the Korean War. It was the early 1950s, a time of conservative reaction to wartime chaos and upheaval.
When I asked him about his years in the Army, he deflected: “All I did was learn to appreciate German beer.” But when pressed a bit, he revealed that as part of his training, he learned how to follow people, among other tricks of the trade.
That was as far as the revelations went. Why didn’t I press further? Did I relish the idea of my father as a kind of spy? Was the mystery of it all strangely alluring? Or did he indeed just drink a lot of beer overseas? My imagination struggled to fill in many blanks.
The thing about being a spy, apparently, is that once you get into the thick of things, you can’t be completely sure which side is the righteous one; nor can you anticipate how acts of subterfuge might tilt your own internal antennae.
Maybe Dad’s reluctance to detail his Army service was an act of grace; but maybe not, given that he was a master of the Irish strategy of silence, exile, and cunning.
I learned to live with maybe.
I pierced my father’s wall of silence only once. As I approached my thirtieth birthday in June, it occurred to me that my parents’ anniversary was in early December: The math did not add up.
Angry at my father for some perceived infraction, I blurted out on the phone: “We’ve figured it out,” I said, roping in my siblings for cover. “I was in the oven when you were at the altar.”
There was stunned silence on the line before he hung up.
Dad never said another word about it. Instead, he had my mother reach out to inform me in writing that an apology was expected, pronto.
I couldn’t risk calling him, so I wrote a note explaining my position. He responded that it was no apology, whatsoever.
Maybe I wasn’t sorry.
After we retreated to our respective corners, no words were ever spoken or written again on the topic. I was not surprised.
The only pushback came from my beloved Aunt Theresa, considered a secular saint in the family: “Patti Lee,” she said quietly, addressing me by my childhood nickname, “Some words are better off unsaid.”
What a notion: This never occurred to me in my righteous stand for truth and transparency. To my mind, I had simply taken an opportunity to counter my father’s infuriating form of control. At the dinner table each night, he dictated the parameters of conversation. Absolutely not to be discussed: Why the Catholic Church was in freefall in attendance; why his own father always struggled to support their family; why we spent so much more time in my mother’s home state of Vermont than in Dad’s hometown, Boston; anything to do with sex, or God forbid, money.
How did I square my probe into Dad’s reticence with an infatuation with mystery? Clearly my approach had pitfalls. Later it occurred to me that unsaid words had a mystery all their own.
I continued to be an avid reader of mysteries on the page, which offered at least a degree of accountability for bad actors and a reckoning for truth and justice. By the time I started as a publishing assistant in New York City, I had read most of the novelists in the American noir tradition such as Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. I liked their crisp, atmospheric prose and relished the protagonists’ world-weary airs. Though I was only in my twenties then, I adopted a similarly disaffected pose.
Slowly but surely, I climbed the literary ladder. Was it a coincidence that my most commercially successful acquisitions were mystery novels? One was set on a bayou in Louisiana, another in the heart of Los Angeles. Both writers spun their plot twists beautifully, taking readers on a journey where the righteous hero triumphs even in a world of unavoidable compromises and increasingly endangered moral codes.
Did I have such a code myself? I liked to think so. And though I bristled at my father’s inability—or refusal—to acknowledge emotional truths, I knew he was an honest broker in his job in marketing at a major food company. In a Christmas card he composed one year in the form of a family coloring book, he “colored” himself, “Poor but honest.”
Dad was the first person in his Boston Irish family to go to college. His father was a janitor, his mother a telephone operator with a sixth-grade education. Even after my father became a successful business executive, he still saw himself as a struggling kid from the working class. His ability to compartmentalize, to hide his insecurities, was his lifeline. His silence was his shield, something I realized only as I got older.
Maybe he was a spy in his own life.
After I lost my job in publishing, I kept working on books as a freelancer, including a novel about a spy who goes to an African country for the CIA. What is editing but the search for the truth at the core of a piece of writing? Even if you find it, it’s likely that questions will remain, which is after all how you hook readers. Isn’t too much knowledge the death knell of mystery, hence of drama?
As crime writer Dwyer Murphy said in an interview: “The mysteries that capture your attention are always shifting, and while you’re not looking, they transform into something else altogether.”
It’s the looking that matters—observation grounded in curiosity, as shown by the kids in the Hansel and Gretel story who scatter breadcrumbs to find their way home. Some writers scatter more narrative breadcrumbs than others.
Recently a friend told me that all the members of her book club hated a novel I had recommended. “There wasn’t enough backstory for the main character,” she explained.
“But that’s a choice,” I pointed out.
The notion that a writer would withhold information baffled my friend.
At this point, I am perfectly comfortable with bafflement, at least on the page.
I considered Dad’s silences in a different light. Stricken with both cancer and Parkinson’s disease, near the end of his life he struggled to reach out. One day, unprompted, he showed me his application to Harvard.
What we never knew until we prepared a celebratory booklet for his seventieth birthday: He was accepted at Harvard, but offered a larger scholarship to Boston College, a Catholic school. Even after his parish priest told him Harvard was full of Communists, my father decided to join the heathens in Cambridge. Even as a “townie,” he knew Harvard’s name would take him further in life.
It was an open secret that government agencies often recruited boys from poor families who were smart enough to make it to the Ivy Leagues. Was my father one of them?
I honor the fact that it’s a mystery I’ll never solve.
Patricia formed the editorial consulting service Brooklyn Books after over twenty years in book publishing. She started as a temp at Farrar Straus and Giroux and left as Editor in Chief at Doubleday. Her authors included bestselling crime writers James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.