There has always been some social distance between us; Frank the blue-collar man, Paul the lawyer. He is constrained by self-imposed social divisions of another era. I suspect that doctors would unnerve him, like talking to God. For Frank, this would be an added point of stress in dealing with his daughter’s illness.
“Been a long time,” he says.
“It could have been under better circumstances.” I motion with my head toward the judge’s bench and smile.
“Tough day?” he asks.
“They’re all tough. You know my partner, Harry Hinds?”
“Don’t think we’ve met,” says Frank.
Harry gives him a mystified look and offers his hand.
“Frank Boyd. Harry Hinds.”
They shake hands, and Harry finally connects the name. “Oh, you’re the little girl’s. .” then catches himself.
“Right. Her father.” There is something about Boyd that brings to mind the actor William Devane. It is in the sad-sack eyes, and the face that seldom changes expression, as if the load of life were simply too oppressive to permit any real relief. It is the look of a man who is not allowed emotionally to come up for air, who is quietly drowning.
“How’s Doris?” I ask.
“Oh, good. Good. She’s tough.”
And then the inevitable: “Penny?”
At this he gives me an expression, sort of turns away. “Not too bad,” he says: the big lie. What he means is, not too bad for a child who is dying.
“I need to talk to you,” he says. “If you have a minute.”
“Sure. You want to do it here? I’m finished for the day.”
He looks around a little at the room, daunting formality, walnut railings and fixed theater chairs. “Maybe we could get a drink,” he says. “I’ll buy.”
Harry offers to clean up, to haul our files back to the office. He has hired some enterprising teenager with a hand truck and a van in the mornings and afternoons to help us with the cardboard transfer boxes filled with documents. These seem to propagate like rodents as the trial goes on.
Harry and I check signals for the morning, then Boyd and I take off. It is clear that Frank is suffering from more nervous agitation than usual this afternoon. When you know someone as I’ve known him, not intimately but through periods of calm and frenzy, it becomes obvious when there is a favor to ask and the person is uneasy about asking it.
He follows a half step behind me, across State Street, to the Grill at the Wyndham Emerald Plaza. Frank is uncomfortable here and shows it.
“I’m not dressed for this,” he tells me.
“Don’t worry about it.”
I suspect he’s wondering whether he has enough in his pocket to spring for the drink he has offered. Though Frank has all the work he can handle, I suspect that he and Doris have never made more than fifty thousand in a single year.
Doris held a seasonal part-time job with a small company for a while, but had to give it up when Penny became too sick for day care.
We shuttle between tables as the after-work crowd starts to settle in for drinks and embellishments on the day’s war stories: secretaries on the flirt, young lawyers on the make. The only ones you won’t find in here are the bondsmen from bail row a block away. They are too busy making money chasing tomorrow’s clients.
We find a table in the back, dim light and wood relief. I order a glass of wine, the house Chablis, and give the waitress my credit card to start a tab. Frank argues with me, but it is halfhearted. He accepts a drink, orders a beer, Bud, and thanks me.
He is a big man, sinewy and strong as a bull. He is a full inch or more taller than I am, even sitting here, hunched over the table.
He looks as if he hasn’t had a good meal in two days. I order up appetizers, chicken wings and some stuffed mushrooms.
Frank kills time with small talk, his latest job, a mansion for some software mogul. He’s been hauling one-ton beams into the basement for a mammoth hearth single-handedly. Using leverage, he moves the hundred-year-old timbers that he has salvaged from some closed-down mill in Colorado. Anyone wondering how the pyramids were built might want to discuss the matter with Frank.
I can tell he is waiting for the waitress to come back so that we won’t be disturbed. The drinks come first. Five minutes later the food, and Frank doesn’t hesitate. He’s into the mushrooms and chicken wings. “These are good,” he says, then notices that I’m not eating. He puts the chicken wing down on the little plate in front of him, self-conscious eyes looking around.
“You gonna have some?” he says.
“Sure.” I pick up a wing to keep him company.
“You’re wondering why I need to talk?” he says.
I smile.
“It wasn’t to get a meal. Or a free drink.”
“I didn’t think it was, Frank. You probably want what we actually owe you for your work in the office,” I tell him. Frank had handcrafted some bookshelves for us into some tight spaces in the office and charged us five hundred dollars for two thousand dollars’ worth of work. When I tried to pay him more, he wouldn’t take it, saying that what I had done for Penny was more than enough.
“I need a divorce.” He says it just like that. Like “Pass the salt.”
I don’t say anything, but he can read stunned silence when he sees it.
“It’s the health insurance,” he says. “I need a divorce because of the medical-insurance thing. Crazy, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you start at the beginning?” I tell him.
“Fine. But I’m not gonna eat unless you do.”
I spear a mushroom with a toothpick, if only to make him feel comfortable.
“It’s Penny,” he says. He picks up the chicken wing and starts to nibble on it, but I can tell his heart is not in it. He has lost the yen to eat and drops it back on the plate. Instead he goes to the drink, something to dull the senses. Takes a swig from the bottle, ignoring the glass that the waitress poured and is half full, shrinking by the head.
“Her medical expenses are huge.”
“I can imagine.”
“I don’t know that you can. Last month it was twenty-five thousand dollars.”
He’s right. I didn’t have a clue. He looks at me over the bottle caught by the neck in his large hand.
“You’re wondering where would I get that kind of money? Until last Tuesday, from the insurance company. But that’s about to end. A lifetime million-dollar cap,” he says. “We’ve bumped up against it with Penny. That’s why we need the divorce.” He puts the bottle down on the table and leans forward, a salesman about to make his pitch.
“Doris and I talked about it. She didn’t want to do it either, but you see, it’s really the only way. We were up ’til three in the morning, talking.”
I can see it in Frank’s bloodshot eyes.
“She wants to divorce you?”
“God knows why she didn’t do it years ago,” he says. “I haven’t been a great provider. A lot of squandered opportunities. If I’d stayed a schoolteacher, at least they’d have health insurance. Doris and the kids. Most of the wood I work on has more brains that I do. I’ve made a lot of bad decisions.”
I tell him he’s being too hard on himself.
At this moment I wish I had a few million in the bank I could loan him. Fact is, I’m tapped out, new practice in a new city.
“I’ve looked for jobs. But who’s gonna hire some burned-out termite? Besides, as soon as they find out about Penny they always come up with some reason not to take me on. Suddenly they’ve filled the position. No longer hiring.”
“You have your own business.”
“Yeah. Right.” He laughs.
“This is the extent of my business.” He holds up his leathered hands. “My only assets. According to the bank,” he says. “And I can’t sell them or mortgage them, not even for body parts. So where does that leave me? Where does it leave Doris and the kids?” He’s looking at me now, leaning across the table, whispering like this is some secret cabal.
“The insurance guy tells us there’s nothing he can do. Hell, if I hadn’t had the policy for years before Penny came along, they would have canceled us years ago. Fact is, we’re uninsurable,” he says. “That means the house, everything is on the block. They’ll take it all, every dime. My kids are gonna end up on the street,” he says. “I’d be better off dead.”