The Fall

Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s life had been an unqualified success right up to the day he took a drink from an unopened bottle of water he found while jogging in a park less than a mile from his house. At least that was the initial conclusion which most of the family had settled upon after every other explanation for his implosion had failed to withstand logical scrutiny. So bizarre were the circumstances surrounding his metamorphosis that a family of educated people had been reduced to believing an unproven and unprovable theory involving a random bottle of water that had never been found or tested for toxins that might have explained how an otherwise circumspect 56 year old man could have so suddenly and spectacularly gone off the rails. The Fitzgerald family, being as unaccustomed to and unprepared for scandal as any tribe in North America had not handled the drama well. Accusations began to fly within the family, blaming everyone from his wife of 30 years, to his impossible to please father, to his meddling mother, all the way down to his disrespectful children. But, the writer has gotten ahead of himself. The reader by now is naturally wondering about the nature of Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s metamorphosis, and not nearly as concerned with the infighting of his extended family. I will attempt to tell the tale honestly without bias or judgement, for in the day and age in which we live, this story needs to be told.

1. Family History

William and Margaret Fitzgerald carefully considered the name they would bequeath to their first born in the fall of 1963. The Fitzgeralds were second generation wealthy, William having inherited a small fortune from his self-made father and having married into the Sebastian fortune which had flowed to Margaret upon the untimely death of both of her parents, who had tragically perished when the catamaran they were sailing capsized during light winds in the Chesapeake Bay less than two years after Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s birth. A manufacturing failure discovered within the workmanship of the mast ultimately added to the Fitzgerald fortune in the form of a settlement check from lawyers representing the boat company. William...it was William, never Bill, or worse...Billy, had for years been embarrassed at his wealth for the old fashioned reason that he had done nothing to deserve it other than being fortuitously conceived. His own career as a lawyer served only to provide him a place to go every day and a respectable answer to the oft-asked cocktail party question, “So William, what do you do?” The answer that he was an attorney quickly led into a pleasant ramble about his time at Princeton, and the early years of clerking for this judge and that. But as a matter of profitability, his law practice netted him barely enough money to cover his ample overhead. He had enough skill and connections to make an honest go of it but found the lack of urgency too much to overcome. Being independently rich, he discovered, had sapped him of any work ethic he may have inherited from his father. Eventually, William and Margaret had made peace with the happy accident of their births and stopped feeling guilt about their wealth. They had come to see their good fortune as, in fact, the very embodiment of the American Dream. They had come into their money the truly old fashioned way...by inheritance and summary judgments.

So, the choice of a name for what was surely to be the third generation of prominent and successful Fitzgeralds was crucial. Consideration must be given to tradition, the family tree and proper nobility. For William this meant a name that did not lend itself to truncation, or the degradation of a nickname. Daniel Sebastian checked off all the boxes, Daniel, after the Old Testament hero of the lion’s den, and Sebastian, the surname of his wife, the family name that provided 60% of the Fitzgerald net worth. However, William would ultimately regret the choice. It took virtually no time for little Daniel’s school friends, even those well bred enough to attend St. Paul’s, to twist Daniel into a hundred ugly iterations. Dan the Man, Danny-Boy, and the especially infantile Book-em Danno had all taken turns as the nickname of choice during Daniel’s middle and high school years, bringing his parents untold grief. When, over the course of time, it became obvious that nothing was to be done about the fact that their son would forever be known as Danny, William and Margaret accepted it as the price they would have to pay for raising such a popular and winsome boy. For Danny had turned out to be everything that his parents weren’t, optimistic, fun loving, adventurous, gregarious, empathetic and magnanimous, all traits that hadn’t appeared over several generations of either branch of the family tree. The Fitzgerald’s had largely been known as a stoic lot, full of industry and toughness to be sure, but not known for the warmer gifts associated with the human condition. Grandfather Fitzgerald, builder of a thousand brick ranchers and split levels throughout central Virginia, was an efficient and meticulous businessman known for being a fair boss, excellent craftsman, and ruthless negotiator, but in all of his life no one could recall him donated a single dime of his considerable fortune to a single charity beyond his church. His personality, such as it was, could best be described as distant. William had inherited all of the distance, none of the industry and all of the money. Although Margaret had been blessed with respectable warmth and charm along with a passable sense of humor, she had inherited the Sebastian family pride, the imperious kind that served as a stiff arm to the lower classes who were unlucky enough to stumble onto her path. Her single purpose as a mother to her son had been to protect him from bad influence which she narrowly defined as those outside his rank and station. To her eternal consternation, every such effort had failed. Danny counted among his friends an endless succession of misfits and ne’er do wells who brought with them their course language and sloppy manners. There was simply nothing to be done. Their son had developed a tendency of attracting friends everywhere he went, for good or for ill. His parents had been reduced to glorified overseers, doing their best to influence their son towards the right friends and away from the wrong. Despite this troubling tendency, Danny had given them not one minute’s trouble. He was respectful of their authority, dutiful and obedient, an excellent student and well liked by everyone.

Then he met Kate.

Kate, (not Katherine, the birth certificate actually said Kate), Buchanan had crashed into the Fitzgerald family like a runaway freight train in the summer of 1982 when Danny announced to his parents that he had met the love of his life and that she would be spending a week with them at the river house over July the fourth. Kate Buchanan had been exactly what Margaret Fitzgerald had warned her husband would happen if he permitted their son to attend Virginia Commonwealth University instead of Princeton. It should never have been allowed in the first place, their son matriculating at a state school known for nothing other than a basketball team and a campus life littered with drugs and bohemian habits. Princeton would have delivered the world to his doorstep. With VCU they would be lucky if he graduated without a stint in rehab. But here was Margaret, looking on in wordless horror as Kate Buchanan exploded out of the passenger seat of Danny’s BMW, dressed like a gypsy, radiant smile beaming out from under that ridiculous Panama hat, running up to engulf her boyfriend’s mother in an inappropriately familiar embrace. It had been the beginning of the most awkward week of Margaret’s life, filled as it was with the realization that her son was irretrievably ass-over-tea-kettles in love. Meanwhile, William had been struck mute by the presence of the girl, barely contributing a word to the conversation for the first hour or so, overwhelmed as he was by the pure novelty of someone who combined outrageous fashion and personality with such astonishing beauty. As the week wore on, Margaret and William were united in their belief that the girl would be an unmitigated disaster for their son, but equally convinced that the relationship would never last. Danny would soon tire of this whirling dervish. How could he not? The child babbled on all week about every conceivable topic that people like Margaret and William couldn’t possibly have cared any less about, while Danny sat there bewitched, hanging on every word. 

He had met her in an introduction to sculpture class, the sort of class he never would have taken had he gone to Princeton, when fate had placed him next to her on the back row. She had arrived to class carrying nothing with her that might have identified her as a student. No back pack, no books, no purse. Just a loose fitting tie-dyed T-shirt, no bra, and her angelic face. For Danny it had been love at first sight, or at least lust, which at 18 years of age amounts to the same thing. At the end of class during which not a single word of conversation had passed between them, she had extended her hand to him and said, “My name’s Kate. You’re cute.” Thus had began the manic affair that now had belched itself upon the banks of the Rappahannock River. Margaret and William smiled knowingly at each other. He would tire of her in time. All was well.

But like millions of parents before them, Margaret and William had underestimated the enduring power of both passion and love. By the time Danny had graduated with a worthless Bachelor of Science in Advertising degree, they were still in love and announced their intention to marry at the earliest possible date. When Margaret and William had objected to the match, Danny and Kate had responded by eloping, then sending his parents a postcard from Key West, officially beginning a 30 year strained relationship between Kate Fitzgerald and her in-laws. Although the arrival of grandchildren, a girl, Caroline, and a boy, Teddy (not Theodore), had softened the general frostiness of their discourse and injected a touch of warmth on both sides, animosity still hung heavily in the air whenever they occupied the same space. Despite the animosity, Margaret and William always managed to cover over their disappointment with the pleasant veneer of manners, never revealing too much, never letting slip any openly hostile words, always preferring the veiled insult, the soft contours of the pulled rhetorical punch. It infuriated Kate to be on the receiving end of their passive aggression, to the point where she had begun to take great delight in offering translations in real time to anyone who might be within earshot.

Margaret: Kate, my dear, you look healthier every time I see you.

Kate: What Grandma means kids is that Mommy’s getting fat!

Ever since the children had arrived it had become one of Kate’s joys in life to refer to her Mother in law as “Grandma.” Margaret hated nothing in the universe more than the ghastly title, always answering with, “Grandmother.” Of course, the children picked up “grandma” and used it gleefully as soon as they learned to talk, a delicious victory for Kate and a thorn in the side to Margaret who visibly winced at the sound of the word. Such pettiness was unlike Kate, a fact that her husband often reminded her after each family visit. Kate could only admit the truth.

“Yes,” she would reply. “When it comes to your mother I can be a real bitch. I should just ignore her, but I can’t help it. I do so love watching the way her bottom lip quivers right before it stiffens up and pushes out whenever one of the kids says ‘Grandma!!’ You’ve got to admit, honey. It’s pretty funny.”

“It’s hysterical,” Danny would always respond. “But what’s the point? It only makes things worse between you two.”

“Actually, it makes no difference whatsoever. Your mother will be your mother for as long as she lives. And as long as I remain your wife she will hate me, and never in a million years will she ever admit to hating me. Am I right?”

“Yes. You are right.”

Thirty years of the battle between wife and mother in law had raged without any meaningful cease fires. Even once Margaret became an octogenarian she still delivered her patented silk-covered verbal bricks in nearly every conversation. After watching Kate remove an over-cooked roast out of the oven, the silver-haired, face-lifted matron hadn’t missed a beat, “It is quite remarkable how unspoiled by failure you continue to be.” But on the fateful morning when Danny had stumbled back home from his Saturday morning run, white as a ghost with a nasty abrasion on his forehead, Kate’s skirmishes with her in-laws would intensify into a full blown war.