It was true, Joe couldn’t have kids. After Dominique was born we went to a fertility specialist, because I’d decided that all I wanted to do the rest of my life was have babies. The doctor took Joe aside and whispered, Are you sure she’s your child? All the experts insisted that Joe had NO sperm and that having any offspring was impossible. So what kind of magical elixir had he rendered from the sky to create our daughter? What ever it was, it made our haphazard, reckless union, feel mythic and pre-ordained. She looks just like me, Doc. Of course she’s my kid. True, she did, there was no doubt about who the father was in this situation.
(Remember, how I ended up in Gloucester, home of the Perfect Storm, the Man at the Wheel, Captain’s Courageous, the oldest artist colony in America, the oldest seaport, the oldest railways, the Gloucester Stage company, and so much more!? Remember how I’d followed the signs on bulletin boards, and mysteriously washed up on Rocky Neck, one sun-slanted, autumn afternoon? Ok, good).
I’d never imagined a father, looking for, or finding one. Growing up, I’d only been interested in finding the Birth Mother. Fatherhood to me had always been a shady business, a position that was based more on a man’s willingness to own up, be named, and accept responsibility, than on any innate connection to the child. But here in Gloucester, I found myself married to, not only a commercial fisherman, but a father, and as I observed him interacting with our daughter, I couldn’t help but wonder if there might be something more to a father than a social contract. There was a mystery between a daughter and a father that intrigued me. Perhaps fathers emitted an invisible frequency, like an EPIRB transmitting coordinates to lost daughters, across the vast, dark ocean. Perhaps. In any case, I became more curious, and finally, one evening, I called the Birth Mother and got up the nerve to ask her about who my biological father might've been.
“Well, I vaguely remember that he was from somewhere on the North Shore and in the fish business. You’ve got to understand I’ve tried to forget everything about him. He was at Harvard on the veteran’s bill, we were in classes together, but he was a few years older than me and married, with a kid, maybe two—I don’t remember—his wife got knocked up and he had to move out of Addams House.”
Joe and Dominique were on the bed, playing with her felt horsies. I was standing, holding the bedside phone to my ear, repeating every word the Birth Mother said out loud, North Shore, fish business, Vet bill.
“His name was Robert Barry Fisher.”
“Robert Barry Fisher,” I repeated.
Suddenly, Joe sat up, a little grey horse in his hand, mid-hurdle, “Barry Fisher?”
“Yeah,” I said, “Shhhh”.
“Barry Fisher?” he asked again.
“Yes, Robert Barry Fisher.”
“I know him.”
“No you don’t, Joe, how could you? He went to Harvard.”
“I do, Barry Fisher, yeah.”
As far as I was concerned if you put Harvard, North Shore and fish business together, you got a guy who lived in Manchester-by-the-Sea and owned an import/export business, a guy who had very little to do with actual fishing, or Gloucester, or Joe Sinagra.
“He’s a Gloucester fisherman,” Joe insisted.
“What?”
“What? What’d Joe say? He knows him? Oh my God, are they related?”
“Wait a sec, hold on!—Joe, what?”
“Yeah, he’s a Gloucester fisherman.”
“He’s a Gloucester fisherman?”
“Oh please, Jesus, don’t let him be Joe’s secret father, that’s all I ask.”
“He says he knows who he is, that’s all.”
“I do,” Joe said, “I know him. Barry Fisher. He was in the Boy Scouts with my father.”
“Please, God, Joe’s mother doesn’t have any dark misgivings she needs to tell you about does she?”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I lowered the phone, so I could hear Joe.
“Seriously,” he continued. “Barry Fisher was a Gloucester fisherman. He was really good friends with my uncle Carly.”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
“Talk to my brother Frankie, if you don’t believe me, he knows him better than me.”
“DID YOU MARRY YOUR BROTHER?”
“No! Jesus, I didn’t marry my brother.”
With both the Birth Mother and Joe speaking at once, I gave up trying to control the conversation and just stood in the middle of the maelstrom, like a piling in the harbor, riveted, the phone pressed against my ear, aware of Dominique on the bed, next to her father, happily engaged with her horsies, the fog horn’s rhythmic warning, the Eastern Point light sweeping out over the Atlantic, and back home again.
“Well, I thought you might start asking questions, so, I went into reporter mode and consulted the Harvard alumni office. Apparently, he had a lot of boats, on the West Coast, but, too bad, they all went up his nose.”
“Like, drugs?” I asked, wondering why the Harvard alumni office would divulge that kind of information.
“He went to Oregon,” Joe said. “Made a shit-load of money, my Uncle Carly was gonna go, before he went down in the Alligator. Did some joint venture with the Russians, herring, I think. A drug problem? I don’t know about that, last I heard, he was dead. He had cancer.”
“What’d Joe say?”
“He thinks he might be dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that would be….Dead? They think he’s dead?”
“Yes, DEAD!”.
“Oh. I never thought…Really? Dead?
“I guess.”
“Oh. Well, hell. YAY! He-might-be-dead? He-might-be-dead-dead-dead-dead-dead-dead! Hooray, hooray, he might be dead. Fiddlesticks, I mean, too bad. Oh, fuck it, hooRAY!”
“What’s she doing?” Joe asked
“I think she’s dancing,” I said.
Eventually, she returned to the line out of breath. “I’m sorry, really I am, so sorry.”
“It’s okay--“
“But you don’t understand,”
“Yes, I do—”
“Well, maybe you do, but, who this man had become, all these years, this terrible secret I had to keep. I’ve never told anyone this story before in my life, you can’t understand what it is like to never ever tell these things to anyone and now have them suddenly lifted and I don’t have to hide anymore.”
“Uh huh,”
“But me dancing for joy, because your father might be dead—”
“He’s not my father--”
“—-is just bad form, forgive me.”
“It’s fine.”
“Ha! Now he’s dead! I never imagined that he might be dead! Bless his heart. How can we find out for sure?”
Bright and early the next morning, Joe started asking around the waterfront. According to the old timers who grew up with Barry Fisher he was…an asshole, the craziest sonuvabitch you’d eva wanna know, a great fisherman, a lousy fisherman, couldn’t make it in Gloucester, here we got real fishermen, that’s why he went to, ah, where was it? Somewhere on the West Coast, Oregon, I think, had a heart of gold, was wicked smaht, went to Hahvahd, tried scottish seining, always something new, smaht I tell you, yeah, sure, I remember him, he was a wild guy, your fahther, his family owned the Foundry, lived up on Hovey St, maybe it was Prospect, Robert Barry Fisher, yeah, sure, helluva a guy, you don’t want to know him. But, dead?
We found photos of him in National Geographic and the National Fisherman aboard his fishing vessel, the Excalibur. He was famous in fishing circles for his hand in developing the North West fisheries and for joint ventures with USSR factory ships in the Bering Sea during the ’70’s, and for being a “fishing pioneer, a leader, a spokesperson.”
Word got to Barry from Gloucester, that we were snooping around. His old friend Patsy Frontiero called him, “Joe Sinagra, remember him? Well, his son, Joe, has a wife, says she’s your daughter.”
A few months later, He attended the Fish Expo in Boston and tracked Joe down.
“You’re Joe Sinagra,” he said.
“You’re Barry Fisher, you’re my wife’s father.”
“Em, he was shaking, his hands were shaking. I thought he was going to cry. He’s huge. Really tall. He had this big gold ring. He was smoking.”
“He smokes? But I thought he had cancer.”
“I’m just telling you, he was smoking.”
“Did he look like me?”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
I certainly never expected a father to drive down the driveway, to our little duplex behind the Colonial Inn, 28r Eastern Point Rd, Gloucester, Mass, park his rental car next to Thunder Road, our 20-foot wooden Stone Horse sailboat, that someday Joe was going to fix up and get back in the water, and yet there he was, white-haired, broad-shouldered, well dressed in rich spruce-colored corduroys, a flannel shirt, ochre wool sweater, polished loafers. Somebody, no doubt a wife, was taking good care of him, I thought. His mustache was stained from too many cigarettes. He wore a gold signet ring. I never expected a father to get out of his car and reach for me. But he did. As we hugged, I could feel the soft flesh around his back ribs trembling, my head rested on his heart. Was he crying? January 6, Three Kings Day, Epiphany. A good day to meet a father.
.