Free The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch Page B

against rash judgments.
    Halfway through the legal imbroglio, his fourth collection, Good Counsel , was published by a highly respected university press. It was dedicated to his soon to be former spouse, who couldn’t have cared less, and to his sons, themselves not terribly impressed, lost as they were in the shuffle of marital failure. A brief but enthusiasticreview in the Washington Post did little to cheer him, though it helped to sell, in one weekend, half of his book’s first printing. Harried and hapless, he spent months immersed in the minutiae of divorce: attorneys, private investigators, depositions, interrogatories. A scholar by training and disposition, and a pushover for languages and jargon, he became conversant in case law and precedent,show-cause, suit and countersuit. When he once referred to his sons as “the minor children,” I objected. I could not bear to hear these beautiful boys who had their mother’s wisdom and their father’s brains, his dark humor and her brown eyes, called anythingbut precious. He kept crafting his testimony and his closing arguments for a day in court I told him would never come. The billable hourson both sides were plentiful.
    Once the litigants had spent all they had saved toward the boys’ college educations, the attorneys, well paid for the rattling of sabers and the launching of salvos, met over sushi, divided the spoils, and agreed to meet for golf the following weekend, weather and caseloads permitting.
    It was done.
    Good counsel, near as anyone could figure, was unequivocally andirrevocably, finished.
    O n the grand scale of things, a sad man, adrift in southcentral Ohio, compares unimportantly to the larger sorrows. War rages in the usual places, hunger whittles through whole populations. Plagues decimate the culture and the sub-cultures. The poor are with us always. The dead are everywhere. In such a world it is hard to work up sympathy for a white man with tenure,the lion’s share of his pension left, visitation rights, his health, his job.
    Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evident scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. The soul festers. The wound, untreated, can be terminal.
    But in a world that distributes victim status like coin of the realm, my friend’sdemographics disqualified him from the institutional forms of relief. Where divorcing women are seen as taking charge of their lives, or getting out of abusive relationships, divorcing men are seen as damaged goods, deadbeat dads. Heartache is their comeuppance.
    Truth told, he was hardly alone. Look closely on Saturdays and Sundays when the fast food places and the cinemas and malls fill up withthe non-custodial parents doing their “quality time” with their children. Real parents stay home onweekends to garden or golf or watch old movies with slow stews simmering on the stove. But non-custodials live a different life: uprooted, on the lam, forced to fit a week’s affection and discipline and guidance into what the losing attorney always calls their “liberal visitation rights.” They haveto hustle to get some semblance of home life with their children. Taco Bell takes the place of turkey and mashed potatoes. The mall replaces the Main Streets of home towns always described as a great place to raise the kids. Weeklong parents buy their children underwear and orthodontics. Weekenders buy them toys and talk of trips to Disney World in the sparkling future. Many give up trying, tellingthemselves it’s too hard on the children, too hard on themselves. Too hard.
    At first, both of the Nugents were calling me weekly, daily sometimes, sometimes twice a day. I reckoned I owed them both. Both of them had been willing to listen to me ten years before when my own ruined marriage was unraveling. So I listened back, tendered free advice, along with the disclaimer that you get what youpay for. She stopped calling