EVERY NIGHT FOR TWO months, Tommy Mungo tried to get through to Dr. Verity Ambler. On the radio each night, she gave strength and advice to all the other callers: tearful young wives, husbands who thought they were gay, lonely widows, men whose women had run off, pregnant teenagers, parents who hated their children and children who hated their parents. He would listen to her alone in his bedroom, wearing a headset so his mother wouldn’t waken, listening to her cool, perfect voice, her strong words, her certainties. He was sure that somehow she could help him. She would give him some words and those words would change his life. So each night he dialed the station, and each night there was a busy signal, and this deepened Tommy Mungo’s sense of failure and despair.
Then, amazingly, suddenly, without explanation, one night he got through. A man picked up the phone and asked Tommy his name and his problem, and Tommy Mungo told him, and the man said he would put him on hold, and when Dr. Ambler picked up, he should be certain that his radio was turned off. Tommy Mungo lay there with his heart pounding for another twenty minutes. And then suddenly he heard her voice.
“Yes, Tommy, this is Dr. Verity Ambler. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I uh, you see, I’m twenty-eight years old,” Tommy said. “And I feel like I failed at everything.”
“Yes, Tommy…”
“For example, I can’t seem to finish anything. I never finished high school. And then I went to night school, to get a GED, you know? But I couldn’t finish that, either. I got a job in a sheet-metal shop. Like an apprentice, you know? You’re an apprentice for two years, then you move up the ladder, and eventually you become a journeyman and make good money. But I couldn’t stick with it, I couldn’t finish. My mother says—”
“Do you live at home, Tommy?”
“Yes, yes, I do.”
“And you’re twenty-eight years old?”
Tommy’s stomach knotted. He could feel Dr. Ambler staring at him with cold eyes, across the miles from her studio in Manhattan to his apartment in Brooklyn.
“Yes,” he admitted. “Yes, I live at home.”
“How does your mother feel about that, Tommy?”
“Well, she doesn’t say much.”
“And your father?”
“My father…passed away.”
Her voice was suddenly accusatory. “You sounded
“Well…the truth is, he didn’t pass away, actually. That’s just something I tell people since I was fifteen. Actually, he just left. He took off somewhere; I don’t know where.”
“I see,” Dr. Ambler said. “And how did your mother feel about
“She felt bad, of course,” Tommy said quietly. “But she always says to me, ‘Thank God you’re still here.’ And—”
“Ah,” Dr. Ambler said, drawing the word out. “Don’t you see, Tommy? That’s the real problem, okay? And you can’t finish anything. What does it suggest to you, Tommy?”
“I don’t know.”
Her voice was reasonable, soft. “Well, what do you think is the first thing you must finish?”
“I’m not sure. That’s why I—”
“You must finish your
There was a click and she was gone, and Tommy felt suddenly abandoned, the unspoken words choking in his throat. He switched on the radio, and Dr. Verity Ambler was saying she would be back after “these messages” and the news. Tommy Mungo punched the pillow and said out loud: “You didn’t let me finish.…”
I wanted to tell you about the crash on the Belt Parkway, he thought. And how my mother was crippled, her spine smashed, while nothing at all happened to my father. I wanted to tell you how he stayed with her for three years after that, until one night I saw him alone on the stoop, crying his eyes out. All of that was before he left. And then when she was alone, I promised her I wouldn’t let them stick her in some home or some hospital, wouldn’t leave her to charity. You didn’t let me tell you that, Dr. Ambler.
