“A good night for a short sail. Sail on, my old friend,” Cap said in his final words, his voice catching. Polished Cap Richardson had taught working-class Bill Sweeney to sail in college, the gift of a lifetime. The first few notes from Sean’s fiddle were all it took for the crowd to understand that William Sweeney was truly gone.
As the song’s refrain faded out, a frail David Hughes, Bill’s longtime editor at Allegory Publishing stood. He hugged Liza, Maggie, and Tricia before making his way to the microphone. He told the story of reading Never Not Nothing for the first time, saying of the experience, “It was the greatest gift of my publishing career, to spend a weekend alone with those words before the rest of the world would discover William Sweeney, knowing it would change their lives, too.” Maggie, in the middle, squeezed both her sisters’ hands.
It was a perfect night and they had made that happen. Liza had out-Liza’d herself, whipping the Willow Lane house into shape with the help of Julia, who insisted on returning to work despite her own shock and grief. If Liza had another week, she probably would have managed to paint the house and re-landscape. A thorough cleaning, a carload of new towels, pillows, and cheap rugs would have to do to freshen the faded interior. Liza brought in the company who did the Christmas decorations at her house to string hundreds of white lights to camouflage the exterior. Details were her strong suit. She’d even managed to get Jack a bath and a fresh bandana for the occasion.
Tricia had contacted the guests, reaching out to all the people her father truly would have wanted there, like the mechanic who kept his old Mercedes running and the long-retired department secretary from The New Yorker. She excluded the people her father would have called “phony,” like Millie Reeves, the head of the Southport Historical Society who denied her father a special commendation for his seventieth birthday because she didn’t like the language in some of his books. There had been some loose security at the door, one big bouncer from a local bar and two assistants from Liza’s gallery, to distinguish any local wake crashers from fanboy wake crashers. Locals were welcomed without a scene.
Even Maggie, who had a tendency at events to stand on the sidelines and watch rather than work, had poured her energy into making an artistic tribute to her father on the west end of the property where the lawn turned to meadow: an installation of her father’s beloved sails and spinnakers, hung high on C-stands borrowed from a photographer—an old boyfriend who trucked everything in from New York, including a generator and lights.
When David Hughes ended his tribute, Liza, Maggie, and Tricia rose together and made their way to the stage. Liza had wanted Tricia to be “the official spokes-sister,” claiming that Tricia would be “the least emotional” and thus able to get through the eulogy in one piece. Tricia was both flattered and wounded by the statement. It was Maggie who insisted they all speak, saying, “We’re the Sweeney sisters. We’re good at this. Public speaking awards, sixth grade, Mill Hill, Sweeney Sweep. Talking is our thing.”
Tricia agreed. “We should each read something Dad wrote. Something that mattered to each of us.”
And so that was exactly what they did. Liza, being the oldest, spoke first. She gave Vivi and Fitz a hug on her way to the stage. She stood at the microphone and breathed deeply several times. Normally a confident speaker, she made several false starts, trying to get her opening words out without crying. She looked at her sisters and settled into a quiet rhythm with a story about their father’s work ethic. She told the mourners how her father would take them all through his process at the dinner table when he was working out an essay or a scene in a book. “We were his first audience for almost everything. As children, we had no idea what he was talking about most of the time, but we knew we loved listening to him tell stories.”
Then she read a passage from a piece in the Yale Review called “Quitting Time,” about his instinct for knowing when a piece of writing was done, when it was “fully finished, polished to a deep luster, but not so shiny that one doubted its authenticity.” She concluded, “My father lived to the age where he attained a deep luster, but never too shiny that you didn’t believe him for one minute. May we all understand our own quitting time so well.”
Maggie stood next, ascending the stage with poise and hugging Liza deeply. Maggie was in a long black dress with a bright orange-and-pink scarf in her hair and silver hoop earrings. She spoke nervously at first, introducing herself with the nickname her father had given her when she was a teenager. “Some of you know me as Mad Maggie. That’s what my father called me for most of my teenaged years. I have no idea why,” she said, wryly.
Then she recalled the many Christmas Eves they would sit around the fire, after the tree was decorated, listening to their father read aloud the classic Truman Capote story, “A Christmas Memory.” “My father described that piece as ‘everything that matters in life in ten pages,’” she said. “I struggled in college, maybe some of you know that. My mother had just died, I was my usual mess. I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t eat. But I could certainly self-medicate in a variety of ways and lie in bed all day. I was capable of that. And this card arrives with Snoopy on the front.” She held up the card her father had sent her, with the drawing of a beagle lying on top of his doghouse. There are laughs from the audience. “Inside is a twenty-dollar bill and the words, ‘For your Fruitcake Fund.’” Maggie paused, collecting herself, then continued, “And as a P.S., my father added, ‘This moment in time is the greatest test of your strength, my Mad Maggie. Use this pain and make your art sing.’ Use this pain and make your art sing. Thank you, Dad. I did then and I will again now.”
Tricia paused and let Maggie have her moment on stage. Maggie took it and then exited with a small bow and a fist-bump for her sister. Tricia wasn’t the slightest bit nervous. She had worked on her material late into the night, then got up, put on her running shoes, and rehearsed it several times on her run. Tricia went to where everyone in the audience knew she must go—back to the beginning.
“Like some of you, I read Never Not Nothing as a teenager, because it was a coming-of-age novel intended to be read by those coming of age. Honestly, I couldn’t understand all the fuss, maybe because every character in the book seemed so familiar to me. My father as the main character Ethan, of course. Aunt Frannie as the little sister. Dear Cap Richardson as the more sophisticated best friend. I like to think that my mother Maeve was Elspeth, but my mother and father hadn’t met yet when he wrote the book, though I’m guessing that when my father met my mother, he knew he’d found his Elspeth. These weren’t characters in a novel; these were the people in my life.
“But two summers ago, after a difficult personal situation, I found myself in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village and there was a copy of Never Not Nothing in their lending library, along with spy thrillers and self-help titles. I started to reread it over a latte. When I finished it hours later in one sitting, I realized that I was the same age then as my father was when he wrote it, and the book resonated with me at a whole different level.
“Never Not Nothing is about establishing self-identity and the impossibility of living up to standards that somebody else created. That’s something you learn well past your coming-of-age years, isn’t it? My father needed the distance to write the story and that’s true of all of us. We need to look backward before we can move forward. But more than anything, what I missed the first time I read Never Not Nothing was the longing to belong—to a family, to a friend group, to another person. I already belonged to those characters on the page, or so I thought at sixteen. But by thirty, I had lost that sense of connection. After rereading the book, I understood how essential growing up a Sweeney was to my being. Time and distance and losses made me hunger for belonging again. I think it’s why the book continues to be read and loved, because we’re all a little Ethan, searching for our people, for those essential connections. And look at you all here—you were my father’s people and you made his life complete, even if there were days when he wasn’t completely whole himself. Thank you. Thank you so very much.”