Protagonist · The Good Father
Forty-one. History teacher. Room 217 at Harmon High, the window over the practice field. Born in this town, in the North End. Has not lived anywhere else. Hears the math the way only a history teacher can, and places the bet anyway.
David Marsh has taught American history at Harmon High School for sixteen years. The window of room 217 looks out on the practice field. He can deliver the Antietam lecture from memory, the casualty figures, the angle of the cornfield, the way McClellan refused to pursue an army that was already broken. He is, by trade, the man in this town most likely to recognize a situation that is already lost. He is, also, the protagonist of The Good Father.
He grew up in the apartment on Elm Street where his mother Helen raised him on a night-cleaner’s wages, humming “You Are My Sunshine” over the sink. He and Sarah married out of a cold one-bedroom on Vine Street, where she studied for nursing boards and he wrote his thesis at the kitchen table with her feet in his lap. Now the Marsh house is at 1847 Third Street in the North End, the old neighborhood up by the river where a teacher’s salary still reaches, where they bought when Emma was two. The morning routine, two plates at 5:32, was the marriage; the chair on the left has been empty since Sarah took the night shift in June.
His mother Helen is in Lakeview Memory Care, Room 14B, twenty-two minutes out of town. The monthly bill is the original wound: Lakeview costs more than the household earns, and the cheaper option, Pine Ridge on Route 9 north of town, fully covered by insurance, is the hallway David stood in as a boy from 1989 to 1992 when his own grandmother was a resident after a stroke. The promise that he would never move Helen there is the load-bearing thing. Everything else in David’s adult life is what the promise is sitting on top of.
The gambling, in this reading, is not a vice. It is a math problem. Lakeview costs more than the household earns. The math has a single open variable, and David is the kind of man who, when he sees an open variable, cannot stop trying to solve it.
Warned at his usual booth at the Lamplighter, David hears it the way only a history teacher can, in past tense, settled, a battle already lost on a field he is still walking across. He places the bet anyway, because Loss B means moving Helen to Pine Ridge and breaking the promise he made her at a kitchen table at seventeen, when she begged him not to promise to carry everything and he said I promise I’ll do both anyway. Loss A is bigger, but Loss A is, in the grammar of David’s head, a thing that happens to him, which is the only kind of loss he can survive. (The verbatim warning is on the book’s page.)
The house at 1847 Third Street, to foreclosure. Sarah, who finds the forged home-equity document and folds it into quarters with a nurse’s precision before she takes the children to an apartment on the East Side. Emma, who stops speaking to him and leaves his last text unread. The teaching job, down to a non-renewal hearing three weeks out. And Helen dies in the spring; the Lakeview line vanishes from the List, and David learns there is no arithmetic crueler than the arithmetic that improves when someone dies. He ends in a small apartment on Oak Street with the rooster clock his mother gave him, paying off her headstone, SHE PAID HER WAY, at $40 a month. The version of himself he came into the booth with, lost in the booth, before he stood up.
David becomes the town’s cautionary tale, “the history teacher whose hard year the whole town had half-known about.” He is glimpsed on the periphery of other books: a restrained nod in The Tired Mother; a man buying a single replacement bracket at Haskell Hardware on a Saturday in The Quiet Man; the regular Donna once served at the Lamplighter, carried in the diner’s memory into The Honest Woman. His wife Sarah Marsh recurs more often still, a steady St. Clare’s ER face across several books.