Joshua Hyatt

Ghost Story;

 

They drove to a local hospital. Briggs felt good inside; he still thought he was doing this for the boy's sake. They entered a room in which about 40 people were seated around a table. Briggs recognized one of the faces. "How are you?" he boomed. "Great to see you." The man nodded back. Poor guy, Briggs thought, that poor, poor guy. He pulled out a chair for his companion, then sat down beside him. He unwrapped one of his favorite cigars, a handrolled Macanudo. The perfect after-dinner smoke, Briggs thought, and he deserved it tonight. Here he was giving his own time -- his very, very precious time -- to rescue this lost soul. This was, he soon learned, a discussion meeting. People were going to get up, one at a time, right in front of everybody, and hang out their miseries. A young male alcoholic agreed to start.

He began by talking about a friend of his who had not had a drink in nine years. But it didn't make the guy any better. He was still impossible to get along with, subject to unpredictable tantrums, haunted by an empty feeling inside. As he listened, Briggs grew madder and madder; who did this young man think he was, anyway? And what the hell was he doing up there, telling Briggs's story? Now he was sorry he had ever come.

He leapt from his seat, took the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at the young man. "You have one hell of a nerve talking about me, when you don't even know me," he growled. What is this, anyway, he thought, some kind of practical joke?

Briggs looked around the table. Nobody was laughing. Maybe this is your story, the speaker said, but it is mine, too. My story? Briggs thought. Who the hell do you think you're talking to? Fuming, he settled back in his seat without saying a word. "I knew I had just better shut up," he says. Briggs Doherty was hearing something new, a living voice, long ago stepped on and squashed. He suddenly felt helpless and frightened. "On the way home, I knew I had found something," recalls Briggs. "I didn't know what it was."

But that night, he says, "something hit me." Unlike the young man at the meeting, he had never told anyone about his suffering. He had never admitted how inferior he felt. "I suddenly realized that if you don't ask anybody to fix it, and you don't let anybody know that you are ready to explode, nobody can help you," he says.

The next day, Briggs came home from work around noon. Come for a walk with me, he said to his wife, I have something to tell you. He told her about the man at the meeting. "All that yelling and screaming doesn't only hurt other people," says Briggs. "It hurts you. I realized that it was leading me to death. I had to change."

Now, Paula could see his pain. "He was hating what he was seeing in himself," she says, "the anguish, the exasperation, the eating people up alive. I told him, 'Do what you have to do."

Briggs Doherty Jr. spent the first 40-old years of his life reacting to his father. The dad, the genius, the tyrant, the ghost. But four years after his father's death, says Briggs, "I decided it was time for me to let him die."

In April 1985, not long after the self-help meeting, he asked his wife to come work at the store. With her background in retailing, Paula was more of a logical choice than an emotional one. In fact, Briggs Sr. had never much cared for her independent spirit. Once, during a dinner conversation about -- what else? -- the business, Briggs Sr. was boasting about his handling of a difficult employee. "What do you think of what I did?" he asked Paula, expecting her to defer, as he thought ladies should. She told him she thought he was wrong. He slammed his palm on the table, rattling the dishes, and shouted at Briggs, "Keep her the Christ out of the business!"

Maybe his father wouldn't have stood for it, but Briggs knew he needed her help. "I began to see that Briggs Doherty alone couldn't make this succeed," he says. Around the same time, he revived yet another idea that his father had loudly rejected: he opened Lady Briggs, a clothing department geared for career women. His father felt women ruined the ambience; he wanted his store to feel like an English men's club.

Quickly but quietly, Paula started working, careful not to steal any of the spotlight that shone on her husband. "I'm a strong part of the business," she says, "but he's the show." She took over backstage, where Briggs Sr. had toiled, tracking down receivables, handling bank deposits, and cleaning up the books. For her first year, she even drove to work every day in Briggs Sr.'s 1973 Mercedes. "I'd get in the car every morning and I'd say, 'Well, I'm going down to your store," she recalls. "I knew he would have had a fit." Thomas Davidow, a psychologist who has worked with Briggs, says that "the ghost of Briggs Sr. shines in its most terrorizing visage around the legitimacy of Paula's involvement."

Some days, Paula felt Briggs Sr. hovering. "Every time I answered the phone," she recalls, "I expected his father to be on the other end saying, 'What the hell are you doing in my business?" Earlier this year, Briggs officially made Paula the company's business manager. "I'm learning that I have the ability to listen and to see what's right and what's wrong," says Briggs. "I'm doing things that I want to do."

With the Providence store generating about $4 million in sales, Briggs plans to open a few more outlets within the next two years. He expects that one of his two daughters will take over the business some day -- For Christ's sake, Briggs, a woman running the shop? -- though he is insisting both of them work outside the business first. "I want them to come with fresh ideas," he says, sounding very much unlike his father.

For now, they help out in the store from time to time. On a recent Sunday, Briggs and one of his daughters were on their way to the store when they stopped off at the cemetery. Briggs wanted to make sure the flowers he had ordered for his father's grave had come in. He fussed around the headstone, rearranging the flowers. Finished, he lingered for a moment.

"You know," he said, addressing no one in particular, "it seems like Dad has been dead forever."

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