Bogart (41 page)

This particular night, Tracy needed all of his acting
skills, because he was a wreck.

Kate Hepburn described the last visit to me this way. “I
was with Spencer. We spent time with your father. Before we
left I kissed him good night, the way I always did, and Spen
cer put a hand on Bogie’s shoulder. Bogie gave him one of
those great Bogart smiles, you know, and he said, ‘Good-bye, Spence,’ but those words, Stephen, they were so filled with
meaning. You knew Bogie meant it as a final good-bye, be
cause your father had always said good night in the past, not
good-bye. We got downstairs in that lovely house they had, and Spence looked at me. He was terribly sad and he said to me, ‘You know Bogie’s going to die.’ He meant that Bogie
would die very soon.”

Though my father almost never talked about dying dur
ing his illness, it seems that toward the end he knew. Even his
doctor said that on his last visit Bogie said good-bye and
thanked him for all that he had done. “I’m sure that night
he knew he was going to die,” Brandsma says.

After Tracy and Hepburn left that night, my mother and
father watched
Anchors Away,
the film starring Gene Kelly and
Frank Sinatra. Lately, my mother had been sleeping in an
other bed, so as not to disturb Bogie’s sleep. But on this par
ticular night he asked her to stay with him. The night was a
horror for both of them. Dad suffered through the night in
a claustrophobic nightmare, constantly picking at his body,
clutching his chest, struggling, it seemed, to leave his body. I
can only imagine what my mother went through, lying there
helplessly beside him. Later she learned that this was a com
mon phenomenon just before death.

In the morning Dad seemed a little better, as he usually
did when day arrived. It was a Sunday, and Mother took
Leslie and me to Sunday school at the All Saints Episcopal
Church. When she came back she and Dad talked for a while
and when she left to pick us up at Sunday school he said to
her, “Good-bye, kid.” These were his last words to her, and
later the press would make something of it, filling the words with meaning, as if Bogie knew they were the last words. But
my mother says no, he said, “Good-bye, kid,” just the way he
always said it.

When Mother brought us home from Sunday school my
father was in a coma.

Dr. Brandsma came over. He told my mother that Bogie
could come out of the coma, but that, more likely, this was
the end. “He has fought harder than anyone,” Brandsma
told her. “He lived longer than we had a right to expect. He
should have died four months ago, but he didn’t because his
will was so strong.”

My mother was shaking. “What about Steve?” she said.
“How do you tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is
dying?” She asked Brandsma if he would talk to me.

Then she called me into the butternut room. “Steve, Dr.
Brandsma wants to talk to you.”

Mother asked me to sit. I must have known that
something bad was going to happen because I remember
sitting on the edge of the chair. Brandsma sat across
from me.

“Stephen,” he said, “you know your daddy has been
very sick.”

“Yes.”

“And I’ve been trying everything I could to make him
better,” the doctor said. “But that’s not enough.”

I nodded.

“Stephen, your dad is sleeping now. He may go into a
deeper sleep. And he might not wake up. Do you know what
I’m trying to say to you?”

I nodded. My mother had her arm around me. “Ste
phen, do you understand what the doctor is saying?”

I ran out of the room.

Later my mother found me. “Daddy is in a deep sleep,”
she said. “Come and see him.” We walked into that room,
with its awful smell of sickness and decay. We sat on the bed.
Mother was more frightened than me. I moved closer. We
both took Bogie’s hand, and sat there not talking to each
other, just thinking our own thoughts, feeling our own feelings. After a moment I leaned over and kissed my father’s
cheek. Mother did the same.

Later that day she found me again in the bedroom, standing by my sleeping father. She asked me why I had
come back. “Because I wanted to,” I said.

That’s what happened. I know from talking to my
mother and from my own small fragments of memories. But
for most of my life I could only guess at what I felt: fear, an
ger, loss. I could recall only some of the scene, as if I had glimpsed it quickly from a safe hiding place. And I recalled
none of the feelings. Lately, they have been returning—
glimpses, whispers, sensations of regret so poignantly felt that
I have no words to describe them.

That night the nurse came to my mother. “Mrs. Bogart,”
she said, “Mr. Bogart has died.” My mother sobbed all
through the night. Because of their game, their pretense that
it was all a passing virus, their insistence that Bogie was always
on the road back to good health, Mom had had to hold so much in. And now, with him gone, all those trapped emo
tions came pouring out for her. She could let herself feel
what she had been trying not to feel for months. I sometimes
wonder if these memories I am having in bits and pieces are
enough, or if I also need to have such a moment.

At dawn she came into my room.

“Darling, I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father died early this morning.”

She says I lay there, rubbing my eyes with my fists. My
eyes were wet and red, she says, but I did not cry.

“Is he in heaven?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s in heaven,” she said. “And he is watching over
us, so you must be brave and strong. He was so proud of you.
And he loved you very much.”

Then she got Leslie and brought her in and told her. I
do remember that Leslie kept playing while Mother told
her, and because I was feeling sad while Leslie was still play
ing, I somehow thought that made me better than Les
lie. Of course, Leslie kept playing. She was only four
years old.

So I lost my father when I was eight, and within a year I
would lose my home, my school, and my friends. All of those
losses that I remember would be troubling, of course. But
something happened during those final weeks that has trou
bled me even more all of my life. I was in my father’s room
one day. I don’t know if I was talking to him or just playing
there. And I don’t know whether it was days before he died,
or weeks before he died. But after I was gone, my father told
my mother not to let me or Leslie in there anymore.

I’m forty-five now and I can perhaps gather some of what
my father must have felt, the emotions that would make him say such a thing. The pain of having his children see him so
impotent, so small and pathetic, must have been unbearable.
He must have cried to think he would never see us grow up.
It must have been more excruciating than the cancer for Bo
gie to look at his little boy and his little girl playing in the
sunlight that streamed through his bedroom window, know
ing that the light would go out much too soon.

But that’s big Steve Bogart sizing things up with his adult
brain. I was eight years old. And what I have held on to most
of my life is that feeling of not being allowed to see him, of
being somehow left out, of being rejected by my father dur
ing his final days. The memory of that feeling has stayed with
me always. Perhaps it explains, in part, why until now I have
been unwilling to talk about my father’s life.

* * *

Mother and I stand outside of the house. We stare into the swimming pool.

“It wasn’t here when we moved in,” she explains. “I had it installed for you kids.”

She points to the spot where Leslie and I left our small footprints in the cement four decades ago. Both somewhat stunned by our memories, we stand by the edge of the glistening water, as if our own feet are anchored in the cement. Our visit to the Mapleton Drive house is over, but we are not quite ready to leave. There is a slight breeze and I hear the soft play of the water as it slaps against the edges of the swimming pool. I replay a memory that I have replayed many times.

I am with my father on the boat, sailing to Catalina. Then I am on the shore. My father is offshore, on the boat. He is sending Pete in the skiff to pick me up. But I don’t want to be picked up. I want to swim out to Dad, show him I can swim well. I wave to him. “I’ll swim to you, “I shout. He shouts something to Pete, telling Pete to let me swim but to keep an eye on me. I begin to swim.

The water is cold around me and the surface bobs at me, now and then splashing my face. I keep my mouth closed, afraid of swallowing water. I kick my feet the way I’ve been taught. My arms swing forward wildly, pulling me along through the water. I can swim good, I think.

My father is standing on the foredeck watching me. He holds his hands to the brim of his fisherman’s cap, to keep the sun out of his eyes. He is rooting me on as if it is
a race and I am his favorite. “Come on, Steve, my boy!” I keep swimming. I want to get there. I don’t want to fail. I swim onward, but the boat seems farther away than it did when I began. I begin to feel a burning in my chest. I am tired, but I am determined, and I flail my arms forward, wildly scooping the water behind me. Dad is cheering me on. The
Santana
is bobbing in the water. “Good going, Steve,” my father is shouting. Pete stays near me in the skiff. I keep swimming. Finally, the boat is getting closer. I’m going to make it, I think. I swim harder, I breathe faster. I’m going to make it. I’m feeling so good. Almost there, I find one last burst of energy, and rip through the remaining water. I did it, I think, I swam to the boat. I begin to climb the ladder. My father, excited, dashes over to help me aboard. I get to the top rung. He lifts me in his arms and swings me around. He is smiling. “Great going, kid,” he says. “I’m so proud of you. “

The memories are coming rapidly now, and as the
Santana
of my memory sails away, and Mother and I begin, at last, to leave the house I am suddenly aware of another memory, an incident that happened just a few weeks before this trip to California.

I am at home, looking at videos of old home movies. There is my father swinging me upside down in the yard. There is Leslie and me, splashing in the pool. There is my dog Harvey loping across the lawn. There is the young Bacall with her Bogie. Suddenly a picture of me as an adult has flashed on the screen. I am confused.

“How did a picture of me get on this tape?” I say to Barbara.

She looks at me strangely. “Steve,” she says, “that’s not you. That’s your father.”

I look again. Barbara is right. For the first time I am seeing myself completely in my father’s face. More and more lately I have been seeing pieces of my father in me. I have become preoccupied with questions that have never before bothered me. Am I my father’s son? How are we alike? How are we different?

Now, when my mother and I walk around to the front of the Mapleton Drive house the morning seems very bright, like the mornings of my childhood. The smell of the grass and the trees rush into me as if for the first time. I feel as if I have come to the end of two journeys that all men must take, one way or the other. One journey, I began a decade ago when my wife told me, “Find out about your father.” The other, a journey of self-knowledge, which can last a lifetime, or a year, or even just the time it takes to walk through a house you once lived in.

Your search is over,
I
think. The words just come to me suddenly, as if carried on the breeze. Though I have spent most of my life running away from the shadow of my father, I have come now to see what Barbara has told me, that just because I don’t want to live life as “Bogie’s son,” I don’t have to ignore him. “Bogie or not, he was still your father,” she has told me.

If I didn’t know it before, I know it now, standing in the yard of my childhood home, that this search is all about looking at my own life and at my father’s and trying to figure out what, if anything, they have to do with each other. I feel as if I have, in a very real sense, come home. I want to embrace my father, not run from him. I know now that the words will come easier. Not just the words I write about
my father, but also the words I speak to my children when they ask about their grandfather, the words I speak to strangers when they say, “So you’re Bogie’s boy, huh?” My mother and I are quiet with each other as we drive away from the Mapleton Drive house that morning. I love her. She is still my mother, and even when she is driving my sister and me nuts, she is loving us. We are on our way to visit some more old friends of Humphrey Bogart. I am anxious to see these people, to ask more questions. But I am anxious, too, to be done with this trip, and to get on a plane back to my home in New Jersey. I miss my kids.