The Story of My Father (10 page)

We had the service in New Haven, near where my grandparents, then in their mid-eighties, lived and a location central to many in Mother’s vast family. Each of us, my grandfather included, rose and went up to the pulpit to speak or read something in the service. My father had the 23rd Psalm. I read a poem of Mother’s.

The day was long. We had arranged a lunch for the whole extended family at a local hotel. I was sitting two seats down from my grandfather at the long table. I remember that at one point he reached over and pushed the full plate away from the person sitting between us as he spoke to him, as though this poor man’s lunch might distract him—and surely he wouldn’t want that!—from what my grandfather was saying. I remember thinking how like him my mother had been in her hunger for attention and admiration.

After lunch we stopped at my grandparents’ retirement condo to visit my grandmother, still recovering from her stroke and unable to come to the service. Then there was the long dark drive back to Boston. The next day, my brothers and sister left and Dad’s rental house seemed suddenly vast and silent. We began to clean it, and he, slowly, to pack things up.

My father couldn’t go back to New Jersey until February; my parents had rented their house out for the entire semester. They had taken the Cambridge house only until just after the New Year, having planned to travel together for the remaining time. This was something he couldn’t imagine doing now, alone. Instead, just before Christmas he moved in with me for a month.

His possessions sat for those weeks in boxes and suitcases heaped against the wall in the kitchen. It was only on the second or third day that I noticed the white corsage-sized box that held Mother’s ashes in the pile, as though it were of no more importance than the books or clothes. For my own ease of mind I tucked it away below other things, so my father’s dog or my cat or the kids running in and out wouldn’t bump into it and knock it to the floor, but it startled me as a fact about Dad that he would treat the ashes so casually.

I needed to explain it to myself, and the way I did this was to attribute it to his complete lack of sentimentality: for him, I concluded, no part of Mother was contained or represented by the ashes, by the idea of the ashes, by the presence of the white box. Wherever her memory, her soul, dwelt for him, it wasn’t there.

Was I right? I don’t know. Maybe, I think now, he was already a little Alzheimer-y, flattened in his response to some things, as in his apparent forgetfulness of the meaning of the box. Maybe another, intact version of Dad would have been more careful, more . . . reverential somehow about it. But maybe not.

We tried to live a normal life. On New Year’s Eve we went to a Scandinavian friend’s house for a splendid dinner, and in accordance with Norwegian custom we stood on our chairs and jumped down from them as the New Year commenced, signaling our new beginnings.

We drove out to Lincoln one night to have dinner with my aunt and uncle, my mother’s youngest sister and her husband. Dad’s birthday was January 11. He was sixty-five, officially elderly, as I told him (as I was now, at thirty-five, officially middle-aged). I cooked a fancy dinner and made a cake, and he blew out the candles. Ben was there, and a cousin had stopped by for the night, so it felt, I thought, festive. Festive enough.

We went to movies; we took Ben and friends out for hamburgers; we stayed busy. But there was often a slight sense of strain, the awareness of silence, of the absence of the person who would have been decrying something, exalting something— even tediously describing something—but occupying center stage, at any rate, and thereby letting the two of us off the social hook. We missed her. My father usually had one drink before dinner, and I took to having one—and often several others— with him. It made things easier for both of us.

Over these weeks my father’s behavior made me hopeful that he would approach his new solitary life with the discipline and curiosity that had marked him in all his endeavors: a new subject to study, a new sad project to begin. It seemed this might be so; he had a note pad, and he followed me around the house, asking questions and writing down the bits of useful information he was gathering. “About how often do you vacuum?” he’d ask, and write down my answer. (My answer! I hope I gave him the
theoretical
number.) “How often do you clean the toilets?” Scribble, scribble. He listed household products I used and asked and noted
how
I used them.

I had to show him how to balance a checkbook—astonishing to me, and then not: of course she’d kept the accounts. She’d run the whole show. Everything to free him to be purely, only, the brilliant scholar she felt him to be.

I discovered, going over their books, that they had no money to speak of, that when they’d loaned me $5,000 for the bulk of the down payment on my house, when they’d loaned my siblings money for their houses as well, they were cleaning themselves out each time, giving us everything they had, in checking as well as savings. I think none of us would have guessed this or perhaps we wouldn’t have felt so free to ask. Of course, they knew they had his pensions coming, that their retirement would be essentially salaried—they didn’t really need a nest egg—but this radical generosity to us was, nonetheless, extraordinary, and the more extraordinary to me for having been kept secret.

The day Dad left to drive back to New Jersey was frigid, the old snow on the street frozen and grimy. His car, a battered dark-green Volvo parked in front of my house, was packed full of boxes of papers and books. I’d fixed him a lunch for the road. Maybe, he said, he’d save it for dinner when he got home to New Jersey. I thought then of the new absence he’d have to confront there, the empty house, the silence, Mother’s things, her arrangements, everywhere.

I went out on the front porch to wave goodbye to him. He was wearing a ratty balaclava and the slightly-too-big tweed coat that my mother had bought for him secondhand somewhere; she had always bought all his clothes for him. He led his old dog out to the car and helped him into the passenger seat— Kolya was by then maybe sixteen or seventeen, an arthritic black Lab mix who’d gone grizzly white from the bottom up. Then Dad crunched around to the driver’s side, breath blurring, got in himself, and started the car. I watched them as they rounded the curve out of sight. He honked once. I was tearful again, suddenly stricken with sorrow for all I couldn’t do for him, for his solitude, for all the lonely tasks ahead of him. I remember thinking, Please don’t, don’t let Kolya die for a few more years.

Through the next days and weeks, I tried to reassure myself with the beginnings I had seen. I thought of my father, making his notes, working out the rules for his new life. I thought of a poem I found, complete, in my mother’s papers after she died, about the differences between them.

His habit is to work.
Diurnal, steady as the sun
He rises, dominates the day, it seems.
Lies down at night
Stinted.

Her habit is to moon about.
Waxing, waning—
Flux.
Some days full-face, smiling, whole.
Others attenuated as a nail paring.
Written off.

Surely this is how he would proceed—steady as the sun,
working—
even in his grief.

This was not the way it happened, though. That steadiness, that dailiness, that seemingly permanent temperamental need to be always
at
something fell away from him. And my education into the disjuncture of his dying, its inconsistency with his life, began here too. No wonder I resisted understanding it.

It helped me in my resistance that he seemed much the same
interpersonally
for several years. He was interested in all our doings and stimulated by company, by intellectual events. He and I spoke and wrote often. I kept most of his letters, his script precise and vertical as always. He described things he’d seen and done.

Reds
[the movie] is well worth seeing. The hero looks like Ben. It’s long and sprawling, but finally focuses in on a taut and convincing triangle—O’Neill, Reed, and Louise. And the climax in Russia in the revolution is wild adventure. There is a fascinating chorus of elderly survivors: Eastman, Henry Miller, etc., who reminisce periodically, and Emma Goldman, Lenin, Zinoviev play their parts in the action.

He sent me advice about my new life teaching, about my work:

Don’t be intimidated by your students. After all, the incoming freshmen are fresh out of high school and the senior prom. They are enormously different from first-year graduate students, even those who are only twenty-two.

And:

I’m sorry that you were bumped from the advanced writing class. I suppose the dean figures that since he has to pay the full professor’s salary anyway he might as well get a full work load out of him. But if you are producing, that’s better yet.

He sent me clippings from the paper of things he thought I’d be interested in as well as things that amused him. One about a man who’d “accidentally” shot his mother-in-law (not badly), claiming he’d mistaken her for a raccoon. Another:

A Hopewell [NJ] man allegedly snipped off the long braided ponytail of a Cranbury woman as she jogged along Pretty Brook Road Sept. 19, about 5:50 p.m. The braid extended down to her waist, according to police.

The woman told police she screamed and the man ran north on Pretty Brook Road. She ran to the nearby Pretty Brook Tennis Club where two staff members and a club member pursued a suspect.

He was cornered by the three hiding in a pond on Princeton Day School property, within a patch of lily pads. The man was held at bay until the arrival of police. . . . He allegedly used a pair of scissors in the assault.

I can still laugh out loud when I read this old clipping, so like the germ of a Cheever short story. And it reassured me that my father would notice and be amused by such a thing. He still had his sense of humor then. He still took pleasure in what was offbeat in life, what was Thurberesque.

It’s just that he had also pretty much stopped
doing
things. The first summer after my mother’s death he never got around to getting a fishing license. He gladly hiked with me and Ben when we visited him in New Hampshire, and with my brothers when they went up; but not on his own, not with that self-propelled interest in the activity that had always marked him. And over the next few years I noticed that things began to come up that interfered with projects and plans he’d made. He’d forget to reserve a kennel spot for the dog and have to cancel a retreat or miss a reunion. He’d just
never quite get around
to arranging to meet my aunt to watch the hawks migrate.

He began, for the first time in his life, to get negative student evaluations. The enrollment in his classes dropped.

My two courses seem just barely enough, five or six each, so that I can’t cancel either. There is one advantage to the light load, in that I am finding it hard to get back into the rhythm of teaching, and to organize effectively.

Within two or three years of Mother’s death, he seemed to me to be reduced, slightly withdrawn, increasingly without initiative.

And now the old friends and relatives began to talk to me, that series of conversations conducted, really, behind his back, the questions I couldn’t answer: What’s
wrong
with your father? Is he lonely? Depressed? What did you notice? Aren’t you worried? What are you
doing
about it?

But I talked with him face-to-face too, and at first he was characteristically candid—and insightful and intelligent— about what he saw as his failings. He fooled me, maybe he fooled himself too, by being so open and clear about it. He said he couldn’t stay focused in class. He’d begin a thought, and by the time he’d made his way through two or three sentences he would have forgotten where he was heading, and he’d have to do some tricky intellectual footwork to make it seem he’d had a point at all. He said he was making no progress on his writing projects. He laughed at himself, ruefully, for his lack of discipline, for watching too much TV. “The old man’s comforter,” he called it.

It was at the end of this period—six years in all—that my sister and I persuaded him to move to Denver.

I still don’t know exactly what we were seeing in Dad at that time. But whatever it was, I know I pushed it away—thinking about it, trying to understand it, even, sometimes, seeing it. I chose, I think, not to notice as long as I could.

Why? Because, I suppose, he was still so smart, so interesting and interested. Because the disease’s onset was lurching, halting, and the good times made me dismissive of the bad times. Because I could argue to myself it was partially depression over my mother’s death.

Sometimes I thought that what I was seeing plain for the first time was the lifelong forgetfulness, abstractedness, that had driven Mother slightly crazy but that her compulsive perfectionistic control over their life together had shielded him from revealing. Now of course it was exposed, now that he had to
manage
his life as well as live it. Even I, who had so idealized him, got irritated with him occasionally early in this period for forgetting to do things he’d said he would do—for me, for Ben.

But I also think that at the heart of my not-seeing was my astonishingly naive set of assumptions about death. This could not be what was happening to Dad. Not to
my
father. That he would be diminished, and diminished again, before he died? That I would lose him, over and over, before the final loss? That I was already losing him? Some childish part of me simply said no—this couldn’t be the way he would die, he would end—and continued to say no even after it ought to have been clear that it was, indeed, the death he was moving toward.

Now that they’re both long gone, it is my mother, the one who died earlier, the one whose death I did not see, whom I sometimes dream alive and whole again. What I imagine in my sleeping life is that it was all a mistake, the notion of her dying—some sort of confusion on our part. And when I wake after these dreams, occasionally I believe in them for a few moments: I believe she is alive.