The Story of My Father (3 page)

He looked genuinely puzzled. “He must have gone downstairs,” my father said.

So, after a moment, I suggested we go downstairs too—go downstairs and find the kids.

We descended and stood in the cluttered space. There was a single bare bulb suspended from the ceiling whose light fell wanly over the abandoned junk. “Where were they, Dad?” I asked him.

He crossed in front of the furnace and began to look among the boxes and cast-offs, pushing things back and forth, perplexed.

“There’s nobody here now,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “Nobody.” He seemed suddenly tired again. Defeated. He didn’t look at me.

After a few moments we went upstairs, silently. We sat down in the living room. Finally I said, “Dad, I don’t think there were any little children down there, even earlier. There aren’t little children in and out of this house anymore. There would be no reason for there to be kids in here that I didn’t know about. No way for them to get in, even. And we didn’t hear them or see them leave.”

He nodded. “No,” he said.

I tried to speak more lightly. “God knows, I wish we did still have little children roaming around, but we don’t. They just weren’t there, Dad.”

After another long pause, he said, “So I guess I was seeing things.”

“I think you were,” I said. “Look, you hadn’t eaten or slept in a couple of days. That does things to you. Chemically. I think you’re exhausted and drained and, yes, that you were seeing things.”

We sat in silence for a while. Finally he smiled ruefully and said, “Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my
mind.
”

There was an unspoken clause implicit at the start of this sentence
—I’ve
tried to think of all the ways I might get old, but—
and I heard it at least as clearly as I heard the part he spoke. I understood, abruptly, that he had wondered how they would come to him, old age and death, and now he was even a little bemused that they should take this unexpected form as they approached.

I was startled at the time to realize this—that he had thought about it. But now that he is dead, and several others of his generation and the one before it in my family are dead also, it’s my turn to think of it—of death—and I do. I wonder how it will come to me. Unlike Dad, though—but largely because of him—I think often of the possibility that I may lose my mind. And when I do, I remember this moment; when my father seemed to be getting the news about his fate, about how it would be for him; when he took it in and accepted it and was, somehow,
interested
in it, all at the same time, before my eyes. It was a moment as characteristic of him as any I can think of in his life, and as brave. Noble, really, I’ve come to feel.

At the time, though, I didn’t think of it this way. I didn’t want to think of it at all. I didn’t want to see what he saw, I didn’t want to accept the larger meaning of the moment. I began to make excuses again to him—for him—the same excuses I’d been making to myself all day about his behavior. And to my relief, he seemed to accept them. He seemed comforted.

This may just have been a kind of politeness on his part. He saw my distress, after all, and he may simply have been responding to it. Perhaps he knew how much I needed him to agree with me, and so he did. He agreed with me. To be kind. So I wouldn’t dwell on it. So I wouldn’t be troubled.

I don’t know.

At any rate, we moved ahead. My son came home, full of adolescent energy and delighted by the surprise arrival of his grandfather. We had dinner, we talked as though this were an ordinary visit. We touched on some of the problems awaiting us; Dad mentioned his need to get back for the dog, I mentioned finding the van. My husband said he’d dig up some toiletries for Dad, who hadn’t shaved or brushed his teeth in a while. Basically, though, we visited. Later in the evening, after Dad had gone to bed, my husband and I again talked about what we should do. In the end, I decided to call my sister to ask for her help.

Of course there had been signs earlier. There was the slow weakening of what we might have called his
will
after my mother’s death six years before. A lack of direction. But other things too. The time I’d gone to New Jersey for a visit and he clearly had no memory that we’d arranged it—though he was, as always, gracious in his expression of pleasure at seeing me. The time he delivered a five-minute sermon in the church in his summer town when he should have gone on for fifteen or twenty minutes—a sermon that had a kind of eloquence, sentence by sentence, but made almost no sense as a whole and then was over so much too soon. There was a palpable shock in the congregation when it ended; after the service, one kind old lady broke the spell by leaning over to me and saying, “That’s how we like ’em: short and sweet.” A little while after that, an old friend of his asked me for the first time a question I would hear over and over as Dad got sick, “What do you think is wrong with your father?”

There were problems in class, the first he’d ever had. There were his own reports to me of difficulties with his work. There was his arriving at his youngest sister’s house, forty-five minutes away from his own, and telling her he’d had a period of blankness on the road when he couldn’t think where he was or where he was supposed to be going. She called me, wondering if I had any idea what was wrong with him. It was on account of all this, after all, that we had urged him to sell the house in New Jersey, where he was so isolated once he retired, and move to Denver to be near my sister.

But Dad was by no means so hapless as this makes him sound. He had functioned on his own after Mother’s death, and for the first years he managed it rather well. Whenever I visited, for instance, he was always a welcoming host, making modest but tasty meals for us, having the towels set out, the guest bed made up. He stayed in touch with all of us, his children, by letters and phone calls. More important, he had made arrangements himself within a year of Mother’s death to go to an ecclesiastical retirement community in California (a place he couldn’t have considered before she died—the mention of it made her audibly, visibly, grit her teeth: she would
not
grow old and die among ministers and missionaries!).

Some of the reason he was going to Denver now was as a stopgap measure on the way to California: there was a wait list for Pilgrim Place that was two or three years long, and he had agreed with us that he needed sooner than that to be more with other people and to have more help in daily living. There was a new “elderly complex” being developed near my sister, one she and her husband had hoped his parents might move to also. We had proposed it to Dad for the interim, and he agreed.

My sister and I were the ones in the family who had seen this as necessary; neither of my brothers felt there was a problem with Dad. And in general when I’d expressed my concern for him, she was the one of my siblings who responded. She and I had also been the ones who sorted through and distributed Mother’s possessions after she died. She and I had divided up Dad’s things this spring in anticipation of his move. She was expecting him out west in any case in the fall, after his summer in New Hampshire. It seemed natural to turn to her now, to ask her in effect to welcome him this much earlier than she’d planned, to watch out for him until he seemed all right again or until there was someone in New Hampshire—both my brothers were planning to visit him that summer—who could be, in some sense, responsible for him.

When I called her and proposed this, she agreed instantly. Quickly we worked out a division of labor. He would come to her, and she would either send him back later on his own or bring him back, depending on how he seemed, on how completely he recovered from this episode. Over the next few days I would get to New Jersey and take care of the last details in the house, figure out what to do with his car, still in his garage there, fetch the dog, and deal with the vanished van. Done.

The next day I presented the plan to him, mildly, casually. “Tell you what, Dad: why don’t I . . . ?”

Dad would have none of it. He was dismissive—politely dismissive, of course—but absolute: No. No. Of course I couldn’t do all that. There was no need. He’d be on his way; the van would turn up; he’d take the bus home, or fly, and manage everything. No need to trouble myself.

I tried several more times, but I couldn’t make a dent. At some point during the day I had my sister call him and invite him out to her house in Denver, just for a little rest after this exhausting spring. His responses to her as I heard them on my end were much the same as what he’d said to me. Oh, no, that was too much trouble. There was no need. He’d had a lovely rest at Sue’s, wouldn’t head home until he felt really restored. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask her to go to so much trouble.

I suppose what I hoped was that I could wear him down eventually. In any case, I kept at it on and off through the day. It would have been funny, I think, to anyone overhearing us— each of us being so scrupulously polite to the other, bowing and scraping verbally, but each stubbornly, absolutely persistent.

“Why don’t you think about . . . ?”

“No, no, it’s far too much. . . .”

“Dad, I really think you should. . . .”

“That’s very kind, but I couldn’t. . . .”

And so on. We were too temperamentally alike in this regard to make any progress at all.

It became clear to me that I would need to be honest and forceful or he would never accede to me. That I would need to insist. I had never insisted on anything with my father. I don’t know that anyone had.

The moment arrived later in the afternoon. My husband had wanted to be around for moral support when I made my move, and he was home. We were all in the kitchen, and Dad began again to say how kind we had been, how much trouble he’d caused, and how he thought certainly the next day he ought to get going.

I said I didn’t think he ought to go to New Jersey alone. That I didn’t want him to. I thought he should go to Denver.

My husband concurred.

Dad pointed out that there was an awful lot to do in New Jersey. He needed to be there. He wanted to get clear of it and get up to New Hampshire for the summer.

I told him I would handle the details in New Jersey.

He couldn’t let me, he said.

The back door was open, and in the silences between us we could hear the music of someone in the apartment building behind us, the voices of people next door, the wind in the trees.

He brought up the dog again.

I said I would get the dog; I would find a place for her until he came back east.

He certainly couldn’t let me do that, he said. He’d been enough of a bother already. Though he was still characteristically polite, there was anger now—very contained, very submerged—in his voice.

I took a breath. “Dad, I can’t let you go,” I said. My heart was pounding in my ears.

“I’m afraid you have to.” He smiled a thin smile.

“No, Dad, I can’t. You’ve been ill, really. You’ve had a kind of breakdown of some sort. . . .”

There was a terrible silence. My husband ended it, offering his general support of me, making the argument again. Dad, as ever more willing to listen to men, nodded and seemed to consider what he was saying, but he still did not agree, did not say yes.

He and I were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. I had been looking sideways while my husband talked, out the window at the blur of leaves in the late-afternoon sun. Now I focused on Dad. I leaned forward toward him. “Dad, listen. Imagine if the positions were reversed,” I said. “If I had shown up at your house, and I was exhausted and seeing things that weren’t there.” Now it was his turn to look away. “You would feel it was your responsibility, your duty, to be sure I was all right, wouldn’t you?” I waited a moment. “You would never, never let me go off alone again right away. Would you?”

There was another long silence in which I think he saw his position clearly—and I saw it too, for the first time. He understood and we understood: we were taking the first step into his illness, whatever it was, together. We would be in charge of him now.

It was over in a few seconds. He looked back at me, then down. “No,” he said quietly. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t let you go.”

The next day, my husband bought him an overnight bag, loaned him a fresh shirt, and we drove him to the airport and sent him off to Denver, a small, thin, oddly dressed elderly man, still wearing his beloved horrible hat.

I flew to Newark airport, got a bus from there to Princeton, and then a cab from what is euphemistically called “downtown” to Dad’s house in the woods. I spent some hours there, bagging trash and odd possessions, packing up the last few things, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen and bathrooms. It was awful to me, pathetic, to see the way he’d been living—no furniture, a mattress on the floor to sleep on, dog hairs everywhere.

By midafternoon I’d done what I could. I got in Dad’s car and fetched his dog, Naomi, from the kennel. I drove to Connecticut and left the dog at Dad’s sister’s house there; she had offered to take her. I got home long after dark and parked the car in a willing neighbor’s driveway until my sister and Dad could pick it up.

I spent much of the next day on the telephone. The van had turned up—at last!—and been towed to a nearby garage in western Massachusetts. I talked to the people in the rental office in New Jersey about their perhaps going up to get it for a surcharge. No deal. Finally I arranged to have it driven back down by a guy at the garage. He understood exactly how much at his mercy I was. He charged me a blackmail rate and kept me on the phone a long time. He said he loved my voice, he’d love to meet me, what did I look like, what was I wearing? I was very, very polite to him because I felt I had to be, but it seemed the final, almost laughably irrelevant unpleasantness to get through.

On schedule, though, we left for our stay in France; Dad came back east a few weeks later with my sister and had his summer in New Hampshire.

That fall I had a fellowship in writing at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. We didn’t have phones in our studios there, so I was sitting in the public phone closet under its single bright light, the voices and laughter of the other fellows in the main room only slightly muffled by its closed door, when I learned from my sister what I already knew in my heart— that Dad had been diagnosed with what is called “probable Alzheimer’s disease.”