The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  “Why not now?”

  I tried to give him a more candid answer than I’d given him before. “Daddy,” I said, “my house is in an isolated area. It would not be good for you. I go away an awful lot. There would be nobody to care for you.”

  He studied the pocket watch a while longer and did not press me further about going home with me. Still, I knew that I had not assuaged his longing to come with me. Nothing I said was going to relieve that longing from now on.

  Only a few nights after that, he looked up at me brightly when I came into the room and announced, “I’m Harry.”

  I replied, “I’m Jonathan.”

  “I know you are.”

  He stared very hard at me. Then he listed these four words: “Ma, Pa, brothers, sister….” (I should explain that, in addition to his older brother, who died before my father moved into the nursing home, he had a younger brother and a younger sister. His sister had died of leukemia when she was only forty-nine. His younger brother—I had decided not to tell him this—had passed away the year before.)

  I didn’t know what prompted him to say this. The words he had spoken seemed to come out of the blue. I wondered if he felt that, by announcing these few basic facts of which, if only at that moment, he was absolutely sure, he might be able to secure them in his memory.

  On an impulse, I said my grandma’s name to him in Yiddish: “Rivka.”

  He said it back to me in English: “Rebecca.”

  Another night, trying to draw out memories of things I knew he had enjoyed in years gone by, I mentioned one of the grand hotels in Northern Italy in the region of Lake Como, which he’d visited a number of times. He answered me immediately, but in Italian—“Lago di Como.” Then he went on and spelled out each of those three words, then said the name again.

  He would sometimes spell out other words he’d spoken—very short words usually. It reminded me of spelling bees in elementary school, in which a child got up from his chair, repeated a word dictated by the teacher, then spelled it out, then said the word a second time, then took his seat again. Is it possible my father was reverting to the days when he and his playmate Danny Sullivan were students in the first grade in South Boston? I knew that he’d been happy in his elementary school, although he’d told me long ago that he and Danny Sullivan had tried to burn the building down when they were in third grade.

  “We set a fire outside the front door. I can’t imagine why. Maybe we were angry at one of our teachers.”

  The fire did no damage to the building, but he said he got a spanking from his mother when she learned of what he’d done. He said she told him that, if he did not correct his ways, he was going to “grow up to be a hoodlum.” (There were a lot of “hoodlums” in South Boston in those days, he said.) He told me the story several times. In spite of the spanking, he seemed to enjoy this memory tremendously.

  Sadder times continued too. When I told my father once that I’d be away two weeks because I had to go to California and New York, he asked me, “Can you take me with you?”

  “It would be awfully hard to do that, Daddy,” I replied.

  “Why?” he said. “Couldn’t you try?”

  “I’ll be on airplanes,” I explained. “It would be impossible.”

  “Can’t you try?”

  “No, Daddy. I can’t do it.”

  It wasn’t easy to be so direct with him at last but, when he pressed the point this time, I decided that I shouldn’t string him out with tentative and vaguely worded answers anymore. As with the dilemma I had faced about Persnickety, I did not want to tell my father lies.

  His adamant persistence on this matter, even though it made things difficult for me, was nonetheless a keen reminder that he had resisted that extreme passivity, that pattern of abject capitulation to decisions made by others, that is commonly induced in patients by the governance arrangements and the feelings of captivity that are familiar in a nursing home to which Alzheimer’s patients and other patients stricken with dementia are confined. It seemed, indeed, that he was so determined to devise a way to get out of this institution that he did a lot of thinking to develop various ingenious plans for doing it.

  One night, for example, when the two of us were sitting on the sofa and no one else was near, he leaned forward and proposed to me a way that we might pull it off. “When I need to, I’ll come out”—he nodded toward the door that led out to the patio—“and I’ll say, ‘My son is coming for me.’ ” Then, as he had worked this out, nobody would dare to interfere. The idea, as I understood it, was that I would be nearby and take him quickly to my car.

  Alejandro, when I told him this, smiled with appreciation of my father’s plan. When I said I was surprised by what appeared to be at least a fleeting instance of strategic thinking, Alejandro said that he’d decided many months before not to be surprised by anything my father said that seemed to be ruled out by his condition or, more to the point, by the textbook expectations and predictions of the limited capacities of people who had been officially “assigned” to that condition. My father’s absolute refusal to suppress whatever yearnings for autonomy remained to him, said Alejandro, no matter the problems it created for the staff—and no matter how upsetting it might be for us to see—was something to be celebrated, something to be seized upon as evidence of an unbreakable vitality.

  Now and then, that restlessness exploded into language that was almost confrontational. “Can you take me with you now?” he asked one night in May when we were on the patio.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Yes! Now!”

  His cheeks reddened. He clenched his fists and stared at me commandingly. He was the father. I was the son. He was not asking me for something this time. He was giving me instructions. As painful as this was to me, I relished his assertiveness.

  On evenings when we stayed indoors, I would usually pull up a chair directly opposite the sofa where my father sat. Sometimes, however, he would make it obvious he wanted me to sit right next to him.

  “Harry is over here,” he told me once when I was sitting on the chair. When I got up and sat on the space beside him on the sofa, he took my wrist and lifted it and held it there in front of him and studied it a while.

  “Who’s holding it up?” he asked.

  “You are, Daddy.”

  “No one else?”

  “No one else. Only you.”

  He nodded at this. Then, with his left arm, he reached across my shoulder and drew me closer to his side, as if he wanted to believe he was protecting me.

  “He sent you a letter not long ago,” he said—although the last time he had written anything at all to me (it was not a letter, but another of those lists of annotations that Lucinda had sent on) had been nearly a year before—then spoke of “going to New York,” which probably was suggested by the fact that I had told him of another trip I’d soon be making there.

  He didn’t ask if he could come with me, however. “I wish I could go with you,” he said. “But I know I can’t.” A moment later, as if to explain why he was accepting this for now, he added, in a quiet voice, “I’m on the other side….”

  Persnickety was lying on the floor across the room from us, pawing at the carpet underneath a coffee table and another sofa and noisily sniffing at something that excited her. When she became bored with this, she stood up and shook herself, a habit she had always had when she decided she’d exhausted all the possibilities of something that had captured her attention, then trotted back to sit before my father.

  He didn’t throw any cookies for her this time. He held her head and rubbed her ears and lightly touched the elevated area just above her nose.

  “We have been so changed…,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was speaking of Persnickety. He wasn’t looking at her now. He was looking right at me.

  “How much is left?” he asked.

  I didn’t try to answer. The question didn’t seem to ask an answer. I stayed a while longer, until I saw that he’d begun to c
lose his eyes.

  His regular helpers were not there that night. A nurse came in to lift him from the sofa and bring him down the corridor and put him into bed. Outside, I gave Persnickety a chance to run in circles in the grass until she found a spot to please her. She squatted down and lifted her nose, as usual, as if she were studying the stars.

  —

  My father was ninety-five years old in August of 2001. My mother told me she would like to be with him to celebrate his birthday. I arranged for Silvia to bring her to the nursing home, since I had to be in Western Massachusetts earlier that day and would be arriving from the opposite direction.

  They got there before I did. When they came in, Silvia said my father seemed a bit confused and somewhat distant and detached. But when my mother sat beside him and reached out one of her hands to touch and gently graze his cheek, then placed it on his knee, he turned to her and said her name—“Ruth, darling…, Ruthie dear”—then lifted her hand and kissed her on her fingers many, many times.

  Lucinda and Alejandro and his wife and two of the other people who’d been caring for my father were in the room as well. If I’m not mistaken, the teaching assistant who used to keep my parents company and help my father with his writing had come to visit too. There were also some people there who’d known my father long before his memory began to fail, and whom I didn’t recognize, who came on their own. I had not invited them—it would never have occurred to me to do so. Besides, I thought the evening would be more relaxed, and less confusing for my father, if he were simply with my mother and Lucinda and the others he was close to.

  It was a peculiar situation. I didn’t know these people, although it’s possible that they had once been closer to my father than I knew. I didn’t want to disrespect them, but I felt their presence was invasive.

  It did not turn out to be a comfortable evening. They sat around my father in a circle but spoke as if he were not there or couldn’t hear what they were saying to each other. At one point, a woman who was sitting to the right side of the sofa raised her voice to speak across the room to me. “When the time comes, Jonathan,” she said, “you know you can count on us. You’re lucky to have had your father with you for so long. It’s going to be hard for you to lose him. After the funeral….”

  I cringed to hear her say this. She was sitting only a few feet from my father. Up until that moment, he’d been looking at his lap and did not appear to be attentive to the conversation. But, at those words, he suddenly looked up and said, not to the woman who had said this but to the room in general, “Is someone speaking of a funeral?”

  The woman looked amazed to hear him say this. It was as if it now occurred to her, for the first time, that she had been speaking of a living person who was sitting there in front of her. But the damage had been done by then. I got up, went over to the sofa, and, touching my father’s shoulder as he turned his eyes to me, I said to him, “Daddy, people say a lot of stupid things that they don’t understand.” They left shortly after that. He didn’t seem to notice their departure.

  My mother and the others stayed a while longer. When she left, she kissed my father on his forehead and she whispered, “Harry, darling….” In the car, as I drove her back into the city, I couldn’t tell if she had been unsettled by that reference to a funeral. I was sure she’d heard the words, since the woman’s voice had been so loud.

  Lucinda later told me that she had been disturbed not only by the words themselves but by the way the visitors spoke “across” my father almost the entire time that they were there. I had noticed this as well. They were talking about Daddy as if he’d been reduced to a piece of silent stone that had no feelings and no possible awareness of what was taking place around him.

  Lucinda also made the point that, on the few occasions when they did address themselves directly to my father, their voices had an artificial sound, as if they were engaging in some sort of ritual of pretended conversation. Many people talk this way when they are with Alzheimer’s patients. Talking across them, rather than directly to them, is familiar too. I’ve heard a few physicians do this, speaking to me of my father’s mental state—“loss of affect,” “diminished capability to respond to stimuli”—while he was sitting there in front of us and looking at us quizzically.

  “The thing of it is,” Lucinda told me once, “I like to keep it real. I don’t like having bullshit conversations with my patients that I’d never have with people outside of this building. I talk with your father, as much as I can, the same way that I like to talk with you and with my children and my friends. If I’m forced to bite my tongue and never tell him anything that feels authentic to me, I think it’s degrading to his dignity. And, besides, it’s boring. And the last thing that I want to do is bore a man who’s known so many people who were obviously fascinating.”

  Like Silvia and Alejandro, she refused to dull my father’s consciousness or underrate his possible responsiveness by speaking in placebos, and she never fell into that awful singsong tone, familiar in the nursery, that too many people use when they speak to patients who are elderly.

  Lucinda was especially adept at eliciting those moments of sheer gaiety I have described when she was sparring with my father. In doing this, she brought the fresh air of the real world into his existence, driving out the grayness and the cognitive inertia that create a sense of semi-slumber in so many institutional environments. She loved to see the spark of life, and humor, and amusement, awaken in his eyes, which may be another reason why she had become incensed to hear somebody speak about his funeral in front of him.

  —

  Throughout that year, as in the years before, whenever Daddy made a reference, even the very briefest one, to something in his childhood, I would do my best to make an observation or to ask a question that I hoped might somehow stir a slightly deeper recollection of that memory.

  I was convinced that, despite the seeming inaccessibility of many of these memories, and certainly his inability to put them into more than the most limited of verbal forms, my father had an inner life of cerebral activity—“a life beneath the life” is the way that I imagined this. One of the doctors whom I’ve questioned since my father’s death spoke of this as an “oneiric” state, where memories, emotions, and diffuse ideas, although free-floating and amorphous in their nature, remain potentially “emergent properties” that might, at times, be activated by external stimuli or simply by spontaneous electrical events between the neurons in one or another portion of the brain.

  I knew nothing of this at the time. But I was repeatedly persuaded, as when my father suddenly announced the members of his family, that there was a world of intermittent recollections, of memories or fragments of those memories, existing in a cloudy and anarchic kingdom of their own that might be summoned up “into the daylight,” as it were, if I asked exactly the right question or struck upon a word or phrase that had an evocative association for him.

  Not long, for instance, after he had made that reference to his parents and his sister and his brothers and had said his mother’s name, “Rebecca,” I made a calculated reference to his father, because he hadn’t spoken of his father very much since he moved into the nursing home. As I’ve noted, Daddy called his father Pa. As soon as I asked him something about Pa, he smiled brightly and replied without a moment’s hesitation, “He taught me how to sew….”

  To any other person, at least to any person who did not know anything about my father’s father, that answer might have seemed rather mysterious. But, right away, I knew exactly what he was referring to. As recently as 1993 or 1994, when he was living with my mother still, I had questioned him one night about his father’s early years in the United States and he had answered in engrossing detail, even though my mother had to help him now and then to get the pieces of the story in the proper order. I took out a pad of paper and, when he noticed I was leaving sentences unfinished, because it wasn’t easy to keep up with him, he would pause and then repeat himself.

  He
started by explaining that, although his father had arrived in Boston two years before his mother, he had not been able to succeed in his attempts to establish a financial foothold as a tailor and had been obliged to work instead in a sewing factory and, later, on a piecework basis, as a “presser,” for example, in assisting other tailors. It was not until my grandma had arrived and begun to exercise her imposing power and to bring to bear her ingenuity in financial matters that my grandpa started his own tailor shop.

  “He sat at a table and worked with an old machine that somebody had given him, which was operated by the pumping of a pedal. It was a Singer sewing machine. I remember it quite well because he took the time to teach me how to use it.”

  My grandma, by that time, had opened up the little store where she was selling milk and other groceries. Within a few more years, he said, “they had saved enough for Pa to turn the tailor shop into a clothing store.” Daddy was twelve or thirteen now, and he remembered going after school to help out at the clothing store so his father could take off an hour, usually from four to five, to go home and have an early dinner, after which he would come back and work as late as nine. Sometimes, Daddy said, his mother also asked him to go in and help his father on the weekends.

  His mother, he had mentioned, never asked this favor of his older brother, “whom she regarded as ‘the scholar’ in the family” and who, for this reason, was going to be spared any obligations that distracted from his studies. I asked if he had felt resentment of his mother’s seeming favoritism for his brother. “You know Ma,” he answered, not in a resentful tone but with a shrug of resignation. “No one in the family dared to argue with her.”

  Besides, he said, “I liked the clothing store, seeing all the working people coming in to buy those heavy boots and pants and sweaters that they needed for their jobs in the cold weather….” And, on weekends before holidays like Easter, “women from the neighborhood would crowd into the store looking for the pretty dresses and the stockings and especially the decorative hats” that were, he said, “an absolute necessity” for any kind of celebration in South Boston.