– • –
By 10:00 p.m., I am exhausted. I have spent the day since I arrived back home alternately sleeping and stomping angrily around the house and, at times, crying. I am not ashamed. Crying does not make me a baby. Crying comes from many sources and has many causes: anger, frustration, sadness, lack of sleep. I think I am suffering from all four, and I think that is why I have been crying.
It’s time for Dragnet, and although I don’t have much energy for it, I’ve already skipped one episode of the first season, and to miss another would put me horribly off track. I cue up the tape and press play.
Tonight’s episode, the ninth of the first season of the color episodes, is called “The Fur Burglary.” It originally aired on March 16, 1967, and it is one of my favorites.
In it, a furrier by the name of Emile Hartman (played by Henry Corden, who appeared in two episodes of Dragnet and nearly every popular TV show of the ’60s and ’70s) has been wiped out by burglars. Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are called in to investigate, and they soon determine that they will have to pose as buyers in hopes that the burglars will attempt to sell the furs. Emile Hartman teaches Officer Bill Gannon how to be a connoisseur of fine fur, giving him a vocabulary that includes such terms as “gamey” and “split skins.”
Eventually, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon arrest the men responsible and get the furs back to Emile Hartman, saving his business.
I suppose when something is taken from you, it can be a lucky break to have men like Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon to get it back.
There are not enough men like those two to go around.
– • –
As you may have guessed, I already have a green office folder for the man who does my father’s bidding, Jay L. Lamb. I should write to my father, but I just don’t know what I could say to a man I suddenly do not know.
Mr. Lamb:
I must again voice my objections to your interference in affairs that should be handled within my family. I realize that you serve at my father’s whims, but I am left to wonder if $350 an hour is really worth intruding where you do not belong and are not welcome. For me, the answer is clearly no, and after the events of today, I would think that any reasonable person would come to the same conclusion. You will have to make peace with that question yourself.
At any rate, I very much resent your attempts to provide me with legal counsel. Should I require the assistance of an attorney, you can be sure that I will choose someone who is not a toady for a frustrated, spiteful, violent man.
In other words, I will not choose you.
While I would like to be able to say that this letter concludes our interaction, I know that this is not up to me, but rather to my father. I am hopeful that we will not have any more such episodes, but hope is not a reliable emotion. I shall wait for the facts to emerge.
In the meantime, I bid you good day, until I can bid you good riddance.
Regards,
Edward Stanton
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30
My waking hours on the 303rd day of the year (because it is a leap year) begin with a 7:14 a.m. phone call.
“Hello?”
“Edward?” It is my mother. My mother never calls me at this hour.
“Mother?”
“Edward,” she says, and I can hear a wobble in her voice, “you need to come to St. V’s. Something has happened to your father.”
“What?”
“Just come, Edward. St. V’s emergency room.” She hangs up.
My data will have to wait.
– • –
St. V’s is what people in Billings call St. Vincent Healthcare. There are two main hospitals in Billings, St. V’s and Billings Clinic. They sit side by side in the hospital district downtown. Billings, because it is the largest city in a 500-mile radius, is where many of the people in Montana and northern Wyoming come for hospital services. If you have an extremely serious medical condition, you might have to go to Denver or Salt Lake City or Seattle, but the Billings hospitals can handle most anything else. My father is at St. V’s, so maybe he doesn’t have an extremely serious medical condition. He is also in the emergency room, so maybe he does. I try not to think of this on the drive over, because it’s just conjecture. I prefer facts.
I’ve moved quickly. After my mother hung up the phone, I pulled on a pair of blue jeans. I can wear my 1999 R.E.M. Up tour T-shirt to the hospital. At 7:29, I pull into the St. V’s parking lot and cross the street to the emergency department. I am not wearing a coat. It’s cold.
My mother is sitting in the waiting room. So is Jay L. Lamb. I hadn’t imagined that I would see him again so soon.
“Edward, come sit down,” my mother says when she sees me. She is calm in a way that I find eerie, but I can see that she has been crying. Her makeup is splotchy from her tears.
I sit next to my mother.
Jay L. Lamb nods to acknowledge me, but I do not return it.
“Edward, your father collapsed this morning,” my mother says.
“I don’t understand.”
“He was going to hit golf balls and he collapsed.”
“He was playing golf? In these temperatures?”
“Edward, that’s not important. He collapsed. Someone saw him. They got help to him. He’s…” My mother is crying again.
“He’s inside,” Jay L. Lamb says. “They’re doing what they can.”
He wraps an arm around my mother’s shoulders, and she leans into his chest, sobbing.
I clasp my hands in front of me, lean forward, and stare at the floor. And I wait.
– • –
It is not a long wait in terms of time, but it seems endless. It occurs to me again that time can be an illusion, even though it is also a fact. My mother continues to sob, and Jay L. Lamb continues to comfort her. “He has a good team in there,” he says. She cries some more. I keep my eyes on the floor.
At 7:58, the emergency room doctor, a young-looking man with a mop of swept-back black hair and round wire-rim glasses, emerges with a grim look on his face. Beside me, my mother starts quaking.
“Mrs. Stanton, gentlemen,” he says to us. “I am so sorry. We did everything we could, but we just could not revive him.”
My mother wails. Jay L. Lamb clutches her tightly.
“He appears to have suffered a massive heart attack. The lab work will tell us for sure. I am so sorry.”
“He’s dead?” The voice is mine, and yet it seems to be coming from outside me.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
My mother wails again, sobbing, “No, no, no, no.”
The young doctor reaches out and clasps her hand.
My mother sniffles and gurgles and turns her head from Jay L. Lamb’s chest to face the doctor. “I want to see him.”
– • –
My father’s body is in an empty room in the emergency department. Although I recognize him, it’s not really him. Gone is the brightness and color in his face and the way his expressiveness added to it. He is pale. His chest, stripped free of his ever-present golf shirt, shows the trauma of the attempts to save him—the compression from CPR, the use of the defibrillator paddles. His ordinarily well-kept graying hair is mussed and tangled and wet. In life, my father could be found where there was chatter and aroma and motion. Here, it smells of cleaning fluid, we’re standing still, and no one is saying a word.
He is gone.
My mother, sturdier now than she was just minutes ago, steps to the edge of the gurney and strokes my father’s face, then bends down and kisses his cheek.
“Jay,” she says softly, “will you take care of everything?”
“I will. Shall I give you a ride home?”
“No,” I say. “I will take her home.”
– • –
My mother is mostly silent on the climb up the Rimrocks along Twenty-Seventh Street. As we hit the straightaway atop the rock, heading toward my parents’—my mother’s—house, she says, “I can’t
believe it.”
“I can’t, either.”
“Edward, your father is gone.”
“I know.”
She looks out the window at the farmland speeding by. Up here, yesterday’s snow still lies sprinkled on the ground.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says.
– • –
The house, which always seemed to me to be ridiculously large for just two people, seems cavernous without my father in it. I had my troubles with him—never more so than the last time I saw him, an occasion that now fills me with regret—but I loved his outsized personality and the way he could fill a room with his laugh and his voice.
There are many empty spaces in this house now, and I do not know who can fill them. Not my mother. Certainly not me.
“Would you like some breakfast?” my mother asks.
“Mother, you don’t have to cook.”
“I would like to.”
I nod. “Breakfast would be good.”
– • –
My mother cooks and tells me what happened this morning. My father, figuring he could get in a few buckets of practice balls before the rain picked up again today, had left the house around 6:00 a.m. and headed down the hill to the Yegen Golf Club in the West End.
He didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. He collapsed right beside his car. Someone called 911, the ambulance showed up, the golf pro called my mother, and she called Jay L. Lamb, who came to pick her up and take her to St. V’s. From there, she called me. In a two-hour window, my father went from eager golfer to dead.
I am numb at the thought of this.
My mother places a plate of over-easy eggs, bacon, and toast on the kitchen’s breakfast nook and waves me over. Her cooking is marvelous, as it has always been. I pick at the food. In fits and starts, my mother talks.
“He loved us.”
I nod.
“He loved you especially.”
This is not true, but now doesn’t seem like the time to say so. When my Grandpa Sid, who had been sick for many years, died in 2003 and my Grandma Mabel followed just three weeks later, I remember that my father was given to extolling virtues that his parents never possessed. Dr. Buckley told me that it was part of his grieving process, a sort of “deification,” she said, to help him think of them in the best possible way. Dr. Buckley assured me that, as my father went through the process of grappling with the loss of his parents, he would come to acknowledge their attributes and their faults. “We all have both,” she said.
She turned out to be right, too. Dr. Buckley is a very logical woman.
I will not interfere with my mother’s deification of my father. Her grieving has begun.
I wonder when mine will.
– • –
By 10:00 a.m., my mother has begun to wane and says she wants to go to sleep. She asks me to stay, and I say I will. Whatever plans I had—I can’t remember what they were—have gone by the wayside.
At 11:11, when she is fast asleep, the phone rings. I pick it up.
“Yes?”
“Hello. Could I please speak to Maureen Stanton?”
“She is asleep right now.”
“This is Matt Hagengruber with the Herald-Gleaner. May I ask who I’m speaking with?”
“Edward.”
“Edward Stanton?”
“Yes.”
“You are Ted Stanton’s son?”
“Yes.”
“Edward, I’m sorry to hear about your father’s death. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“Yes.”
“I can ask a few questions?”
“No.”
“Would it be all right if I called later to talk with your mother?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for your time.”
I hang up the phone.
The calls come all afternoon like that, some from friends of my parents (I know none of those people), some from the radio and TV stations. Those are all variations on the call from Matt Hagengruber, and I tell each of them the same thing: they are welcome to call back later and see if my mother wishes to talk.
The only exception is the stupid woman from the TV station who asks for “Mrs. STAINton.” I tell her never to call back again. I would like to say the same thing to Jay L. Lamb, who calls at 2:58 p.m., but I think my mother would like to talk to him. I write down the message.
All the while, my grieving mother sleeps.
– • –
I spend my off-the-phone time in my father’s office, where I find a shelf full of photo albums that span the days when my parents met, long before I came along, to present day. I notice something else: Along about the time that I graduated from Billings West High School in 1987, I started disappearing from the rows of photographs. By the late 1990s, around the time of the “Garth Brooks incident,” I was gone entirely.
In the past decade of family life as captured by a camera’s lens, the Stanton family is my father and my mother and their trips together (I recognize France and Egypt and London among the photos). Edward Stanton Jr. is nowhere to be seen.
And yet today, Edward Stanton Sr. is dead, and I am in his office.
I never really understood the concept of irony, but this situation may be it.
– • –
At 4:40, my mother emerges from sleep. She comes downstairs in her robe. She looks tired, which is to be expected. She looks older than she did when she left me several hours ago, which is shocking.
I tell her about the calls from the media and that they will be back, hoping to speak with her. She sighs. “I’ll have Jay make some sort of statement.”
I tell her about Jay’s call and request for a callback.
I tell her that her friends are worried.
I tell her that I am OK.
And I tell her good-bye, that I have things to do at home.
“You’re a good boy, Edward,” she says to me, her thirty-nine-year-old son. “I will give you a call tonight and let you know about the arrangements for your father.”
– • –
I thought that I might be able to breathe if I could just get out of that house. But here I am now, waiting to make a right turn at Twenty-Seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and I can’t find any air.
At Division, where I take a left turn that will lead me to Clark Avenue and home, I feel the tears sliding down my face. Soon, I can’t see the road.
“I will not deify my father,” I say, but no one is here to answer.
– • –
At home, I work calmly and silently in the kitchen, gathering the things I will need. They fit into two plastic bags left over from some long-ago trip to Albertsons. I walk the bags out of the kitchen, out the back door, through the backyard, and into the alley behind the house, where I drop them into the big cityowned trash receptacles.
It’s the remaining root beer, the salad in a bag, the half-eaten sorbet, the uncooked steak, and every Lean Cuisine meal I bought. I should have known better than to change my routine. The only worthwhile things in life are those that you can rely on. Change brings uncertainty. Change brings chaos. These are things I do not need.
– • –
Tonight’s episode of Dragnet is called “The Jade Story.” It is the tenth episode of the first season, and it is one of my favorites.
In “The Jade Story,” which originally aired on March 23, 1967, Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon are called in to investigate the theft of nearly $200,000 worth of jade from a wealthy woman’s safe. Even today, $200,000 is considered a lot of money; in 1967, it was an extraordinary amount, the equivalent of about $1.2 million in today’s dollars.
As Sergeant Joe Friday and Officer Bill Gannon investigate, many things about the story told by the jade’s owner, Francine Graham, don’t add up. They do some more digging and discover that Francine Graham had long since sold many of the pieces that she claims were stolen. Confronted with this, she confesses and says that, when he died, her husba
nd left her with no insurance and little in the way of liquid assets. She slowly unloaded the jade to maintain her lifestyle, until she could do so no longer.
I have seen this episode four times a year since recording it in 2000, and I had seen it many times before that, although I didn’t count my viewings back then. Today is the first time that this episode has left me worried.
My father, like Francine Graham’s husband, is dead. Unlike Francine Graham’s husband, my father has left my mother no jade to sell off to maintain her lifestyle.
– • –
When Dragnet is over, I head into my bedroom and retrieve five thick green office folders and one less encumbered one, which I carry into the next room, where my desk and computer sit. I spend several minutes counting and organizing and thumbing through the sheets of paper, occasionally stopping to read one. I then turn on the computer and pull up Microsoft Word to compose a letter.
Dear Father,
This will be the final letter I write to you. Even if I sent my letters of complaint, which I have not done since what you call the “Garth Brooks incident,” this one would not get a stamp. There is no mail service wherever you have gone.
I have counted 178 letters of complaint to you over the past eight years. This will make 179. This one is notably different from the others in one way: The complaint lies with me, not with you. I never could find a way to make you proud of me, and at some point, I think I stopped trying. When you were here, I blamed you for that. I think now that the failure is mine.
The 178 previous letters of complaint are full of indignation about ways in which you slighted me or made me feel bad or disregarded me, and while I remember many of the instances and feel justified for the things I said, what difference does it make now? You are gone. I am here. I thought maybe someday we would reach an understanding. Now we never will. These are facts, and I accept them. I’ve always said I prefer facts, and that means I have to prefer them even on a day like today.
Had I known that it would end up this way, I would not have taunted you yesterday in Jay L. Lamb’s office. It occurs to me that death is a funny thing—not funny in a laughter sort of way, but in a twisty sort of way. It’s the people who are left behind who have to grapple with the regret. The one who is gone is just gone. I don’t think that is fair. Wherever you are, Father, I hope you have regret about what happened yesterday.
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