Bob had been dating a woman named Grace, whose fleshy arms and loose dresses made her seem as soft as bread. Her hair was tied back in a limp ponytail. She wore no makeup and smelled of soap. When Bob offered her a drink, she settled for a glass of water instead of wine. Her name and modest appearance led me to believe that she’d rejected worldly things for the sake of some religious principal. Bob treated Grace with care verging on caution, gallantly assisting her when she sat or stood, refilling her glass before she had to ask. She moved with a sleepy tranquillity that made me want to whisper in her presence and protect her contentment.
Regardless of Grace’s almost contagious calm, her visit to our house agitated my mother, who boiled an unusually perfunctory meal of chicken and potatoes and initiated several long pauses during dinner while joylessly chewing her food. Every bland bite was a lesson to us all. My father also seemed to hold a grudge. He hardly bothered with the standard rush to judgment. He let Mother do the disparaging. He sat back in his chair, a passenger.
“Why don’t you like her?” I asked my mother later that night. “I think she’s nice.”
“Yes,” said my mother, drowning a stack of dishes in the sink, “she’s very maternal, isn’t she? Naturally a child would be drawn to her.” I was so insulted by being called a child that it didn’t occur to me that my mother was telling me—which is to say, telling me without telling me—that Grace was pregnant. Family rumor had it that my father, believing the child wasn’t Bob’s, paid Grace a handsome sum to stay away. True or not, she stopped seeing my brother abruptly and never gave him a reason why. Bob must have been mystified to think that love and not animosity had brought his loneliness about, as if the two emotions were interchangeable, different routes to the same sorry state.
When first Gary, and then Ron, hinted at the possibility of leaving the firm, our father suspected Sharleen and Nancy of conspiring to incite mutiny. The idea that his sons were manipulated by their wives was easier to take than the possibility that they’d arrived at the decision on their own. It was easier to blame the supposed machinations of ambitious women than it was to admit how much he didn’t want his sons to go. Then Bob considered leaving, too. Never one to grovel, Dad aimed for groveling’s opposite: the pretense that he couldn’t have cared less. He said there were plenty of young men fresh out of law school who’d give an arm and a leg to have what his boys were throwing away. “Go ahead and leave,” he told them. “See how long you last.”
The brief history of my brothers’ apprenticeship at the Spring Street office is best summed up in the changes that took place on the frosted glass door, the gold letters stenciled on and then scraped away by the Continental Building’s maintenance man:
Cooper
Cooper & Cooper
Cooper, Cooper & Cooper
Cooper, Cooper, Cooper & Cooper
Cooper, Cooper & Cooper
Cooper & Cooper
Cooper
I came to consider this a poem of sorts, an elegy entitled “Cooper & Sons.” It may not have rivaled the couplets my father composed for The Case of the Captive Bride, but it carried as direct a message, and he was just as much its author.
My father came home later and later, less and less. Every morning he left my mother’s allowance on the kitchen counter. How else, but by letting herself be placated, was she to have money? She didn’t drive, didn’t possess the skills to earn an income. Her dependence—she knew it pressed upon her husband, that it nagged him as much as it did her—was a weapon as surely as Bob’s Smith & Wesson.
When Bob had lived at home, he never would have believed that those mornings he’d spent grooming himself in front of the bathroom mirror with Ron and Gary would one day be replaced by the fear of his own reflection. Fear was there before he awoke in his bed at the Emerald Arms. He could hardly bring himself to leave the warm sheets, sheets that preserved him like a leaf between the pages of a book. He could hardly bring himself to walk across the cold floor when he knew what he’d see in his bathroom mirror: bruises from blows so soft and common he couldn’t recall what caused them. Knocking on a door, bumping his knee on a table—these were enough to change him, to discolor his skin with the purples and yellows of rotting fruit. Blood seeped from his gums for hours after he brushed his teeth. It tinted the water and sluiced through pipes, washing out to sea. The sea became clouds. The clouds became rain. The rain, inescapable, pelted his roof.
My parents didn’t tell me he’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease until the day his Pontiac, loaded with his possessions, pulled into our driveway. The sight of it stung, but I didn’t ask questions; by then I knew my parents’ tactics: mother believed it was best to wait until the last minute to break bad news, postponing the shock, whereas father believed that by never breaking news of any kind, shock was prevented altogether. Ron and Gary had moved away from home, and since Bob had been the first to strike out on his own, his return was especially portentous, as if forces were at work to draw matter backward, and the work had just begun.
Bob reclaimed his old room. Placed books and blankets exactly where they’d been. Took the same seat at the dining table. Made his furtive entrances and exits. Yet he went about life at an eerie remove, as if he’d recalled his habits but not their motivations.
Round after round of radiation hollowed him out, left him stunned by his cells’ rebellion. During his decline, gravity exerted a stronger pull inside our house than out. As a countermeasure, my parents discussed, in buoyant voices loud enough for Bob to overhear, rumors about miraculous remissions, experimental treatments in clinics across the Mexican border, a promising new drug made from ground apricot pits (an early version of Laetrile) that would be available any day now, any day. Bob would have none of it. He was done with hope long before the rest of us. Always a quiet boy, his silences widened, a gulf empty of everything, even disbelief. The animal peering out from his eyes knew only a dull and faithful waiting. His uncommon stealth, his gift for moving unseen through city streets, dwindled into mere invisibility. He kept to his bedroom. Sleep, a great labor, was accomplished in fits and starts, unrelated to the earth’s rotations and beyond the logic of clocks. His black hair grew sparse, exposing the shiny pallor of his scalp. Papery from radiation, particles of dry skin drifted to the floor when he scratched his arms and legs. I’d sit cross-legged on the white carpet, answering his questions about what had happened that day at my elementary school or in the neighborhood, and he’d prop his head on the pillow, listening with a dim but wistful interest.
“Maybe it’s better,” he once said out of the blue, “that Grace isn’t around to see me like this.”
“Like what?” I said, knowing perfectly well.
“Do you know why she broke up with me?”
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know either. I’ve gone over it a hundred times. There’s too many pieces missing, too much that won’t add up. I’m a detective and I should be able to figure out this kind of thing in my sleep. I was ready to … I would have done anything for her. Now, every time I think about her I hate her more. I hope bad things happen to her. Not like this,” he said, looking down at his body beneath the blanket, “but bad.”
That’s when I got it in my head that Bob was dying of love, and that this phrase, which I’d heard on the soap operas my mother watched, wasn’t the dramatic exaggeration I’d thought but a diagnosis as dire as Hodgkin’s.
In the end, the stories I reported to Bob during those afternoons in his room, the adolescent pranks, the feuds and flirtations among our neighbors, concerned people who were privileged with good health, people free to yearn for, or dread, or simply expect consequences. Telling my brother about a single day had the unintended effect of suggesting that days would eventually pass in his absence, one after another, until no story, however rich with incident or filigreed with gossip, could do justice to their sum. If talk reached too far into the future, Bob would swiftly yield to fatigue—a privilege of the sick—and close
his eyes to convince us both he’d fallen asleep. Rising from the floor to leave, I’d sometimes find shed bits of his skin clinging to my palms, as pale and weightless as flecks of ash. I began to examine my hands again and again to see if I held him without knowing it, if some measure of his flesh was mine. I’d brace myself and watch my fists unfurl. A fortune foretold. A prognosis. Afraid of contagion, I avoided touching the carpet with my bare hands, even decades later when I watched my father search through it for a key.
The rift between my parents widened with Bob’s illness. I recall them engaging in only one civil discussion during that period. A truce had been called long enough for them to slump on opposite ends of the couch like two weary travelers waiting for a train, exhaustion all they had in common. They didn’t look at each other as they spoke but stared into the middle distance, considering what to rename their son. Changing a person’s name, according to Yiddish lore, is a way to change that person’s fate. They were seeking a name as different from Robert as language would allow. Nor could they choose the name of someone they knew or had ever known. It had to be a fresh appellation, stripped of both good and bad associations. My parents didn’t put much stock in superstitions held over from the Old World, but neither were they so removed from the Old World that they could ignore a chance to waylay fate. They tested names aloud, as though for a newborn—Benjamin, Paul, Andrew, Carl—to hear how the sound of it fared in the world. Hadn’t this tactic worked for Gary? For Tony Curtis?
Any name would have been too late. One day, blood began seeping from the corner of Bob’s mouth. My parents called an ambulance and went with him to the hospital, thinking it best to leave me behind. When the double doors slammed shut, I could see my mother and father and the attending paramedic through the small rear window as the ambulance sped away.
Gary phoned me at home later that day—he’d joined my parents at the hospital—to tell me Bob was dead, explaining that our mother and father were too distraught to tell me themselves. His voice was steely to the point of dispassion. And yet, once we hung up, what reverberated wasn’t only what he’d said, but the keening he’d swallowed in order to speak.
A decade later, the same steeliness braced Gary’s voice when he told me he’d been diagnosed with colon cancer. He had just turned thirty-four, and the luck that lasted since the day he went by another name had started to change. Illness didn’t fit the life that he and Sharleen had made for themselves. Didn’t fit his new law firm, the glass house in Encino, the walk-in closet full of Nehru suits and op-art dresses, the heated swimming pool that steamed like a bowl of blue soup when the valley nights were cool.
By the time Gary received a second medical opinion, which confirmed the first, I felt myself giving in to numbness, which brought with it a perverse sort of conviction, a sustenance very close to hope. Bob’s death had left me suspicious of remission—a promise that never materialized—and yet I somehow convinced myself that this steeliness of Gary’s would be the very thing that spared him, that he would defy cancer not by recovering from it, but by continuing to outlive the disease until his diagnosis was false, a rumor time would disprove. I’d witnessed Bob’s decline in close quarters, seeing his body surrender and rally with dispiriting regularity, and the geographical distance between Gary and me—even one drivable by freeway—made his illness easier to disbelieve. Except when I went to visit.
One afternoon toward the end of summer, Gary and I were sitting together at the edge of his pool, dangling our legs in the water. He wore a loose T-shirt and shorts, and I saw that the once-robust muscles of his thighs had grown thin. Beneath the water, his skin turned blue-white, and as he lazily stirred his legs, bands of tendon shifted along the length of his calves. Each hair and pore, each clinging bubble of trapped air, was magnified by the water and articulated with a terrible clarity. Gary also seemed to be looking at his legs, but he bent forward, reached out, and, as I’d seen him do many times before, dipped his hand into the pool and scooped a flailing bee from the surface, water dripping through the sieve of his fingers. He pivoted to one side and tipped his hand so the insect would tumble off his palm and onto the flagstone, where it could dry off and, if it revived, fly away. He used to do this to keep the children to whom he gave swimming lessons from accidentally getting stung, and it had become an unthinking mercy as well as a sport whose challenge was to save the insect from drowning and himself from pain. Watching him do it always made my stomach drop because it was hard to tell if the bee was dead or merely stunned, whether it had spent its stinger in the struggle to escape from the heavy, clinging surface of the pool or was so agitated that it would sting at the least provocation. In a mock-mystical tone, Gary would always tell me, as he held the bee aloft and treaded through waist-high water toward the pool’s edge, that he could think a bee into submission by aiming a ray of his psychic power. This time though, the usual remark about mind over matter wasn’t forthcoming, and the bee in his palm began to stir. But that’s not what caused me to catch my breath. When Gary had leaned to the side, his T-shirt rode a few inches above the waistband of his shorts, revealing a plastic pouch, a small pillowy reservoir the likes of which I’d never seen before and whose purpose I couldn’t place. A tube entered a hole in my brother’s body that surgical tape and gauze hadn’t entirely covered, a tear so raw and red and unexpected that, instead of having been implanted, the tube could have pierced his flesh just then. No sooner had I seen this than he let out a yelp as loud and helpless as any I’d ever heard from him—pain emanating, I thought, from this fresh wound. All at once blood banged in my ears and stars blazed and skidded through my field of vision until he lurched back, swearing and clutching his hand, and the laws of cause and effect resumed.
The sliding glass door behind us rumbled open and Sharleen peered out to see what had happened, wary, I was sure, that one more intolerable surprise awaited her, one more degradation of the body she made no mystery of desiring, once confiding in me that Gary was the sexiest man she’d ever known, adding how good it felt to want someone that much, and how lucky I was to have that hunger in store for me. Now, standing behind the screen door, she appeared more fragile than the last time I’d seen her. Every failed treatment took its toll on her as well as Gary, as if she too had undergone invasive tests and experimental therapies, which in a sense she had.
Gary must have seen the shock on my face, because after that day we began having uncharacteristically long conversations, the topic of which was often our father. That’s when he told me about walking in on Dad and his secretary, and how our father believed that Grace would ruin Bob’s life unless he took drastic measures. “Ruin his life,” Gary repeated, too tired for irony. “You can forgive Dad all you want, but after a while, you realize he respects you more when you hold things against him. He wants a sparring partner.”
When Gary died, I prodded everyone for details, especially Sharleen, hoping not to appear morbid, but driven to risk rudeness just the same. The moment of Bob’s death had never been discussed, and so it was a blur in my imagination, the missing passage of a text. I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but I was asking for a story whose particulars could continue to be lived through.
Gary and Sharleen had been watching the late-night news, and after remarking on the stupidity of a used car commercial, my brother gave the finger to their TV, downed a couple of pills, and kissed his wife. He found, after a few labored adjustments, a position comfortable enough to carry him through the night. Sometime toward morning, Sharleen dreaming beside him, he stepped beyond the threshold of sleep and entered the boundless end of sensation.
However brief, however reconstructed or secondhand, I was glad to have a story in which Gary was present till the very end; the story withstood what happened next. Less than a month after Gary’s funeral, my father showed up unexpectedly at the house in Encino, asking if he could visit. Sharleen offered him a chair in the living room and went into the kitchen to get them something to eat, but he wasn’t si
tting there when she returned. She assumed he was in the bathroom, and so she set down the tray and waited. My father wasn’t the type to show up unannounced and Sharleen was certain that grief had brought him there on a sentimental impulse. He was a difficult man, she thought—all the lingering ill will about Gary leaving the practice—but that was a while back, and what was the point to grief unless patience or concern or some other human virtue could occupy the emptiness? She never thought she’d be a young widow sitting alone in her living room wondering such things, and she felt the unstoppable welling up that came upon her in those days at the drop of a hat. She wiped her eyes on a napkin, glad my father hadn’t walked in when her eyes were wet, afraid the sight of her crying might have set him off, too. She remembered him afflicted by violent sobs at the funeral, the storm of it silencing those who, until they heard him wail, only mistook themselves for mourners. Sharleen began to worry when she realized he’d been gone for a long time. She got up and walked down the hall toward the bedroom. The closer she came, the more clearly she heard a dull tapping through the walls, as urgent and otherworldly as a table knocking at a seance. The sound grew louder as she entered the bedroom.
The Bill from My Father Page 11
