The door to their walk-in closet was open, and inside, with his back to Sharleen, stood my father. He briefly inspected one of Gary’s shirts before sweeping it aside. The wooden hanger tapped against the wall in an almost code. One shirt, another. His brisk efficiency suggested that he had a plan. He checked each tag for the shirt size, sometimes thrusting his arm into the garment as if to wrench it inside out. Unable to move, Sharleen watched him go for her coats and search inside the pockets.
She heard herself say, “Stop it.”
He neither turned around nor stopped.
She tried again. “What are you looking for?”
“You know what I’m looking for.”
“I wish I did,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m looking for the new man in your life.”
“What?”
“I know you’ve been seeing another man.”
“Ed. That’s crazy.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“Stop this or I’m calling the police.”
“By the time they come, I’ll have proof.”
“So what? What if I was seeing a man?”
My father turned. His hands were shaking. “It’s too soon.”
“I’m lonely.” She said this not as an admission, but because the truth of it hit her just then, stark and remarkable.
She stepped back as my father barreled past her. “I’m lonely,” he echoed, and she couldn’t be sure whether this was blurted in mockery or commiseration. He raced out of the house, left the front door open. She watched to make sure he’d driven away, then shut the door and locked it.
Ron and I must have talked about our father’s surprise visit to Encino a dozen times since Sharleen told us about it. Each time, Dad became less culpable because we considered his grief—now as incendiary as his temper—a mitigating circumstance. We weren’t necessarily dutiful sons, at least not by our father’s standards, but we were saddened by what was happening to our family and hesitant to add more reasons for mistrust than we absolutely had to. If we knew anything, Ron and I, we knew that our father’s losses had started to deform him; we felt its deforming pressure in ourselves. Dad began to settle ever more deeply into silence, a silence breached infrequently, and only by explosion. Over the next several years, Ron and I were allied first and foremost by the puzzle of how to love such a man.
Sometimes, when contemplating the possibility of my father’s death, I’d ask Brian if he thought, when the time came, I’d be inundated by all the unresolved emotions my father and I had accumulated over the years. He’d think for a moment and say, “No. Not necessarily. It might be a relief.” Then, when I asked him if he thought my father’s death might be a relief from all the unresolved emotions we’d accumulated over the years, he’d say, “No. Not necessarily. It might dredge them up.” And so, the night Brian and I returned home to a message from Nancy on our answering machine, asking me, in a small anguished voice, to call her the moment I got back, I told Brian I was sure my father had died, and whatever was coming was going to be hard.
It fell to me to tell my father, but not before contacting my father’s doctor, who warned me that high blood pressure made Dad’s health precarious enough that he should be told of Ron’s death while under sedation. And so, on the implausible pretext (I was too distraught to think of anything better) that the doctor, unable to reach my father by phone, had contacted me and insisted I bring him in for a checkup, I drove by the old house in Hollywood and picked him up. During our drive to the medical center, I couldn’t stop wondering what it must have been like for Nancy to find Ron wide-eyed and lifeless at the top of the stairs, or whether my brother felt the last bright fragment of consciousness dislodge as his heart seized and he plunged toward the floor. It was all I could do to keep my mind on the road and my grief hidden behind a scrim of small talk. That my father failed to notice my distress or question our mission was a testament either to my acting ability or to what had become for him, at the age of eighty-three, an obliviousness both self-protective and involuntary.
The doctor met us in the waiting room before we’d had a chance to sit down. If initially gladdened by the special attention, Dad was a little surprised when we breezed right past the receptionist and the people looking up from their magazines. We were ushered into an examination room, where, without so much as having to be asked, he clambered onto the padded table, an unwrinkled length of fresh paper crackling beneath him. He blithely offered his arm for the stethoscope and the blood pressure cuff—“Whaddaya hear, Doc? Is there an echo?”—and then for a hypodermic, which the doctor sank, with practiced alacrity, deep into the waiting vein. Not until the plunger had been fully depressed did my father ask what drug he’d been given or what all the fuss was about. Instead of answering, the doctor dabbed at the ruby bead of blood and instructed his patient to hold the cotton ball firmly in place. Then he spun on his heel, giving me a solemn nod as he left the room. My father finally registered a fateful irregularity in the normal course of things. Fear seized his expression for a few seconds before it let go. His shoulders slowly lowered, the gauze of Valium softening his eyes, his pupils opening their black apertures to the point where I thought I could see myself inside them, speaking in the dark. “What!” he yelped, when I told him the news. “What the hell are you saying?” He drew back his arm tried to strike me. The punch missed by inches. He overshot his center of gravity, his fist continuing to sail past my cheek, my ear, the momentum almost causing him to topple over. I had to steady him atop the table, but he bristled meekly, wouldn’t let himself be righted without a fight. He wanted, I think, to look at me, to look into me, and gauge the truth of what I’d said, but the sedative made it hard for him to focus, and so his rage was strangely familiar: feral, diffuse, alarming, useless.
I took down Mr. Delaney’s number and told him I’d see what I could do about my father’s overdue phone bill. After we hung up, I got to thinking how, late in the course of family life, the child is often called upon to assume the role of parent, and the parent, due to age or illness, often reverts to the role of child. So common is this reversal, I figured, that even a man as stubborn as my father, as proudly self-sufficient, would open his hands when hardship befell him and accept what his son was able to offer. He didn’t have to accept it happily or with gratitude. What mattered was that he’d stay out of debt.
The time had come for me to father my father. The aphoristic chug of this phrase—father my father—gathered steam. I’d simply call Dad up and tell him, as nonchalantly as possible, that I’d pay the bill myself, and that way his phone wouldn’t be disconnected. Getting him to go along with the idea might, I realized, require a little coaxing, but sooner or later he’d hand me the baton of responsibility. Never mind that I had plenty of evidence to suggest that he’d hang on to that baton for dear life—A son doesn’t help his father up—I was intent on repaying a kindness to the man who’d inspired me (in the Greek sense of breathed life into) to write about him. Over the years, I’ve checked and rechecked my motives for coming to his rescue, searching for any traces of self-righteousness on my part, and you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that my motives were absolutely pure. Except, perhaps, for a smudge of martyrdom. A tiny speck of ascendancy. A trapped bubble of unacknowledged guilt. In any case, my sense of parental duty was magnified by the fact that I didn’t have children and was frankly pleased with myself for being a person who knows he isn’t inclined toward parenthood and therefore doesn’t have kids, as opposed to being a person who knows he isn’t inclined toward parenthood and propagates anyway. Fathering my father was propagation enough.
“Dad?”
“Hello there!”
“Am I disturbing you?”
“Not at all. I had to get up to answer the phone.”
“Very funny.”
“It’s laugh or cry, boychick.”
Thankfully, I’d caught him in a good humor. “There’s something we should talk about.”
“It’s your dime.”
“The regional supervisor from the phone company called me today and—”
“What!”
“Some guy from the phone company called me today and—”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“Calm down. He called me.”
“What’d you tell that SOB?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. I listened.”
“You think I didn’t listen? I listened plenty. It’s a good thing I’m not allergic to bullshit; if I was, he’d of killed me.”
“Well, how about if I just go ahead and pay for—”
“Pay for calls I didn’t make? Don’t be an idiot.”
“Technically, the calls were made from your phone, so—”
“Let me ask you something. If you borrowed my Caddy and wrecked it, who should pay the damages, you or me?”
“That example isn’t—”
“You?” he shouted. “Or me?”
“This is a totally different situation.”
“You should have to pay, is who!”
“I’m trying to help you!”
“If I want your help, I’ll ask for it.”
“I’m not so sure you would. That’s why I’m volunteering.”
My father fell silent, proving you can’t volunteer in a vacuum.
I took a breath and began again. I’d help him whether he liked it or not. Come hell or high water. “I’m pretty sure Betty made the calls to Texas. One day when I was over at the house she was watching a faith healer from Texas on TV.”
“She’s a very religious person. I’ve met plenty of pious people in my time and they may seem like nuts to the rest of us but they’re not shysters. It goes against her religion to lie and steal.” It gave me a start when I heard a woman’s voice in the background, but it must have been the television; he wouldn’t implicate Betty if she was standing right there.
“Did you ask her about the calls to Texas?”
“I don’t have to ask her nothing. It’s my phone and she’s free to use it whenever she wants. She’s not a prisoner. She’s here of her own free will.”
“I’m glad she’s there. I’m glad she’s doing whatever it is she does for you. But you’re late on your phone bill.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you haven’t paid on time.”
“I know what late means, for Christ’s sake. That thing you said before. Do whatever she does for me.”
“Cook. Shop. Make sure you take your medications. Help you up the stairs.”
“What’s wrong with her helping me up the stairs?” The stairs led to the bedroom, which led to the bed, on which was heaped insinuation.
“Nothing’s wrong with it. She’s your nurse. I’m glad she’s your nurse.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“I don’t … I didn’t …” Here’s where logic began to bend. Anything was possible. “Did it sound like sarcasm?”
“If you have to ask, it’s sarcasm.”
Spoken in my father’s voice, any random statement, any empty maxim—A frozen steak never fed the hungry; good is the bird who stifles its chirp—could bear down on me with the weight of unassailable truth.
“I didn’t mean to be sarcastic.”
“About what?” The voice belonged to Betty. My father had put her on the phone. Probably thrust it into her hand. Years of disinformation when it came to his women, and now this.
“Betty! Hello!”
“Yelling is bad for your father’s blood pressure.”
“Yes. I wish he’d calm—”
“Try not to yell at him. He’s a good man, your dad. Not the best patient in the world,” she said loudly enough for him to hear, “but you’ll be glad to know I’m doing all I can to watch out for him. In this life and after.”
“That’s very above and beyond the call of duty of you to do. His ‘after,’ though, isn’t what needs watching out for so much as his, you know, toe.” I grew even more flustered when I heard myself speak. I wanted to make sure Betty wasn’t proselytizing my father by acting as his travel agent for the afterlife, yet I also wanted her to like me, especially if I was destined to wake up one morning and discover that she was my stepmother.
“Don’t you worry,” she assured me. “I make him stay put. He’s been resting his feet and doing some serious thinking. That’ll happen to a man when he’s incapacitated. Each of us has only so much time to get right with the Lord.”
“I respect your religious beliefs,” I said uncertainly. “But you believe in medicine, too, don’t you?”
“Of course I believe in medicine,” she said. “I wouldn’t wear these awful white shoes unless I had to!” Her laughter was brief but tonic, and I understood how my father would take pleasure in its sound, would hope to provoke it. “I’m one step ahead of Dr. Graham when it comes to your father’s welfare. Just last week I asked the doctor why Ed—I mean, your father—wasn’t getting any better. After all, I watch him like a hawk. Got him to throw away the saltshaker and go with low-fat foods. He’s lost twelve pounds.”
“Water weight,” my father shouted in the background.
“Thanks to me, he’s been drinking eight glasses a day for—what’s it been?—two months? Three? I feel so comfortable here I’ve lost track of time. But the uric acid should have been flushed out of his system by now. Your father relieves himself ten times a day.”
“Twenty!” Dad corrected.
“So I said to doctor Graham, ‘Could you cross-check Mr. Cooper’s medicines? Something isn’t right.’ You can’t be too careful, Bernard. I don’t need to tell who gets blamed when the patient under a nurse’s care doesn’t jump right up like Lazarus.”
I pictured the chicken.
“That kind of healing is done by a greater power than me or any other medical professional and it’s plain vanity to think any different. You’d be surprised how many doctors take credit for successful treatments, but if the treatment isn’t doing what it’s supposed to, they pin it on the nearest nurse, or on some poor orderly, or worse, on the patient. So I get Dr. Graham to look up the side effects of hydrochlorothiazide in his Physicians’ Desk Reference and he gets this funny look on his face and excuses himself to consult with another doctor in the office. He was gone an awfully long time. Left your father sitting on the examination table in a paper gown.”
“That was no gown,” said my father. “That was a goddamn napkin.”
“Well, Dr. Graham comes back and tells us that medicines with zide at the end of them raise the levels of uric acid! Not lower, raise! The medication forces the pancreas to produce uric acid even when the Indomethacin works to get rid of it. Your father’s pancreas has been fighting itself this whole time! God knows, I made him take his pills, for all the good it did him. But the acid was turning to crystals in his bloodstream. Can you imagine having sharp little crystals in you?”
“Hurt like hell is what it felt like!”
“The blood wasn’t cleansed and, oh, did your dad ever suffer.” She was talking on the wall phone in my father’s kitchen and her voice resounded off the tile walls. Betty had adopted Benny Hinn’s calmly oracular manner; her voice never sped up or ascended to a higher register, yet it teetered on the edge of revelation. “Lord knows we’re all flawed merchandise, stubborn and wrongheaded down to a man. Here’s where mercy enters the picture. Why waste a single one of us, is how I believe He thinks. If He brings us low He has His reasons. Now, I’m not supposing I know exactly what’s on His mind, but it’s my personal belief that your father came down with gout so the two of us could meet.”
“Is he off the hydro-whatever?”
“I got him off it right away. Of course, they’ve had to put him on several other meds to cancel out the meds they put him on before. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had to care for too many sick Christian Scientists in my time to be antimedication, but you can’t just throw pills at an illness. Your poor father didn
’t fully appreciate his toe until he couldn’t take a single step or stand up on his own without agony. Multiply that agony by a couple of months and I think you’ll agree that he has every reason to sue.”
“Sue?” I leaned against the wall. “But he’s getting better, right?”
“No thanks to Dr. Graham.”
“Maybe it’s not Dr. Graham’s fault. Maybe—I don’t know—the side effects weren’t listed on the bottle.”
She repeated this to my father.
“I’ll sue the pill people too.”
“Betty, is this the right time for my father to alienate his physician? He’s been Dr. Graham’s patient for ages. Even if Dr. Graham misjudged the prescription, it’s going to be difficult if not impossible to prove negligence. Does my father have the energy for a long, involved lawsuit?” Wait a minute, I said to myself, suing gives him energy.
“Don’t worry,” said Betty. “I won’t let him do anything that isn’t in his own interest.”
Let him? Interest? Were my father and Betty hatching a plan to make some extra income from his gout, drawing each other into a ruinous lawsuit? Or were they simply two litigants in love, corroborating an allegation, traveling hand in hand down the road to restitution? In either case, Dad considered this woman—nurse or lover, it didn’t matter—a worthy accomplice. Like my father, Betty possessed a certain elasticity in her outlook, which stretched from science to prophecy, from bald self-interest to round-the-clock care. When it came to contradictions, the two of them were as limber as gymnasts.
“You honor your father, don’t you?”
I didn’t like the sound of that question. Get ready, I said to myself, he’s going to sue the universe. “It depends on what you mean by honor.”
The Bill from My Father Page 12
