The Bill from My Father

by Bernard Cooper

  I walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for him. “Thank you, sir,” he said. I didn’t know it yet, but medieval chivalry would play a central role in this reunion. I reached out to help steady him into the seat, but he kept his arms folded over the paper bag, shifting his weight, unassisted, limb by limb.

  We ignored the telephone ringing in the corner booth, probably the operator requesting that he make another deposit. Cars flew through the busy intersection, generating enough wind to blow candy wrappers and want ads along the sidewalk. If I’d been told as a child my neighborhood would one day teem with nonstop traffic, I never would have believed it. Nor would I have believed that my father would ride the bus through several outlying counties to meet me on the same street where, long ago, he’d threatened to leave me and drive away.

  Back behind the wheel, I suggested we sit a minute and bask in the rarity of a convenient parking space. “Fine with me,” said my father. “I’m not going anywhere.” I slipped the key into the ignition, half a dozen others dangling from the chain. “You got a lot of keys,” he said. “My philosophy is: it’s better to get it down to one. That way you only got one to keep track of. If you lose it, though, you’re up shit’s creek.” I remembered him in the living room, crawling on the white carpet, except that in the memory—so much for trusty recall—the shag was as tall as wild grass, a synthetic meadow I crawled through too, a son alongside his father, foraging for a key.

  “It’s a long haul from Oxnard,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “Are you feeling okay these days?”

  “Whaddaya call okay?”

  “Do you feel like yourself?”

  “Who else would I feel like?”

  No matter how tightly he clutched the bag to his chest, he couldn’t steady the tremor in his hands, and so he beamed a munificent grin, as if to convince me that he shook with the excitement of gift-giving alone. I waited, but he seemed to forget that a gift is bestowed.

  “Is it a cake?” I teased.

  He examined the flattened bag, turning it this way and that. I hoped he understood the reference. What could be worse for a once-antic man than ungraspable banter? “Yes,” he said. “A pancake.”

  He handed me the bag and, radiant with anticipation, watched me fold it open. The weedy scent of old paper wafted from its dark interior. I could make out the edge of a wooden picture frame, the gleam of glass.

  “Go on,” he said.

  The first glimpse wasn’t encouraging. An illustrated shield featured three stout bulls in silhouette, their tails arched above their backs. Realistic pink ribbons, or once-red ribbons faded by sun, festooned the picture’s borders. Not ribbons exactly, for they were also like the tendrils of a plant that sprouted an occasional spade-shaped leaf. Above the shield hovered the kind of medieval helmet worn with a clanking suit of armor. A grate on the lower half of the helmet allowed a knight to breathe, although large rectangular eyeholes revealed that the helmet was empty. Oh God, I thought, not something headless! And then I thought, Now there’s a prayer.

  “You don’t even know what it is,” said my father, “and already you don’t like it.”

  “I do!” I said. “What is it?”

  “It doesn’t look familiar?”

  Printed at the bottom in a nearly unreadable Gothic font was the name Cooper, every letter barbed with serifs, even the o’s. Fluttering above the family name, a banner read Frango Dura Patientia.

  “It means,” said my father, “‘I break hard things by perseverance.’ All of us do. All of us Coopers. It’s a whaddaya call it—a motto. You have in your hands our family crest! It used to hang in my office, remember? The bulls are for courage and there’s a bunch of other symbolism. Read what it says on the other side.”

  A genealogical fact sheet had been glued to the back of the frame. “Heraldic symbols are testaments to the bravery, heroism, and meritorious deeds of our ancestors. They appeal to the pride of distinguished families today, just as the valiant deeds and self-sacrificing acts of contemporary persons would appeal to their ancestors.” Along with this flattering description of anyone who valiantly plunked down a couple of bucks for a reproduction of his or her family crest, the armorial lineage of my family had been traced to its ancient seat in England. Specifically, to nine British counties including Northumberland, Dorset, Nottingham, and Shropshire. I knew that Cooper was an occupational surname for a maker of casks and barrels, but when I saw the identity of the ancestor to whom we supposedly owed our DNA, the tint of our skin, the slope of our noses, the very core of our character, I couldn’t keep still.

  “Dad, we are not related in any way, shape, or form to the Wee Cooper of Fife. You understand that, right?”

  “Maybe not to him in particular.”

  “Not in general either. Not even remotely. Your parents and Mother’s came from Russia.”

  “So?”

  “So I don’t think they passed through an Irish fiefdom or wherever the Wee Cooper called home.”

  He pointed to a passage tracing the earliest member of the family to a William Cooper, who traveled from Yorkshire to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1699. “I grew up in Philly.”

  “But you were born in Atlantic City.”

  “You never know how far a person can go. I knew a judge who grew up without any advantages whatsoever. He had to fight-tooth-and nail to sit on the bench, and that’s where he sat for the rest of his life.”

  My birthright as a Cooper was to persevere. “I’m not talking human potential, Dad. It’s a matter of history.”

  “This,” he said, snatching the frame out of my hands, “is history.”

  On the wall of my father’s waiting room there’d hung an etching of a barrister in a powdered wig, his chest puffed out as he pontificated to twelve jurors—all of them asleep in their seats. A brass statuette of blind Justice stood on the end table and balanced mounds of peppermint candies on her bobbing scales. Next to issues of Life magazine lay a book entitled Laffs Galore, one-liners to rival Henny Youngman’s. Hadn’t the family crest been displayed in the same spirit of levity, humor to soothe a fretful clientele?

  Judging from my father’s downturned mouth and sagging shoulders, the answer was no. He set the crest facedown in his lap.

  “Dad,” I said, “wasn’t your father given his surname at Ellis Island?”

  “He was a cooper smith. That’s how he made his living.”

  “His name must have been changed to Cooper from something else.”

  “From what?”

  “That’s what I was going to ask you. You’re the only person left who knows.”

  My father stared into the distance and moved his lips, silently shaping name after name. One among them might be ours. There came a soundless flood of appellations. Forty days and nights of names.

  “Dad?”

  His lips began to quiver. His eyes grew red.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “I did,” he whispered.

  A week later, my father sat beside me in the east wing of Saint Joseph’s Hospital, in Oxnard, waiting for an appointment with a geriatric specialist, less than pleased to be there. He wouldn’t have come at all if Brian hadn’t known Dr. Montrose personally and vouched for her reputation. Despite Dad’s mistrust for people in the medical profession, and whatever his misgivings about two men living together, he was proud that his son had snagged himself a doctor. Brian had a degree in psychology, not medicine, but a doctor was a doctor in my father’s book, and he couldn’t care less if an M. or Ph. preceded the D.

  He turned to face me, his glasses flashing. “I don’t want you to watch me grow old.”

  “Believe me,” I said, “there are plenty of things worse than growing old.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as not growing old.”

  For a moment we were allied in silence, remembering Bob and Gary and Ron. Their deaths were done, but their dying survived them.

&
nbsp; “Look at it this way,” I said. “We’re growing old together.”

  “It’s happening faster to me.”

  “No, Dad. You and I are aging at the same rate.”

  “Time goes faster when you’re older.”

  “It only seems to go faster. It can’t go faster for you than it does for me.” No sooner had I said this than I realized that Einstein had, in fact, proven time’s relativity. I forged ahead anyway. “I know this is hard for you, but there may be a medical reason for your confusion …”

  “Who’s confused?”

  “Well, I am, for one. I’ve been confused by several things you’ve done recently. Especially your trip into the city last week. Things I’ve chalked up to … your temperament.”

  “I got news for you: having a temperament doesn’t make me a bad person.”

  A bedraggled man in a wheelchair rolled himself into the waiting room. A thin blue tube snaked from his nostrils to a portable oxygen tank.

  “Your behavior may have a physiological cause,” I continued. “It could be treatable. There’s no harm in talking to Dr. Montrose.”

  “She sure as hell won’t tell me anything I couldn’t tell myself.”

  “She might be able to suggest a new medication or changes in your regimen.” I didn’t mention Alzheimer’s or geriatric dementia, though these possibilities must have occurred to my father, too.

  He leaned close. “Let me ask you something.”

  I wanted to be as frank as possible. If there was a medical ordeal ahead, maybe we’d have a last chance at attachment. I looked into his eyes. “Ask me anything you want.”

  “Why …,” he said, then hesitated.

  “Go on.” I urged him.

  “Why are you reading the Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you pick that magazine out of all the magazines in the waiting room? There must be I don’t know how many others to chose from and you picked that.”

  The March issue had been lying on my lap, opened to a double-page photo of the creamiest seafood bisque I’ve ever seen, a kind of culinary centerfold. I thought I’d cook it for Brian and was about to rip out the recipe. Even in a time of crisis, Dad found a way to goad me like a pro. “Nobody here cares if I’m reading a men’s magazine or a women’s magazine!” I glanced around the waiting room to see if I could spot a man reading Today’s Bride or a woman reading Popular Mechanics, but where is proof when you really need it? “Ideas about masculinity and femininity are different now than they were in your day.” I thought back to the hot afternoon I’d been cinched into my father’s jumpsuit, drunk on rum punch and basted in my own perspiration, staggering through a backyard filled with dykes disguised as housewives who were really machines. “People today are more … flexible.”

  “I’ll bet,” he said.

  The man in the wheelchair wasn’t even pretending not to listen. His eyes met mine and glistened with interest. His posture improved.

  I said, “You were trying to change the subject is what you were trying to do. Then we wouldn’t have to talk about why you’re here. Well, it’s not going to work.” But it had, of course, worked like a charm. Conversation between us ceased. We folded our arms and glowered straight ahead.

  “Dad,” I said, “I hate that one of us always has to be right.”

  “I’m not the one who always has to be right. You are.”

  A nurse hurried into the waiting room and glanced at a clipboard. People shifted in their seats and listened. She had to call for Mr. Hahn—the man in the wheelchair—twice before he managed to release the handbrake and propel himself forward.

  Dad said, “You gotta hand it to the old bastard for getting himself to the hospital.” Translation: A son should release his father’s handbrake and stand aside.

  “I’m sure someone brought him.”

  “You don’t know that for a fact.”

  I tossed the Ladies’ Home Journal onto a table heaped with magazines and fished a copy of Men’s Fitness from the pile, a publication my father was pleased to see me “read.” Looking at pictures of half-dressed men triggered one lustful detonation after another, and I was grateful they didn’t make noise. An article about elderly athletes showed a group of fleet and happy geriatrics dashing through an obstacle course. Great, I thought, now old people can’t just sit back, relax, and fall apart, they have to jump hurdles into perpetuity.

  My father countered with faint snoring. He slumped in his chair, mouth hanging open, stomach rising and falling beneath his indestructible jumpsuit. I noticed that the collar had frayed, insofar as synthetic resin can fray. Here and there, the fabric was stained with a spotty chronicle of former meals. He hadn’t given up on personal grooming entirely—he’d doused himself with Old Spice—but his long campaign of vanity had come to an end, both its failures and triumphs behind him.

  When the nurse called, “Mr. Cooper,” I thought for a second she meant me, and I wondered who would watch over my father when I was gone. His eyelids fluttered at the sound of her voice. I could almost see our family name sinking inside him like a pebble in a well, its ripples disrupting the waters of sleep, triggering his limbs to shift and his flesh and bones to unwillingly wake in the form of an aching, groggy old man.

  “My apologies,” said Dr. Montrose. “I’m running a little late.” A fleshy, energetic brunette, she escorted us into her office and took a seat behind her desk.

  My father landed heavily in the chair facing her and I sat off to the side. “The wait wasn’t too bad,” I said. Dad glared at me because he couldn’t understand why I didn’t protest what he thought was an unreasonably long delay for an appointment he wasn’t keen on in the first place.

  “What did you and your son do in the waiting room?” Dr. Montrose asked. She locked him into eye contact. And so the evaluation began.

  “My son read the Ladies’ Home Journal and I made the mistake of noticing out loud, for which I got my head chewed off.”

  She turned to me. “Were you reading the Ladies’ Home Journal?”

  I looked at my father when I answered. “It’s not like I subscribe,” I said.

  Dr. Montrose took this as a yes.

  “And do you recall what magazine you were reading, Mr. Cooper?”

  “No.”

  I thought of intervening because I knew my father meant he hadn’t read a magazine, not that he couldn’t recall which one.

  She leaned forward, elbows on her desk. “Have you been having any difficulty remembering things recently?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sure you are. But if we test you today, we’ll have a baseline to compare against future tests.”

  “Future tests?” He looked as if he’d tasted something sour.

  “What about that upsets you?”

  “What about what?”

  “About what I just said.”

  My father went pale. “What was it you said?”

  Dr. Montrose jotted a note. “I’m going to ask you several questions,” she continued, “and I’d like you to answer them one at a time.”

  “How else would I?”

  “How else would you what?”

  “Answer them, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Calm down, Dad.”

  “I’ll calm down when I’m good and ready.”

  “We’ll be working from what’s called the Mini-Mental State Examination,” said Dr. Montrose, “and I’ll score your answers as we go along.”

  Dad adjusted his Miracle-Ear. “So test me, already.”

  The doctor retrieved a sheet of paper from her desk drawer and began to read aloud. First, she asked my father to tell her the date. He got it right, whereas I’d silently answered along and was off by a couple of days. Was my lapse symptomatic of a larger cognitive problem? I scooted my chair closer. Now I had to prove to myself that there was nothing wrong with me by answering every subsequent question correctly. I also had to face the fact that I felt competitive with my fat
her, as though we were opponents on a quiz show hosted by Dr. Montrose. She held the sheet of questions in such a way that light streaming through her office window turned the paper translucent, and I wondered if my father could read the correct answers from the other side. Then I realized there were no correct answers to this kind of test, only variable replies. Was there any way to cheat on a mental competency exam? None that I could think of, which may or may not have been a good sign.

  “What country are we in? … State? … City? … Hospital? … Floor?”

  Not until Dr. Montrose whispered, “Bernard,” did I realize I’d been muttering answers under my breath. There was no way my father could have heard me from where he was sitting, so it wasn’t as if I was prompting him. And anyway, I got them right. Dad, on the other hand, didn’t know what floor we were on, but if he had been the one to push the elevator button instead of me, he probably would have known it was the third. The mechanics of recall are delicate, so iffy and contingent.

  As for calling this hospital “Saint Sinai,” if Dr. Montrose had thought about it for a minute, she would have realized that his answer combined the names of two major medical facilities, Saint Joseph’s and Cedars-Sinai. His guess was as logical as it was wrong, but since the testee wasn’t given credit for near misses or whimsical hybrids, why explain his error’s fine points? Besides, I’d already been caught talking to myself, and Dr. Montrose must not have thought me the most reliable advocate for a man who’s rapidly failing his Mini-Mental. Sensing he’d made a mistake, my father lowered his head, laced his fingers together in his lap, and stared at one hand meshing with the other. He had the shamed, inward look of a man who knows he’s blundered but doesn’t know how, and therefore can’t correct himself or offer an excuse.

  “Mr. Cooper,” asked Dr. Montrose, “are you ready to continue?”

  Still staring into his lap, my father nodded. His head seemed heavy, as if with answers that would soon elude him.

  “Spell world backwards,” said Dr. Montrose.

  Dad looked up and unclasped his hands. His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. “Why?” he asked, peering over the rims. “Why world?”