by Anne Fadiman
He agreed.
After a long pause, he asked me if I would telephone two women when I got home and let them know he had lost his sight. One lived in New York, the other in Chicago. That was all he said. But there was something in his voice as it drifted down from the hospital bed. I instantly knew that these were women with whom he had had affairs.
This did not come entirely as a surprise. A few years earlier, when we were talking after dinner in his room at the Hotel Intercontinental in New York, the phone had rung and he had said, “I told you never to call here.” I had wondered, but I had never asked, partly because I didn’t want to press him on something he hadn’t volunteered, partly because I didn’t want to know. Although the timing was accidental, he could hardly have planned a more strategic moment for this revelation than the night at the eye hospital. As I lay on my cot, listening in the darkness, I would have accepted anything, pardoned anything. He could have told me he was a murderer. Nothing would have seemed larger than his blindness.
I’m not certain why he chose to let me know. It might have been purely practical: he feared he wouldn’t be able to call his lovers—or perhaps former lovers—himself, even when my mother was out of the house, because he couldn’t see to dial the phone. Or he thought he’d soon be dead and wanted to tie up loose ends. Or maybe he just felt all bets were off now and all secrets were moot.
A few days later, I called the women. I was surprised that both of them sounded old—but of course they were old! My father was eighty-eight. I had the feeling he had known them for a long time. They were upset by the news and courteous to me. He didn’t mention their names again.
I never found out whether my mother knew. And I never doubted that he loved her. In fact, by this time—when their age difference had become significant and she had spent years taking care of him during his many illnesses—I think he loved her more than she loved him, though she didn’t stop enjoying him. (Once, after he gave a talk at the local library and charmed the entire reading population of Sanibel and Captiva, she told Kim, “That’s why I married that man.”) He could inscribe one of his books “For My Darling—And Forever” and mean it, and he could betray her, and he could believe these two acts were not mutually exclusive. He was constitutionally incapable of resisting a conquest, a thumbs-up, an attestation that he was not an outsider or a fraud or irretrievably ugly. I understood, but my disappointment never went away.
It was a long night at Bascom Palmer. He talked about his work and his family. It all sounded ominously like a summing-up. At some point, near dawn, I reminded him that Milton hadn’t thrown in the towel after he lost his sight. He’d written Paradise Lost. And Paradise Regained. And Samson Agonistes. Sounding a speck less grim, my father chimed in that Milton had also written “that famous sonnet,” and then proceeded to recite the first few words of “On His Blindness.”
Fragment by fragment, we managed to piece together the sonnet’s first three and a half lines (“When I consider how my light is spent / Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide / And that one talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless”) and two of the last three (“Thousands at his bidding speed / … They also serve who only stand and wait”). Milton was asking a question: If I can’t see and I can’t write, how do I serve God? And answering it: I don’t have to do anything; forbearance is a form of service.
At the time, and for many years afterward, I construed the eagerness with which my father leapt to the task of reconstructing the poem as evidence of his ineradicable love of literature, and therefore, potentially, of life. And it was. But now I think a couple of other things were going on as well. One was that we were playing an insomniac game—something he’d always done in the dark and could continue to do in the dark—and it had not stopped being fun. The second was that he was wondering if there was an outside chance that, somehow, he might be able to keep on working after all. Milton talked a good game about being a contented bystander, serving God from the sidelines while the sighted multitudes rushed around serving Him through action, but that was nonsense. There was no way he was going to spend the rest of his life standing and waiting. As my father well knew, Milton ended up dragooning various friends and relatives to serve as his amanuenses, including his daughters, who took dictation and complained bitterly about having to read aloud in languages they did not understand. In short, he became a pest, but he adapted. My father didn’t give a damn about serving God, or xbyabt, but the poet’s example contained something that, an hour or two earlier, he had been unwilling to acknowledge: possibility.
My father was discharged from Bascom Palmer. My mother drove him home. His retina did not detach, and his vision became slightly less cloudy, but he still could not see the E at the top of an eye chart, and was never able to again. To keep up his end of our bargain, he agreed to attend a day program for adults who had recently lost most or all of their sight. And it is at this point, against all probability, that the tragedy turns into a comedy, in both the Hollywood sense (it’s not without humor) and the Shakespearean sense (there’s a happy ending).
The program was run by the Visually Impaired Persons Center of Southwest Florida: “VIP” again, a term that, like so many euphemisms, tries to turn dross into gold. VIP was located in North Fort Myers, forty miles and three bridges from Captiva; my father went there from 10:00 to 3:00 every Tuesday and Thursday for six weeks. He knew he couldn’t get out of it—he had promised to do his damnedest for six months, and he was a man of his word—but he wasn’t exactly champing at the bit. Given his lack of enthusiasm for the American cult of Sharing, it would have been hard to find a less appealing prospect than a “group session” run by a charity. The subject was “independent living skills.” He hadn’t had an abundance of those even when he could see. What was the point of learning how to cook, wash his clothes, and change his sheets in his ninth decade when he had a wife who already did those things for him, and in six months he’d probably be dead anyway?
On the afternoon of his first class, I sat in my New York loft, waiting for him to call, or rather for my mother to dial and hand him the receiver. The phone rang. I expected the worst.
“That may have been the most interesting day of my life,” he said.
I assumed he was being ironic.
“Except for the first day of my life,” he continued, “it was the most novel. There is nothing in my eighty-eight years of experience that prepared me for it.”
He told me that the room had been large; he had initially felt disoriented and bewildered. Several of the staff members were visually impaired themselves—one had explained that she had been blinded by a snowball when she was thirteen; another had taken my father’s medical history and amazed him by typing it into a computer—and preternaturally cheerful. He had learned several skills: how to identify bills in a wallet (fold each denomination differently); how to distinguish coins (use your fingertip to gauge the size and your fingernail to feel the smooth or ridged periphery); how to open a milk carton (locate the two vertical edges with seams and press up the spout on the opposite side); how to fill a coffee cup (curl your finger over the rim to detect the rising heat); and how to put toothpaste on a toothbrush (squeeze a dab onto your lower lip, from which it is unlikely to fall, and sweep it up with the brush). “The challenges were of the most mundane character,” he said, sounding surprised that he had found them so fascinating. He’d always been bad with his hands (that 6th percentile in Lefthanded Finger Dexterity on the Johnson O’Connor test) and had outsourced all manual labor, with the exception of opening wine bottles, to wives, secretaries, and servants. Learning how to fold and pour and squeeze—and having no doubt that he could do so competently—really was novel.
He had expected a roomful of uncongenial boors, and what had he found? An ego-boosting conclave of nice old Jewish ladies, many of them originally from New York, who remembered him from Information Please. The fact that he couldn’t see them, or they him, was immaterial; fifty years earlier, they
hadn’t seen him on the radio either. The leader had announced, “We have a celebrity with us today—Clifton Fadiman!” And everyone had clapped. At VIP, my father actually was a VIP.
Over the next several weeks, his fellow students turned out to be a more effective tonic than antidepressants, maybe even than a 1927 Cockburn port. He was like an aged and somewhat clueless king who descends from his castle in order to mingle with the people, and discovers he actually likes them. Or at least most of them; I regret to say that he described some of them as “the goddamnedest fools.” But he also said they had more character than he did. Most of them were widows living on Social Security; one had two metal knees; another had had multiple cardiac bypasses; many were profoundly blind; and yet they never asked why God, in whom they all seemed to believe, had not treated them better. By contrast, my father was wealthy, he had a wife who took care of him, he was in reasonable health, and though he was legally blind, he retained enough residual vision to make out shapes and not bump into furniture. In the suffering department, he was a comparative piker: a realization that immediately made him stop complaining.
He learned how to follow a sighted guide (hold her arm firmly above the elbow and let her walk a half step ahead). He learned how to shave his neck (swallow so the Adam’s apple recedes and doesn’t get scraped). He learned how to use a National Library Service Talking Book cassette player (from left to right, press the buttons for Stop, Rewind, Play, Fast Forward, and Eject, each embossed with a symbol). After the last of those lessons, he told me, “I am looking forward to Talking Books,” and I told George, “He used the phrase ‘looking forward’!”
In the third week, after hearing a VIP student say she wished that she and her classmates could have Mr. Fadiman all to themselves, the leader suggested he lead a seminar called Fadiman’s Conversation Class. My father recruited five enthusiastic acolytes—the group soon doubled—and gave them a homework assignment: listen to Larry King’s radio talk show. The next day, just as he had guided clerks and stenographers through the Great Books in the 1920s, he led a discussion in his inimitably plummy voice of King’s principal topics. He told me, “Your old man is back at his old job.”
The climax of the VIP program—an opportunity to apply many of the skills the students had learned—was a visit to a simulated McDonald’s that had been set up at a counter on one side of the classroom. Each of them was given money tucked into an envelope that was labeled “WALLET” in giant letters, for the benefit of the partially sighted. The customers lined up, ordered, paid with carefully folded bills, and received their meals (empty bags and empty milk cartons) and their change (invariably wrong, so they’d have to pay attention to the size and texture of the coins). In my father’s case, given his taste for tournedos Rossini and his distaste for ketchup, it was just as well that the burgers were imaginary. VIP had doubtless chosen McDonald’s because it was a restaurant with which every student in the room would be intimately familiar. Every student, that is, but one. My father was familiar only with the idea of McDonald’s. He had managed to spend decades complaining about American popular culture without actually experiencing any. Finally, his opportunity had arrived! It is true that it came in an unexpected guise—a fast-food restaurant with no fast food, patronized exclusively by customers who couldn’t see it—but what man can predict the form in which his enlightenment will present itself?
In the eye hospital, my father had said there were two reasons he wanted to die: he didn’t want to burden my mother and he couldn’t read. In the weeks that followed the VIP program, he made headway on both fronts.
Reading was the more straightforward of the problems. Although VIP offered a Braille class, he considered himself too old to learn; and, in any case, why try to read with your fingertips when you could read with your ears? His Talking Book player arrived, and he mastered its five buttons. He had been informed that eighty thousand free books on tape were available, from the Bible to pornography, and though he never availed himself of either of those, he ordered hundreds of others, as well as commercial audiobooks. He had two players, one upstairs, one downstairs on his desk, where he continued to spend most of the daylight hours. Listening to a cassette wasn’t as good as reading a book—compared with his former pace of eighty pages an hour, it was maddeningly slow, and he couldn’t skip the scenery descriptions—but it was better than he’d expected. He told me his favorite part of the day was climbing into bed at midnight, pressing Play (third button from left, embossed circle), and listening to, say, Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope. (He knew it was midnight because I’d bought him a watch that announced the time in a teeny mechanical voice and tolled the hours with a teeny chime.)
With Henry and Susannah on Captiva, wearing his talking watch, 1996
The other problem was thornier. My mother put in his eye drops and lined up his pills behind his breakfast plate. After she laundered his clothes, she filed them in the same spots in his dresser every week and folded—not rolled, since a tight ball would have been harder to dismantle—his socks in conjoined pairs so that even if he wasn’t wearing the ones he’d planned, at least they’d match. She dialed his phone. She cut up his meat. She was interrupted every few minutes throughout the day with a question about where something was or what something said or how to do something, each question accompanied by an apology that made it sadder. Sometimes she was cheerful and sometimes resigned; it’s easy to cut up someone’s meat the first time and less easy the fiftieth. He’d never taken care of her; on the only occasion I could remember her being truly sick, with toxoplasmosis from breaking up a cat fight, she’d driven herself to a hospital in downtown L.A., and, because he didn’t know how to cook dinner, he’d driven me to a restaurant in Beverly Hills whose rear wall was constructed from the bottoms of wine bottles—and backed into the wall.
But VIP had helped. My mother didn’t have to dispense his toothpaste or button his shirt or do the hundred other independent living skills he’d learned that made him, if not independent, less dependent.
They often “watched” television together at night, sitting companionably on the upstairs sofa; he could follow 60 Minutes without much difficulty, and when the plot of Law & Order hinged on a visual detail—the length of the victim’s miniskirt, the make of the suspect’s getaway car—she filled him in. Their best times were at restaurants, at which they continued to dine three times a week. They’d stroll confidently into Chadwick’s or Portofino or ’Tween Waters, where the waiters all knew them, my father following half a step behind my mother, holding her arm firmly above the elbow. She’d read him the menu; his ears would prick up if the starters included a good soup, which, once he’d sussed out the dimensions of the bowl, was especially easy to negotiate without incident. He had learned how to reach for a glass without spilling it (move hand slowly along surface of table with fingers curled) and how to avoid oversalting (sprinkle in palm first, then on food). The only part of the evening he didn’t enjoy was my mother’s handling of the bill, which both offended his sense of appropriate gender roles and made him worry, not without justification, that she would leave an outrageously large tip.
When my father left Bascom Palmer, his doctor had told him that over the coming months, his vision had roughly equal chances of staying as it was, worsening, or improving (though he would always be legally blind). It improved—never enough for him to leave the house without benefit of my mother’s arm, but enough to allow him to make out a thirty-point headline, though the print, like everything else in his visual field, was hazy and patchy, as if he were looking through Swiss cheese in a dense fog. Glasses would not have helped, because they would have focused images on a retina too damaged to process them. His mood fluctuated according to his basis of comparison: he was screwed compared with normally sighted people but in clover compared with the profoundly blind, a group he had feared he might join. Most of the time he was in clover. From Maxi-Aids, an “adaptive products” catalog of which the Fadimans became devoted customers, I
ordered a telephone with Brobdingnagian numbers, and, after sending him samples of various outsized fonts, some serif, some sans serif (“CAN YOU READ THIS? OR THIS? HOW ABOUT THIS?”), I made a list of essential phone numbers, of which the most frequently consulted were those of his favorite restaurants. Now he could make the reservations.
Maxi-Aids also supplied my father with pads of paper ruled with thick, widely spaced black lines. Their arrival marked the return of something he had assumed was gone for good: writing. He wrote with a Magic Marker in capital letters ten times the size of his old handwriting. He couldn’t always see his work—sometimes he kept on writing after the marker ran dry—but he could see the black lines, and we could usually decode what he’d written between them. He wrote me many lists of article suggestions for the literary quarterly I edited; I thought of them as lineal descendants of the hundred book ideas he’d once written down for Max Schuster. He resumed jotting down his thoughts at 3:00 a.m.
Some of those jots were wordplay:
THE THREE BEARS: FLAUBERT, D’ALEMBERT, CAMEMBERT
MOURNDAY, BLUESDAY, TEARSDAY, CRYDAY, SADDERDAY, AND THE SOBBETH. (FROM A CALENDAR ISSUED BY THE BOOK-OF-LAMENT CLUB)
BETWEEN A WOK AND A HOT PLATE
Some were more serious:
ANOTHER OF MY INSOMNIA GAMES: ANSWER THE QUESTION, WHAT SINGLE EXPERIENCE OF MANKIND’S ENTIRE HISTORY HAS MOST PROFOUNDLY ALTERED HIS PSYCHE? THE TRANSITION TO ERECT POSTURE? THE SHIFT FROM A HUNTING TO A TILLAGE CULTURE? THE ADVENT OF FIRE? STEAM, ELECTRIC POWER, ATOMIC FISSION? PERHAPS NONE OF THESE, AS COMPARED WITH THE DECLINE IN THE BELIEF IN A LIFE AFTER DEATH.
If he thought of something too long to fit on a Maxi-Aids pad, he waited until he could dictate it to his part-time secretary. Anne Marcus was far more accommodating than Milton’s daughters, who smile sweetly in paintings by Delacroix and Fuseli as their father dictates Paradise Lost to them but were actually so resentful that they stole from him and sold off part of his library. And if my father’s literary efforts weren’t exactly Paradise Lost, they were an accurate record of what was on his mind, a sort of noetic meter-reading. Here are two:
