We didn’t believe him at all. We assumed it was wishful thinking, one of the tricks his mind could play. Much later, Bill would check it out with Grandsarah (who, at eighty-nine, was to outlive her only son), and she would recall vaguely that one summer when Father was sixteen or seventeen he had worked for a railroad.
We could tell that there were days when he couldn’t see us. But he always recognized our voices. In that last month, Bill and I would meet at the hospital in the morning and spend most of the day there. Pamela, who was usually the first to arrive and the last, in the evening, to leave, arranged for Father to have shifts of nurses round-the-clock; even so, she felt better knowing that some family representative was there as well. That way, if the nurse on duty wanted to go out for coffee, or if she herself had something else to attend to, Father would not be left alone. Father’s room and the hall outside, where there was a pay phone and a couch and where all the morning conferences were held out of his earshot, became as familiar as a recurring nightmare. We were now faced with the irony that as fearsome as it was to continue with the nightmare, the fear of ending it was even greater.
“Hiya, Pop. How’s it going today?”
Some days he would look straight at me and say, “Hi, darling, much better thank you.” (“He had a good night,” the nurse would whisper.) Some days he would scan the room for the source of my voice; then I would move deliberately across his line of vision.
“Oh, Pop, you didn’t sleep well last night, did you?”
“Darling little Brooke. I want to go home. Take me home.” He would struggle vainly to wrench his body from the sheets.
“Oh, Pop.”
“Home.”
“Pop. Don’t try to sit up, Pop.”
“My gut hurts.” Sometimes he swallowed again and again as if a bone had stuck in his gullet. I had to fight the instinct to pound him on the back.
To the nurse: “His stomach is bothering him again. Shouldn’t he have a pain-killer?”
The nurse would shake her head. “He’s getting Demerol intravenously.” Ah, that must be the new tube taped to his arm.
But there were afternoons where Bill and I found that we could ease into discussions with him about the past, where we could really get him going on and on, comfortably ask him intimate questions about his various love affairs and marriages that, ordinarily, we wouldn’t dare bring up.
At the suggestion of our ex-stepmother, Nan, who was following all this very closely, Bill wandered into the hospital room one day and asked Father for his list of the ten most beautiful women that he’d ever known. It was just the sort of question Father liked best. He was terrific. A trace of color appeared in his cheeks.
“ ‘Beautiful’ is the most misused word in the English language,” he stated, with near-perfect articulation, “next to ‘glamorous.’ Very hard to define. Goddamned elusive. In my book, to be beautiful a woman has to be more than beautiful—you know what I mean? She has to have this quality of glamour, which is also impossible to describe. A certain look in her eyes, a style—an awareness of her effect on people—the way she holds herself, moves, a sense of her own mystery. A blend of all those things. And then some. Damn few women are genuinely beautiful. A handful. I must have come close to knowing them all, as close as any man alive. Fell in love with half of them, married three—”
“Whoa, Pop, you’re going too fast. Three of your wives on your all-time list?”
“Ya. You’re goddamned right. Lola; I guess she was the most beautiful woman I ever knew. She taught me how to fly. Did you know that? Got me interested in planes. Married her twice, I thought she was so beautiful. Maggie—not beautiful in the classic sense, but I don’t subscribe to the classic sense. Nan, definitely. Kate [Hepburn], definitely. The best. God, yes.” He turned toward the window and seemed to drift out.
“Go on, Pop, who else?”
“Oh, well. Garbo, of course. Most beautiful eyes I ever saw. Great face, strange body. Huge feet. Size ten, something insane like that.”
“Could you ever have fallen in love with her?”
“Not possibly. She was kind of sexless. Moved clumsily. Not smart enough for my taste. But my God, that face. When I was her agent, I had to go up to her house to talk her into some deal—I was simply mesmerized by her face, I wanted to fall into it. Your mother was insanely jealous, or pretended to be.” He chuckled to himself.
“Let’s see, that’s only five, Pop.”
“Hold your horses, hold your horses. Fay Wray.”
“Fay Wray?” Hmm, that was unexpected. When David O. Selznick died, his son, Danny, had given me some old photographs he’d found of Father as a young agent; there was one with Fay Wray standing in the background, laughing.
“Ya, ya, gorgeous. Marlene [Dietrich], gorgeous. Isak Dinesen. You know, Out of Africa. Fabulous. An old woman when I met her. How many is that?”
“Eight,” replied Bill and I together.
“Not so sure there are ten,” he mused. “I guess Justine Johnson and—Esmé O’Brian.”
He was pensive now; his hands plucked at the sheet involuntarily. (Who were Justine Johnson and Esmé O’Brian? We didn’t know, and Bill had to take the list to Nan to find out.) “God, I love women. Much more intelligent, much stronger, much braver. Nicer than men, not as mean. And so much more beautiful. There’s not a single inch of the female body that is not beautiful. Think of that. They’re luckier, too. I have a theory about women.…”
We leaned closer; his energy was fading and so was the color from his face.
“What, Pop?” asked Bill. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No, thanks, son.” Father’s voice caught, as sometimes it did, on one syllable or word. What made that terrible was his subsequent struggle to rip the word from his larynx, to hawk up something more than a throttled exhalation. His entire body would heave spasmodically with the effort. There was no way to help. We would wait, panicked, for him to exhaust himself. Slowly the glottal sounds would subside into a wheeze. He would lie still, looking over in our direction with a confused expression on his face, as if he hoped he was imagining such a lapse of control.
“Women,” he choked finally. “You know what it is about them that men envy most?”
“The fact that they shall inherit the earth?” said Bill.
“You bet,” Father closed his eyes. “They’ll outlive us all. Aristophanes was no fool.”
Diana Vreeland:
“I always, during those last ten years, kept thinking: This man is so terribly brave. But, you see, he was built as a gentleman. Consequently, even illness—and pancreatitis is supposed to be the worst, isn’t it, because it affects the emotions so much; everything to do with that department, gall bladder, bile tract, affects the emotions. I would go up to Mount Kisco quite a lot and sit with Leland and talk to him, and God, he was so—Every time I’d leave and go home I’d think, That’s the brightest man I’ve ever known. I mean what’s he carrying on on? No man could have been a more charming gentleman in anyone’s life than he was in mine. He really was a courtly gentleman. It’s an effective phrase because it makes you think of the Civil War or something. But that’s what he was. Even the deep illness of his late life couldn’t take that away from him. Even when he was telling you the craziest story that ever was about his stepmother, Maisie Hayward, and his father, the Colonel—even if he was making a bit of a nut out of somebody, it was never done with malice, never. It was always done with great courtliness and richness of spirit.”
It had taken me such a long time, my entire life, to learn how to interpret him. The knack was to unlearn everything except my most primal love. He was so ingenuous he was hard to figure out. One attributed to him layers of deviousness, subterfuges that would never have occurred to him. And because, to me, he’d always been not only a grownup but my father, I’d spent my adolescence and early adulthood trying to communicate with him on that level. A mistake. His parenthood was a conditioned idea that had been wasted on both of
us. Worse—with time, it had separated us. As I’d grown older and bigger, he’d grown proportionally farther away.
“Brooke, darling, is that you?”
“Yes, Pop.”
“That’s good. Where’s Bill?” His eyelids twitched open.
“He’ll be right back. He’s just gone down the hall.”
“Don’t go away.”
“I won’t, Pop.”
And if all children see their fathers as personifying power—a notion that is usually dispelled by a little time under the belt—I had perceived my father as being even more powerful than anyone else’s. In fact, he was.
How do you live up to that? With your heart in your mouth, that’s how. How close can you come to the sun before it melts your wings? And why, as I stripped back the years and memories, did I have the feeling that the younger I’d been the closer I’d come? Later, I would say to myself, “Nobody this powerful can also be this simple.” But Father was that simple. Deep down he was a child, too, and that’s where he won.
“Do you love me?” He looked toward me blindly.
“More than anything in the world.” I felt the tears beginning. Oh, no, I thought.
“That’s good,” he said. “I hate this, though.”
“Yeah, it stinks,” I agreed, sputtering slightly with nervous laughter.
“Don’t cry, for God’s sake; are you crying?” His eyes were closed and he couldn’t possibly see me anyway.
“No,” I choked, tears streaming down my face.
“I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t, Pop. Why?”
“I broke my promise.” He stirred restlessly under the sheet. “To take you to the bullfight movie. I promised …”
What on earth had made him think of that? “Pop, do you realize how many years ago that was?”
Even after I’d grown up, the implicit threat of his authority was able to scare me. It was only now, as I sat musing at his deathbed, that he became again what he’d once been; when there were no demands on either of us and I was very young; when I was just a child and he was just my father, and sometimes those two states of being seemed almost the same.
“A helluva long time ago.” He roused himself to glare at me.
“What?”
“All my promises.” His voice softened. “I did keep one, though. The time your mother made me spank you. Promised I’d never do it again.”
“Yes,” I whispered. For a moment I’d almost asked him for his handkerchief.
“I never did, either.”
There was a telephone in the hospital room, but Father wasn’t allowed to use it. He wasn’t even supposed to know it was there. Accordingly, it never rang. Out of respect for him, we made all our calls in the phone booth down the hall. To use a telephone in his presence, when he himself didn’t have that privilege, seemed heartless. He was the master; it was one of his glories. Our most crucial communications had taken place on the telephone, and our most comfortable. For me, his disembodied voice—whether spanning thousands of miles or just a few blocks—had more immediacy and meaning than his voice in person.
One day I stared at the telephone in Father’s room, contemplating ways to kill it, indulging myself in fantasies of hurling it against the wall, extinguishing it with a pillow.
I even picked up the receiver to see if it could save me the trouble by going dead on its own.
“Let’s yank it out, Bill. I’m serious. What the hell’s it for?”
Bill shrugged. “Emergency.”
After that, I couldn’t glance at it without wincing. It had become more than an ugly black little reminder of everything that lay outside the hospital, of Father’s past.
It had become a symbol of his impotence and ours.
And finally I knew that he would never call me on the telephone again, that that part of our lives was already over.
• • •
“I miss Emily,” I said out loud, without opening my eyes.
“Emily Buck? Our old nurse?”
“Yes.” I’d dozed off in my chair. It was a bad way to wake up. “Remember how she used to sit on our beds when we were sick? I miss the way she smelled—Clorox, tobacco, coffee, toast. If she were here now, I’d sit on her lap and she’d rock me …”
I peered at Bill through my lashes, not wanting to let in too much light. But the room was already dark. “What time is it? How’s Father?”
“Still asleep. I wish I could sleep that soundly.”
“Me, too. I’m afraid.”
“Of what?” Bill’s chair scraped close to mine.
“Right this minute? Everything. You name it.” I closed my eyes again, longing for Emily. But Emily had died painfully of stomach cancer a few years earlier. “Of letting go. Of dying. Of living. Of going nuts. That’s the most prevalent one. And you?”
“I suppress most of that stuff.” Bill whistled a tune silently through his teeth. “Programmed myself a long time ago not to think about the shit that the future might be handing down to me.”
“Don’t you ever feel rage now?”
“You mean specifically at Mother or Father?” Bill swiveled his gaze to the hospital bed where Father lay. “I couldn’t live long enough to discharge it. We were trained not to express anger. I got so good at that it landed me in Menninger’s.”
The room was steeped in twilight. I felt as if we were detached from the rest of the hospital, adrift.
“Extraordinary,” murmured Bill, wandering back and forth in semicircles around Father’s bed. “Insane what you go through—sixteen years old, being locked up—not because you’ve committed a crime, but because your parents think you should be. Absolutely one of the most impotent, frustrating, disastrous kinds of feelings, because there’s no voluntary trip about it at all. Even though you know it might be doing you some good, and in the long run you might benefit from it. Never got over it.”
Listen, I wanted to answer, what makes you think I got off scot-free? The marvelous act I put on to give that impression? The truth was I felt like a veteran of the wars. It was still inexplicable to me that Bridget and Bill had wound up in Menninger’s and Austen Riggs and I hadn’t. My guilt for not having gone through their ordeal was as great as my relief at having been spared it. Whatever had happened to my brother and sister had happened, in some way, to all of us.
Bill came to a halt in front of me.
“But, on the whole, I’m glad I went.”
“Why?” He really was crazy.
“Well, it’s weird. It’s like—if you think you’re neurotic or possibly insane, the idea is always lurking in the back of your head that the punishment for going crazy is being locked up in the loony bin. And it must be very frightening. But if you’ve already gone through it, it’s not so bad. Besides”—he held out his hands to pull me up—“you can always bullshit your way out.… Here comes the sun.” He flicked on the light.
“Ugh.”
“Reveille,” he went on cheerfully. “What do you want for breakfast tonight? My flight plan features Szechwan Tang Tang noodles smothered with those heavy-duty little black peppers that blow your head off.”
When we leaned over Father to kiss him good night, he awakened instantly as if he were afraid to miss anything.
“What’s up?” he croaked.
“Thought we’d nail down a little dinner, Pop,” said Bill.
“Good idea.” Father nodded weakly. “Let’s go to the Colony.”
“Of course—where else?”
I looked away from the tube of glucose fastened to his arm.
“No.” Father struggled to lift his head. “Let’s go home instead. Where’s Bridget?”
“She—” I hadn’t heard him mention her name in many years. “She’ll be here in a minute.”
“Please tell her to hurry up.” He sighed and turned away from our voices. “I’m tired of waiting.” Then he spoke very softly and as if he were miles away. “There’s a clock in my head. It never stops ticking,
but the hands don’t move. Why does it take so long to die?”
A few days later, he went home.
The night of March 18th, I drove out to Haywire House. After Pamela’s phone call, it took me about an hour to rent a car and get there; by the time I stood at the front door, I felt as if I’d been driving all night. Lucio, father’s young Italian butler, opened the door immediately and grasped my hand.
“I’m so sorry,” he stammered.
“Lucio. How is he?” Although I already knew the answer from the expression on his face.
Lucio gripped my hand tighter.
“Is he still alive, Lucio?” I wanted words, not touch.
“Ten minutes ago …” he began.
The familiar hallway melted around me, pulling me in. I fought numbly against its perfume, its plush burgundy carpet, its diffused light—as carefully regulated as a greenhouse thermostat—illuminating the colors of a painting here or a bowl of flowers there, and playfully flickering across the scintillant feathers of the two silver fighting cocks as they sparred in mortal combat on their tablecloth of rich rose velvet; a hum of conversation in the living room beyond, the phone ringing; was I really too late?
Pamela, in a coral silk caftan shot with gold, came toward me with a fresh whiskey sour in her hand.
“Would you like to see your father?” she asked cordially, as if nothing had happened. I nodded uncertainly and followed her down the hall.
Father’s bedroom was located at the far end of the house, so I had plenty of time to hypnotize myself, by riveting my eyes on Pamela’s robe floating from side to side a few feet in front of me. Nevertheless, when we entered the room, I managed, without looking, to see everything in it at once. The room was octagonal in shape; it had been designed by Father and was his pride and joy. Now its contents were suffused with the light I associated with small chapels. Otherwise everything seemed normal, except that on my right, along the side of the octagon where Father’s bamboo bed had always been situated, was the intrusion of a hospital bed. Its covers formed an unbroken line over the body in it. I stared straight ahead. Okay, I told myself, this is it; on your mark, get set. Pamela was delivering me into the outstretched hands of Brother Paul. Brother Paul, she said, was a member of the Franciscan order and also a male nurse, who, luckily for us, had been taking care of Father since she’d brought him back. Brother Paul told me what a wonderful man Father was.
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