How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  I heard my brother’s voice before I saw him and turned just in time to be pulled into a rough embrace.

  “Thanks for coming, Kate,” Joe said and then, because it interested him to know the inner workings of businesses outside of his own, he continued. “How the hell did you manage it? Didn’t it cost those producers a shitload of money?”

  I smiled tightly, dropped my handbag on the floor, crossed my arms, and replied, “A shitload, as you so elegantly put it. Don’t worry, I’ll make up for it, they’ll see to that. How are you doing, Bobo?”

  My brother assumed a stance that was common to all of us. He stood with his legs a good two feet apart, his feet firmly planted, arms crossed tightly over his chest, leaning slightly backward, as if against a strong but not unpleasant wind. Joe’s face, in the unflattering light of the corridor, looked pale and drawn, his once abundant dark hair had grown almost white and fell below his shoulders in disheveled curls, his beard was rough, and his eyes, hooded and heavy, suggested exhaustion. I had always thought of Joe as robust, but observing him now, I could see clearly that he had lost weight, that he was depleted, and that whatever it was that was ailing our father, he had internalized.

  “What are they doing to him in there?” I whispered, pointing to the chamber at the end of the corridor, where the nurse, now moving in slow circles, continued to busy herself with my father’s head.

  “Jesus, Bo, they’re not measuring him for radiation, are they?” I asked, moving away from the wall so as to command a better view of the room.

  My brother, who had lowered his head, now lifted his eyes to look at me and said, “You don’t understand. It all happened so fast. One minute he was doing his crossword puzzles, telling me his glasses bothered him, and the next we’re here and they’re telling me they have to run more tests, and the sooner the better and, Jesus, what was I supposed to do, tell them not to?”

  “I thought we agreed you’d wait for me,” I countered.

  “They’ve got their own system, for Christ’s sake, Kate, it’s a clinic, after all. I couldn’t very well tell the attending oncologist to go have coffee and a donut, my sister’s not here yet, she’s just coming off a tour, so could everybody just chill and wait till she shows up!” Joe raked his fingers anxiously through his hair, looking at me with an expression that betrayed more fear than anger.

  This anger of my brother’s, so familiar, so easily provoked, would ordinarily have moved me to calm him, would have instantly struck a chord of sympathy, but in this moment, from my vantage point in the corridor that led to the room where my father sat hunched over on a metal stool, it had the opposite effect.

  I put my hands on my brother’s shoulders and, forcing him to look at me, asked the question that had been germinating since I first glimpsed my father in that strange room at the end of the hall.

  “Bo, is Dad even aware of what’s going on? Has the doctor talked to him? Has anyone talked to him?”

  Joe shook his head, then put his face in his hands and rubbed his forehead. I knew that my brother did not feel he had deliberately misled our father, that he had done what had come naturally to him as a son, which was to protect our father from any news that might be unexpected or alarming, in this way allowing him to be carried along by the current so adroitly offered by the medical staff, to be measured and poked, taped and prodded, his gray head drawn on like a child’s map. This was more tolerable to my brother than demanding an explanation from the doctor who, my brother knew, would feel compelled to tell the truth. It seemed to Joe that while our father, the doctor, the nurses, and all the medical personnel contrived to play this game, perhaps it wasn’t a game at all, and our father was merely undergoing a routine examination, the main purpose of which was to restore his left eye to its normal vision so that he could resume doing his crossword puzzles.

  Whereas I could understand my brother’s actions, I could not grasp why our father had submitted without question, without protest, to having his head measured and mapped with a Magic Marker. Such behavior was entirely out of keeping with his character. At every point in his life demanding a decision of any importance, my father had exhibited a real dislike of being told what to do, and would respond with contempt, making it clear that no one had authority over him and, if they dared to push it, he could become closed, withdrawn and, finally, intractable.

  Something had happened. This wizened creature, bowed over a stool in the back room of a clinic, in no way resembled the man who, all his life, had demanded the truth. In the time that had elapsed since my father’s vision had become compromised and his subsequent visit to the ophthalmologist, a seed of terror had been planted, which now prevented him from rising from that absurd metal stool, pushing the nurse aside, and demanding an explanation.

  Notwithstanding my natural disinclination to see my father compromised, what rose up inside me was a disgust with the way the entire process had been allowed to unfold, as if this were, indeed, a children’s game and my father the designated goose, made to run frantically from one chair to the next until, exhausted, he would simply collapse, and not out of fatigue or despair, but of disgrace.

  Joe, standing next to me, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, gazed at our father with an expression of such uncertainty and pain that I instinctively put my arm around him and said, “I get it. You wanted to buy some time, avoid a rush to judgment, but, Bo, this isn’t a business decision, or even a family decision, it’s Dad’s decision, and Dad’s decision alone. He needs to talk to the doctor and the doctor needs to talk to him—and talk straight. We’ve got to allow that. Dad will never forgive us if we don’t, and you know it.”

  There was a brief pause, during which I searched my brother’s face for signs of resistance and, satisfied there were none, said, “You find the doctor, I’ll get Dad.”

  As I approached the small room at the end of the corridor, the nurse attending my father looked up and, seeing me, put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Mr. Mulgrew, I think your daughter’s here.”

  My father looked at me first in bewilderment and then, with suspicion.

  “Kitten, what are you doing here?”

  I kissed his cheek and said, “I talked to Joe last week, he told me you had an appointment with Dr. Koenig today, and I wanted to see you,” I explained, as my father glared at me. “I wanted to come home.”

  “Well, in that case, it’s nice to see you, kid,” he said at last, his expression softening.

  “Why don’t you come with me, Dad? We’re going to have a talk with Dr. Koenig and find out what’s going on around here,” I said, helping my father to his feet.

  Then, turning to the nurse for affirmation, I continued. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it?”

  This nurse, older and wiser than Sam, ran her hand over my father’s head as one would a small child’s, and replied, “Sure. You do that. I’ll see you later, Mr. Mulgrew.”

  My father, a slave to good manners, turned to the nurse and said, “Thank you, Ruth.”

  As we left the small room and entered the main artery of the unit, I took my father’s arm and asked, “How do you know her name’s Ruth?”

  “Because it is neatly affixed to her bosom,” my father responded.

  A door opened in the middle of the corridor, and Joe stepped out.

  “Hey, Dad, we’re in here,” he said.

  My father stopped short and stared at my brother.

  “We are, are we? And why didn’t you tell me your sister was coming?”

  Joe, flushing, was at a complete loss.

  “I wanted to surprise you, Dad,” I prevaricated, then kissed my father again and said, “because I know how much you love surprises.”

  Dad grunted and looked sideways at his son who, in turn, looked down at his feet. At this moment, the doctor walked in.

  Dr. Koenig struck me at once as a man of sympathy. He was tall, well fed, and clean-shaven, and though his was not a striking demeanor, his face not a face to turn heads, becaus
e his presence was calming, his expression honest and open, the three of us were immediately put at ease. I thought, when I shook his hand and looked into his clear hazel eyes, that this was a man who understood love.

  There was a moment’s silence, during which Dr. Koenig placed his file on the exam table and, leaning against it, addressed my father.

  “Well, Mr. Mulgrew—” he began, when my father cut him off.

  “Tom, call me Tom,” he demanded.

  Dr. Koenig smiled gently.

  “Well, Tom, I understand you’d like to know what’s happening to you, is that right?”

  My father, referring to neither my brother nor myself, replied affirmatively, “That is correct.”

  In that single, simple assertion, my father regained a measure of his characteristic composure, and sat tall in his chair.

  “Okay, and I have also been led to understand that you want a clear diagnosis and prognosis, with no omissions of fact. Is that right?”

  My father, momentarily caught off guard by the seriousness of the doctor’s tone, answered, “Roger.”

  Dr. Koenig shifted his position so that he faced my father directly, the subtlety of which was not lost on either my brother or myself. Joe moved to a corner of the room and made his presence as benign as possible. I, on the other hand, felt a stab of shame at having presumed that the doctor would want me to be a part of the clinical disclosure. Dr. Koenig was interested only in my father, and with expert authority, a deftness learned only after years of practice, relegated my brother and myself to the rank of observers.

  “You have cancer, Tom. It probably originated in the lung but has traveled throughout your system and only became apparent when your vision was compromised. That’s because a fairly significant tumor has developed on your brain stem, which affects vision, balance, and, in time, many of the brain’s functions.”

  “What do you mean by ‘fairly significant’?” my father asked, not moving.

  “I’d say it’s about the size of a golf ball,” Dr. Koenig replied. I inhaled sharply. My father lifted an eyebrow.

  “Now, we can treat this, as you have probably guessed, with radiation and chemotherapy. First, we radiate the tumor with the intention of shrinking it, and this will be followed by a program of chemotherapy. Given the size of the tumor and the systemic nature of the malignancy—”

  At this point, my father again interrupted the doctor.

  “What exactly do you mean by the ‘systemic nature of the malignancy’?”

  Dr. Koenig was spatially quite close to my father within the confines of the small room, and yet when he adjusted his position so that he was no longer leaning on the examining table but standing away from it, it appeared to my eye that he had situated himself so as to be face-to-face with my father. Neither man acknowledged this, but they continued to look at each other as I imagined soldiers might, which is to say, unflinchingly.

  “The cancer has spread from your lung, to your brain, but it is also in your organs—the liver, the kidney—and it is in your spine as well. It is moving quickly and is in an advanced stage. Had we caught it earlier—”

  “Advanced stage? How advanced?” my father demanded.

  “Stage four, meaning it has moved beyond the lung into other organs and parts of your body,” Dr. Koenig explained, quietly, before going on. “But I think we can buy some time if we adhere to the protocols this kind of cancer demands.”

  My father remained inscrutable. He leaned forward very slightly and, almost smiling, peered into the doctor’s face.

  “What do you mean by ‘buy some time’? What the hell does that mean?”

  In the room, it was very quiet. Dr. Koenig, for the first time in his conversation with my father, looked away. Suddenly, I had an image of Dr. Koenig returning to his home at night, after a day’s work, after hours of testing and probing, after making onerous decisions that invariably turned into hours of uncertainty, and these hours in turn eclipsed by hopelessness and, finally, despair. How, I wondered, had he learned to battle chronic exhaustion with such forbearance?

  “If we follow the radiation with a rigorous course of chemo, I think you will probably have a few weeks more, at the most a couple of months. There will be questionable quality of life because you will be feeling the effects of the toxins from the chemo, but you will have more time.”

  The silence, intensely felt, remained unbroken. All eyes were on my father, whose own thoughts appeared to have turned inward. He shook his head, ever so slightly, as if to clear it, looked out the window at the gray winter’s day, looked down at his feet as if verifying their existence, then slowly raised his eyes to meet the doctor’s and said, “Not a lot of laughs in your line of work, are there, pal?”

  Dr. Koenig, clearly startled, did not know how to respond. Joe and I chuckled, in a show of solidarity more than anything else, and because responding to our father’s humor, however unexpected, was in our DNA.

  My father rose to his feet.

  “Kitten,” he asked, looking at me for the first time since entering this room, “get my coat, will you? Time to go home.”

  He then extended his hand to the doctor, formally and with intention, and the doctor received it, with equal gravitas. They stood there for a moment, looking at each other, and I silently prayed that Dr. Koenig would say nothing more. He didn’t, whereupon my father said, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done. I have no doubt you are an excellent doctor, but you and I will not be meeting again.”

  Dr. Koenig ushered us into the corridor and watched as we walked the length of the oncology unit, past the nurses’ desk, where Sam waved happily from her station, and through the revolving doors into the bleak afternoon light.

  The three of us stood in the parking lot for a moment before making our way slowly to Joe’s car. When we reached it, I opened the door for my father, and as he settled into the passenger seat, I leaned into him.

  “What do you say to a drink, Dad?” I asked, my hand on the sleeve of his down jacket.

  “I’d say, now you’re talking my lingo,” my father replied, as Joe pulled out of the parking lot, and we started home.

  Chapter Five

  The house was quiet, and soon my father and I would be alone. To get there, however, we had first to pass through the stone gates signifying entry into the small estate we called Derby Grange, then through the back door signifying welcome, until finally it was necessary to pass muster with Lucila Ledezma Ruiz, who signified order. Lucy, strong and stoic, beamed when she saw me and said, as she had said for the past twenty-five years upon seeing me after a prolonged absence, “Oh, señora, you here at last.” For two decades, she had been my children’s nanny, my housekeeper, my cook, and my majordomo. When my children grew up, as inevitably they must, and my parents grew old, Lucy had offered to leave her life in California and transplant herself in Dubuque, Iowa, a place utterly foreign to her, where tall white men sported John Deere caps and spoke sparingly, if at all, and certainly had nothing to say to this diminutive, fierce-looking Mexican woman with her flashing black eyes. She had come to Iowa for me, she had stayed for my mother and, over time and against all odds, she had found herself devoted to my father, so that now, as she divested him of his winter coat, she allowed her hand to rest on his shoulder as she asked, “You hungry, señor? I can fix you a soft-boiled egg and coffee. Or tapioca. You want tapioca?”

  My father, unsmiling, said, “No thanks, Lucy. Not hungry. Not yet.”

  Lucy looked at me, and what passed between us was a shorthand learned over many years, through countless episodes in which it was crucial to protect the vulnerable child, the demoralized sibling, or the confused mother, so that over time a mere lifting of the brow or an almost imperceptible shake of the head was sufficient to convey the message clearly. In this case, it was immediately understood that my father had never been hungry, was not now hungry, and would probably never be hungry again.

  A different current, deeper and more intense, delivered
the more urgent communication, so that after hanging my father’s coat carefully in the closet, Lucy said, “I go check on Beanie, then I go to bed, okay, señora? We talk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll go with you, Luce. Joe, make sure Dad’s comfortable, will you?” I asked, already moving toward my mother’s room.

  Joe, alert to every movement that did not immediately involve him and looking at Lucy with a wariness he reserved for her alone, said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll be in the living room, but I can’t stay long. The kids will be home soon.”