by Kate Mulgrew
Six years earlier, on the warm spring afternoon of Dr. Fortson’s visit, a few of us had gathered in the TV Room to greet him. As the organizer of this event, I had stood sentinel at the screen door, waiting for the doctor’s car to appear in the driveway. In attendance were my brother Joe; my second husband, Tim; and my father, who sat in his customary place on the couch. My sisters, having accepted my mother’s diagnosis months earlier, were not present. Joe, exhibiting allegiance to his father, stood rigidly facing the door, arms crossed, seething with anger. He in no way approved of my having scheduled a house call with Dr. Fortson and considered it tantamount to betrayal. My husband loved my mother, had known her long before he ever set eyes on me, and was prepared to serve in this situation as her advocate. Although Tim disliked confrontation, he was not afraid of my father and would, without hesitation, act in the best interests of my mother. My father had agreed to this meeting under duress, and only because I had the necessary authority as my mother’s health-care guardian to demand it. He strongly resented having been put in a position of subordination to his own daughter, and this attitude seeped from every pore, from the studied indifference in his posture to the overloud exhalations of his cigarette smoke.
When we heard the approach of Dr. Fortson’s car, I noted that no one moved. The powder keg had arrived, and now it was only a matter of the slightest friction before combustion occurred. I went outside to greet the doctor, and when I gave him a cursory description of the atmosphere of the room he was about to enter, the tired, sad smile with which he greeted this information told me he had visited many rooms such as this, and that he was prepared.
Dr. Fortson was met with blatant rudeness when my father refused to rise for the introduction, disdaining a courtesy as natural to him as breathing. He leaned forward grudgingly in his seat and extended his hand halfheartedly to the doctor, who nonetheless accepted it with grace. My father’s incivility astounded me, and, despite the circumstances, I was mortified that Dr. Fortson should see him in this light. I indicated a chair for the doctor and, in a gesture of solidarity, sat next to him. A painful silence ensued, during which each person in the room deliberated his next move. My father’s defense was impeccable; he said nothing.
After accepting a cup of tea, Dr. Fortson leaned toward my father and said, “So, Tom, I understand you’re confused about your wife’s condition, and that you’d appreciate some clarification.”
My father simply opened his hands and lifted them, in a classic gesture of indifference.
“We have run every test we have at our disposal to determine your wife’s diagnosis, and we are almost a hundred percent certain she has Alzheimer’s disease.”
“That qualification is what interests me. The ‘almost.’ That’s where the whole thing unravels, in my view,” my father responded, quickly and incisively. He had prepared himself.
“We say ‘almost’ because science is still studying this disease, and we have a long way to go before we understand it fully. But I can say with certainty that both the Mini Mental and the MRI show that Joan is in the moderate stages of atypical Alzheimer’s disease. Without going into too much detail, the MRI clearly revealed what are commonly known as ‘plaques and tangles’ in your wife’s brain, proteins that cause the degeneration of the cortical region.”
In the room, this information settled like a stone in a deep, cool pond.
“Tom,” Dr. Fortson continued evenly, “Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, degenerative disease that leads to dementia. As of now, there is no cure and, while there are medications available to slow the progress of the disease, degeneration is inevitable and often extremely difficult for family members to manage. Full-time live-in care is crucial if you wish to keep Joan at home, otherwise I’m afraid you’ll have to consider a nursing facility.”
At this suggestion, my father blanched. It had not occurred to him that my mother might need to be removed from her home, that this disease was powerful and insidious enough to separate them physically as well as mentally. It was as if Dr. Fortson had gently inserted a needle into my father’s lung, causing the air to leak slowly out of him. He lowered his head to his chest. Joe turned away and muttered, “Bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit, Joe. Hear the doctor out,” Tim said.
Both my father and my brother reacted to this with venomous looks, which were meant to shut Tim up and remind him that he was not a blood member of this family, and that none of this had anything to do with him. Tim kept his eyes fixed on Dr. Fortson’s face.
“Have I been clear enough, Tom? Do you have any questions?” Dr. Fortson asked, with great diplomacy.
My father lifted his head and, looking at the doctor, shrugged.
“Sounds like it’s all been handled. Everybody seems to have the answers. My daughter has the authority, she’s calling the shots, and she says we need to have someone living in the house full-time. Evidently, she’s discussed all this with you at length and it’s already been resolved, so it seems to me you drove all the way out here for nothing, pal.”
When experience meets compassion in the character of a man like Mark Fortson, conflict is ineffective. He had come out to the house to help my father, to edify him, and to comfort him. All these objectives had failed, and yet Dr. Fortson did not abandon my father. He reached out to him with the kind of directness my father most admired, the kind that is fearless.
“Tom, your daughter was made your wife’s health-care guardian because your wife wanted it that way. Joan chose Kate to take care of these matters, and Kate agreed. Therefore, we must all defer to Kate in decisions having to do with Joan’s welfare and, in this case, strongly advising full-time care in the house for Joan is a sound, practical decision and one I fully support. Your daughter has made it clear that the family has the funds to provide for a caregiver, that the family does not want Joan to leave the house, and that the caregiver is already in place. I know how difficult this must be for you, Tom, but the person whose well-being we need to consider now is Joan. You do want her to stay home, don’t you?” Dr. Fortson asked, very calmly.
The tension emanating from my father was not only palpable, but dangerous. I saw him hunched over, held in, the iron doors slamming shut one by one, until he looked as if he had been turned to stone. Not a muscle twitched, the sound of his breathing was barely audible, and he was coiled so tight I thought he might stand and punch Dr. Fortson in the nose, turn and take a whack at Tim, slap me hard. He did none of these things, but in a long life of observing my father I had never seen him in such a state of impotent fury. He was a lame animal who had been kicked to the bottom of a deep pit.
“You bet your ass I want my wife at home,” he finally managed to say, looking up at Dr. Fortson through eyes like slits. “I just don’t want to be told what to do by every person who comes through that door, do you understand that?”
“I understand completely, Tom. It’s hard to learn that someone you love very much has developed a disease like Alzheimer’s, especially when it involves someone as vibrant as your wife. We’re never prepared for something like this,” Mark Fortson said, folding his hands together.
These words, intended to provide solace, instead reverberated like a tired and ill-timed platitude. My father, who loathed platitudes, was eager for this meeting to come to an end and, to my surprise, abruptly stood and extended his hand.
“Thanks for coming out—Fortson, is it?”
“Yes, Tom. Mark Fortson.”
“I think I’ve heard everything I need to hear for one afternoon, Dr. Fortson. We’ll handle this.” My father lowered his voice and glanced in my direction.
I accompanied the doctor out and, as he opened the car door, I asked him if meetings such as these were predictable, if men such as my father typically responded in this way.
It was a beautiful May afternoon, the sun shone through the maple tree shading Dr. Fortson’s car, the bright hood dappled with the shadows of leaves.
“He’s lost somethi
ng, but he’s not ready to accept that yet. Maybe he won’t ever accept it, but in time he’ll learn to live with it. He’s a tough character, your father, and he doesn’t like being told what to do, does he?” Dr. Fortson asked, a half smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“That’s an understatement,” I said, glancing back toward the TV Room, where I knew the men were now gathered in a thick, impenetrable silence.
“You might be surprised,” the doctor said, settling into the driver’s seat. Then, turning the ignition on, he looked up at me and added, “She was really something, your mother, wasn’t she? Someone you don’t often encounter in life. And to think, your father has loved her for over fifty years.”
The doctor’s words, spoken so long ago, resonated in the room where I now sat alone with my father. I wondered if he could possibly have overheard them uttered that afternoon, when Dr. Fortson was preparing to leave and, if so, where they had settled among his tangled emotions.
And to think, your father has loved her for over fifty years.
Chapter Seven
The vodka had ameliorated my father’s mood. He gazed into the fire and, though I knew he was looking inward, I felt he was standing on the precipice of a memory that he both desperately wanted to recover, and at the same time longed to be free of. Torn by the yearning to dip once again into something delicious, he struggled for a moment, and in that moment, without thinking, I pushed him over the edge. I couldn’t help myself. Time was running out, and soon everything would be unanswerable.
“Was she the best thing that ever happened to you, Dad?” I asked, watching him carefully.
“Who?” my father asked, rhetorically.
“Who do you think?” I asked, a little too sharply, reverting momentarily to our old jousting ways. “Mother, of course.”
“I’d never seen anything like her,” my father began, drawing deeply on his cigarette. “Hell, nobody had ever seen anything like her. Jesus, she was full of herself! From the East, you know. Slumming in Chicago, working for Kennedy. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t know where to get a drink on Lake Shore Drive, I’m from the East.’ And the Kennedy thing, Christ almighty! You’d think Jack was God and Jean the high priestess, couldn’t do anything without first putting it past that bleeping committee.”
“Well, Jean was her best friend, they shared an apartment in Chicago, and Mother was working for Jack, so what do you expect?” I interjected.
“Working for Jack was a euphemism for having a helluva good time on the campaign trail. Yeah, yeah, I get it. Hierarchy. But once our romance extended beyond the church steps and I was permitted to see her outside of Mass, we started to have some fun. Not that watching her four pews ahead of me at St. Pat’s every Sunday morning wasn’t great. She knew I was casing her, and she loved it. But once I actually managed to get her on a date, she dropped the façade and was nothing but pure personality. Jesus, she was fun! Nobody I’d ever met talked like that—you know, the Holyoke routine, but then the questions, you wouldn’t believe the questions. The strangest, most unbridled curiosity I’d ever experienced. And Christ, she was fast! Do you believe in God or is transubstantiation nothing but indoctrination? Who is God to you? Have you read Kierkegaard, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton? Do you crave solitude? How did you come to be born in Dubuque, Iowa? Do people in Iowa read?” My father paused to sip his drink, shaking his head with amusement. The memories eclipsed the reality of the silent woman in the adjoining room. He had returned to 1952, and he was young again.
“But when did you know you were in love with her?” I pressed him, modulating my voice. I had learned through the years that whenever I raised my voice, particularly in emotion, my father would respond by beating a fast retreat.
“She was always slipping away, making excuses, and it was always about the East,” he mused. “The Kennedys on the Cape, her cronies in Boston, her family in Upper Montclair, New Jersey—men, too, were everywhere, which she made perfectly clear. This was irritating as hell but part of the game and, boy, could that broad play games. I wrote her letters, which she seldom if ever answered, I called her to no avail, it was like hunting a fox, and you know what they say—”
I did know, he had taught me, so I quickly said, “Until one day the fox turns around and shoots the hunter.”
“Very good, Kitten.” My father smiled approvingly, suggesting that the tale of the fox and the hunter was unsurpassed in his personal lexicon.
“And why, in this case, do you think the fox decided to shoot the hunter?” I asked, wanting to know if tonight my father’s slant on the mythic story would be in some way altered.
He sat back on the couch, crossed one leg over the other, put his right arm behind his head, and considered me.
“She had run out of options. None of her beaux in the ‘East’ had come through. Her two closest pals had outrun her. Jean had married Steve Smith, Effie Shanley had married Bobby Harriss and moved to Mexico, and there she was in her little garret apartment in Boston, painting watercolors of the Common in her sketch pad, single, dateless, and my guess is, getting desperate. So she picked up the phone and called a guy she’d had a few laughs with in Chicago, someone who shared her values, her religion, her clan, and she threw her lot in with his. Which was mine. And even then, she didn’t make it easy. The hunter had been shot, but he was not quite dead.”
An excerpt from a letter I had found among my mother’s papers had riveted me. My father had typewritten it to my mother in 1952:
The key to the whole thing is you. It’s no good unless you open your eyes and your heart to what might be. I can’t do that for you. And no amount of “sell” can turn the trick—it has to be natural and voluntary. We’re good for each other, Jick—I know that. And I also know that I love you and need you like you’ll never be loved or needed again. So get the hell in gear, sweetie. Give us a chance.
He had fought for her, he had wooed her hard and, finally, he had won her—but had he, really? The hunter may have been dead, but the fox, it seemed to me, was bemused. It was a mystery to my mother, this marriage to my father, one that had unfolded with terrific speed, so that there was no time to consider the consequences or look hard at the future that lay before her, no time at all before she had left her beloved “East” and traveled to Dubuque, Iowa, where, within a year, she had given birth to my brother Tom, followed fourteen months later by myself and then, in rapid succession, Joe, Maggie, Laura, Tess, Sam, and Jenny. After raising these children, and burying two of them, she was left with just a few years to enjoy the beauty of the countryside where she lived, the picnics she shared with Cistercian monks, the wine and the talk, the grown children making her laugh, the studio filled with music, paints, canvases, easels, and rich satisfaction, the books and the trips and the walks down the gravel road. The husband who never joined her for dinner, a man who was cheap and moody and often drunk, was not the husband who had begged her to get the hell in gear. He had changed, he had not kept his promise, and I wondered now, looking at my father as he pulled on his cigarette and quaffed his vodka on what would be one of the last nights of his life, if my mother had simply given up on him.
He had never referred to his love of drink as alcoholism, but my mother had. In the later years of their marriage, when Mother often took trips to visit her friend Jean Smith in New York and immediately upon her return fell victim to a barrage of questions from her oldest daughter, starved for knowledge of what lay beyond the vast cornfields of Iowa, one of these questions invariably led to the next until, in the end, my mother would look out the window and say, resignedly, “I don’t talk about your father when I’m away, but if someone persists, I tell them the truth—I tell them my husband is a drunk.”
Extraordinary that my mother would say this to a complete stranger at an elegant dinner party in New York. Was it chic to say such a thing? Did laughter follow such a divulgence? Was my mother considered witty, this middle-aged mother of eight from Iowa leaning into some man over cocktails in the Chinese-
red drawing room of an Upper East Side townhouse? Or was she considered sad? She had always come back looking, and sounding, depleted, as if the journey home had drained every last scintilla of energy from her body. My father must have picked her up at the Dubuque airport, but I have no recollection of their coming into the house together, no memory of my father carrying her suitcase, following her jauntily up the brick path to the front door. My mother went away for what felt like long periods of time, when in fact it was never more than a week or so, and when she returned the house was restored to life, that much is vivid.
“Things seldom turn out the way we hope they will, especially when it comes to love, right?” This was less a question than a reminder that I was present, and listening, and wanting the night to go on.
My father chortled in that short, derisive way of his, a strange device meant to signal a change of heart. It was seldom, if ever, the unlatching of happiness. Instead, it acted as a warning.
“Ah, hell. Love. I loved your mother. I don’t know who she is now, I couldn’t tell you I know that woman, but I love her. We made a contract, and we honored it.” My father had to laugh at his own disingenuousness, knowing full well that I was a primary keeper of many of his more salacious secrets, and I, in turn, laughed back.