by Kate Mulgrew
The last of the glowing logs, reduced to ember, fell softly in the hearth, waking my father from his brief respite. Sitting up, he registered my presence by cocking an eyebrow and pursing his lips, an expression signifying a slight disappointment in his own inability to stay awake.
“Well, Kitten . . . regrettably, I think I’ve had enough,” he said, eyes drawn to what little remained of the fire.
“Are you all right, Dad? Will you be all right tonight?” I asked.
“You mean, am I afraid of dying?” This question, direct and unadorned, made me blush. My father had intuited that this was exactly what I’d meant.
He looked away for a moment, as if considering, then fixed his eyes on me and said, “I don’t fear death, but I don’t welcome it, either.”
The sheer simplicity and unexpectedness of this confession filled me with a sudden, terrible pride. It was a sensation that did not demand tears, or even recognition. In this moment, I loved my father intensely.
“I am afraid I’m going to need your assistance up the stairs,” he said, and then added, “but I want to ask you to do something for me before we go up.”
“Of course, Dad, anything,” I responded.
“I want you to look out for your brother Joe. He’s a good guy, he’s got a tender heart, but he’s not as strong as you are,” my father said. Not waiting for a response, he rose unsteadily to his feet.
I followed my father as he made his way slowly to the front staircase, where we mounted the steps one by one, until we reached the landing. Here, he paused and drew a long, steadying breath. I took his arm and guided him down the short hallway to his bedroom, where I moved to turn on the bedside lamp.
My father shuffled over to the bed and, placing his hand on the mattress, lowered himself carefully.
“I can manage,” he whispered. It was clear that he couldn’t manage, but I knew that attempting to undress him would be unacceptable. I knelt down, slipped off his penny loafers, and said, “I’m going to lift your legs now, Dad, so you’ll be more comfortable.”
As soon as his legs had been settled properly on the bed, he emitted a groan of relief, and when I bent down to kiss his cheek, my father whispered, “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for this family.”
I stood looking down at him for a moment, and then switched off the light.
Chapter Ten
My bedroom was unchanged, but I had the curious sensation that it was beginning to shrink. For a very long time, it had been a high-ceilinged, capacious room, light flooding in through the long windows from every direction. Aunt Jane’s four-poster bed, replete with green velvet upholstery and gold tassels, stood where it had always stood, separated from the bathroom by a single porous wall which, for years, had carried all sounds and conversations into my room through an open vent situated directly to the right of the bed, an archaic but extremely effective system of eavesdropping. The cherry wardrobe rested against the western wall, its doors wedged shut with bits of folded cardboard. The armchair and ottoman reclined, like a plump woman dressed in faded pastels, under a warm lamp. The floor-to-ceiling whitewashed bookshelf stood against the wall at the base of the bed, where, depending on one’s whim, the eye could rest on a photograph of young Tessie wearing a hat composed of palm fronds, or Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, or travel upward to the highest shelf, where a small bronze crucifix rested against Will Durant’s The Foundations of Civilization.
Tonight, the room felt diminished. My suitcase had been placed on the ottoman, but I felt no inclination to open it. Instead, I moved to the window and looked out over the wide lawn, blanketed with snow. The moon was almost full, and silver light illuminated the room, as it had done all my life. My father had thanked me for everything I had done for this family. Those had been his words, formal and composed. Genuine, but detached. Maybe that was what had kept us coming back for more. His distance. The pleasure he seemed to take in withholding.
Looking down, I remembered a snowbound evening two years earlier when Dad, Mother, and I had gathered around a miniature bonfire, just yards from the front door. Javier, Lucy’s husband, had shoveled until he carved an ideal spot for us, a perfect circle wherein he had placed a small but beautifully mounted bonfire. Three chairs had been arranged around the fire, each covered with a heavy blanket, and Lucy had provided a picnic consisting of cheese and crackers, ham sandwiches, and a bottle of Jameson.
We gathered around the fire as I filled our glasses with whiskey. Both of my parents were relaxed, and this state, I knew, could provoke mischief in both of them. A winter picnic appealed to their sense of whimsy, their love of the unexpected. I watched them sitting side by side in the glow of the fire, and it was as if they’d made the mutual decision to put all of their troubles aside and submit completely to the moment.
My mother, wrapped in her checked blanket, legs crossed, was full of a girlish confidence I had forgotten she once possessed utterly. She reveled in the moonlight, the fire, the heat of the whiskey. She loved the novelty of it, as well as the freedom. We were having an adventure, and she was thoroughly immersed in it. She was the central character in this vignette and, like the best actresses, moved to dispel that notion at every turn. She proffered her glass for more whiskey, she winked at me as I poured, she reached out and half-batted, half-stroked my father’s cheek, she gazed at the moon. A part of her knew it was unlikely that she would experience such a night again, and so she allowed herself to be ravished by it.
Next to her in his green down jacket, my father sat upright in his chair, a blanket draped over his knees. Raising his glass, he blew a kiss to the moon with his free hand and said, “Just beautiful.” In the light of the bonfire, I saw deep pleasure in his eyes, an inward look that told me this was enough. His wife at his side, the whiskey warming them both, his daughter across the way, looking on. He talked of the things that gave him satisfaction, and my mother, in her silence, concurred. They relished the cold night, the sting of the whiskey in their throats, the broad and exquisite vista above them. They would not talk then, or ever, of affliction. It did not suit them. It did not become them. It was not their way. Theirs was the way of a cold night lit by an Iowa moon, of laughter, and of irreverence. They shared a profound unwillingness to let go of the moment, and so we sat for hours in the chill and the quiet of that moonlit night, until the whiskey ran dry and the fire burned to embers, whereupon we all rose to our feet in unison, proclaimed it a damn good night and, looking upward once again, shook our heads in amazement.
I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for this family. How is it that words so longed for can hit and miss with equal acuity? Perhaps this was my father’s secret weapon, to withdraw at exactly the moment of greatest accord, a skill he had deployed with such cleverness over the years that I had failed until now to recognize that he had been doing it all along.
Chapter Eleven
In the dead of night, it began. The first bubbles of amusement reached me like tiny balloons that had traveled from my mother’s mouth, through the slightly ajar master bedroom door, beneath the crack of my own door, and finally to the folds of my eight-year-old ears, where they settled gently and then softly burst. I sensed, with prepubescent acuity, that something highly unusual was afoot, and slipped from my bed with the dexterity of a child long accustomed to eavesdropping.
Across the hall, where they slept, the light was still on. Although their bedroom door was ajar, it was not generously ajar, and I knew I would need to steal myself for some serious sleuthing if my efforts were to be rewarded. I crept across the hall on tiptoe, stopping every foot or so to reassure myself that I had not been discovered. No, they were far too engaged in whatever it was they were doing to give me a second thought. My mother’s infectious laughter made me feel anxious, and I was shocked to find myself alone on the upstairs landing, since such laughter was fit only for the daytime, and would surely awaken my siblings and call them to arms. No one else, evidently, could be bot
hered, or else they had fallen into such deep slumber that even an incident as remarkable and disturbing as this could not rouse them. This is why I am different, I thought, plastering myself to the wall adjacent to my parents’ bedroom door, and ceasing to breathe. With exquisite slowness, I turned my head and, finding a vantage point through the crack of their door, adjusted my gaze so that I could have an unhampered view of the crime scene.
In the bed, my parents lay together. My father’s bedside lamp was on, illuminating the drama. I had only to raise myself on the highest of tiptoes to gain a perfect view. I proceeded to do this, while clinging to the wall with lizard-like fingers, damp and splayed. Silently, voraciously, I studied them. My father lay on his side, dressed only in his light blue boxer shorts. This was startling, since I seldom saw my father in his underwear, let alone in his underwear in bed with my mother. Bare-chested and grinning slyly, he had caught my mother’s hand with his own, and appeared to be speaking to each of my mother’s fingers individually, which effectively sent her into paroxysms of hysteria. When he had finished talking to a finger, he folded it gently but firmly back into my mother’s hand. If she allowed the digit to reemerge, he would look sharply at her and, shaking his head, he would spank the tip of the errant finger with his own bossy finger, causing my mother to scream with delight. They lay facing each other, he in his boxers, she in her white flannel nightgown, her face suffused with merriment, his with pleasure, when suddenly I felt the blood rush to my cheeks, and my heart began to pound so loudly I was afraid they would hear it and turn to find me spying on them. At exactly this moment my father leaned into my mother and, hidden by the tall walnut footboard, disappeared from my view.
* * *
“I THINK IT might be time,” I said softly, leaning on the footboard of my parents’ bed, wearing my mother’s handmade apron, and wondering what to serve for dinner that night. It had been two weeks since my father’s diagnosis, and my siblings had arrived to keep vigil, both those who lived in town and those who came from far away. Everyone needed to be fed. Cocktails would be poured around six, my brother’s jazz CDs slid into sentience, and familiar bodies would begin to saunter in and out of the kitchen, looking for comfort.
“Not yet. Christ, it hasn’t even been two hours,” Joe said, unpleasantly.
“They told us to look for the grimace. Well, there it is, Bo. That’s a grimace. He’s in pain,” I responded, curbing my anger. This exchange had occurred every day, sometimes more than once, since hospice had taken over. Joe had agreed to hospice when it became obvious that Dad would not be emerging from his coma. The endgame, he knew very well, was also the game of mercy. This meant the administration of morphine.
Joe and I were straightforward with each other. I did not feel the need to be careful with him as some of my other siblings did, and yet his stubbornness prickled me. It seemed to me willful and petulant to withhold the drug simply because of an arbitrary timetable, one recommended by women who were skilled in the business of death and what it does to people who are unwilling or unable to face it.
“What the fuck is your rush? He’ll die soon enough,” Joe said, bitingly.
“Don’t lash out at me, Joe,” I warned, slipping a chill into my voice. “I’m on your side.”
My brother’s words stung because I suspected that they were, in part, true. Wrapped in my mother’s apron, serving dishes from my mother’s oven, commandeering the sickbed and the old man in it, I knew that my thinly veiled arrogance often masqueraded as self-righteousness. Time to get the dinner on, time for hospice, time for the morphine, time for the sponge bath, time for a break. As long as I kept moving, and moving briskly, all would be well. Up and down the stairs ten times a day, checking the coffeepot, checking the laundry, writing the market list, simmering the sauce, staying constantly, irreproachably busy.
In that way, I could walk the plank and at the same time count myself among the most stoic. Certainly, one of the most organized. The trick was to keep life going at a real clip, so as not to feel the plunge into emotion too keenly. To not feel at all, if possible. The objective was to trip over the death of my father with only a very slight bruising to the heart. As for my father himself, I wanted him to disappear quickly. I almost wanted him to surprise us.
The fact that I wished for such an end for my father did not sit well with Joe. He had his own ideas about the getting of oblivion and being surprised was not one of them. Joined as we were by this morbid need to assist our father in the act of dying, we were divided in our opinions as to how death should come. My brother clung to the idea that my father would want to die naturally, that he would choose to forgo palliative drugs. Attached to my father was a stoicism based, I could only conclude, on his reticence. Where others spoke, my father had retreated into a hard stillness, the veneer of which frightened everyone away. This ongoing taciturnity had endowed my father with an unassailable authority and cowed the more voluble among us into whispers. As the years unfolded, my father had sought the confines of his self-imposed hermitage with increasing determination. The mere prospect of having to be within twenty feet of an animated conversation between two women vexed my father so much that, as a matter of course, I would swing shut the door linking the TV Room to the kitchen. Even then, Mother and I modulated our voices, so as not to nettle my father who, sufficiently incensed, might stalk in and, shaking his head, say, “Jesus H Christ.” If this made me laugh, he would pause on his way to the coffeepot and hold his right hand aloft, bringing his fingers rapidly together in a code well known to mean “the incessant chatter of women is intolerable.”
Why then, I wondered, would my brother assume that our father, so near death, might yearn for the very sounds that only a month earlier had driven him crazy? Was the incessant chatter of women more palatable from the depths of a coma? Would that noise, which had so clearly offended him, transform itself into music, simply because he was dying? How very odd and strangely amusing to think that this man, who had disdained any form of idle conversation outside of the drunken, might suddenly long to hear the raised voices of his womenfolk, mixed with the darker tones of his male progeny, and even more curious was the suggestion from our hospice nurses that our voices might have a salubrious effect on our father. It was a well-known fact, they assured us, that hearing was the last sense to go.
It made me nervous to think of my father straining, as if from a too-great distance, to catch the threads of our deathbed conversation. All of the women instinctively lowered their voices upon entering the master bedroom and, if the talk was too impersonal, subdued them still further until a conversation about something as mundane as a bad hair job reduced them to tones so hushed as to be indecipherable. If it was true that hearing was the last sense to abandon the corporeal ship, why then did everyone immediately slip into muted cadences when they walked into the room? Even those who moved directly to my father’s side, where they often knelt, spoke slowly and softly into his ear. It never occurred to me that their questions might be reaching my father and, even if this were remotely possible, that my father might consider these questions answerable. From the depths of a cancer-induced coma, I simply could not imagine that a query as perfunctory as “How are you doing today, T. J.?” might elicit a response. I imagined the inquiry would have to travel like a tiny bee through wads of cotton wool, which would absolutely dement my father. By the time the bee stung, he would wish himself well and truly dead.
Joe considered the liberal use of morphine a kind of aiding and abetting, and counseled discipline. What felt like anger coming from him was, in fact, sheer frustration. The thought of our father in pain caused him great anguish, but even more disturbing to my brother was the thought of our father trying to communicate and failing because he was completely narcotized. The prospect of a last-minute reprieve, from which our father might rouse himself to speak, was something my brother wished for until the end. I wanted our father succored with efficiency, mourned with dignity, and buried quickly. Joe wanted words,
a gesture, a look. One last moment of connection, during which love would be conveyed and understood. In this way, he could bid his father good-bye, and go on living.
“Okay, Bo, have it your way. We’ll look at him after dinner,” I said, knowing that this suggestion would alarm my brother, signifying, as it did, a long cocktail hour followed by an even longer dinner, at the end of which time our father might very well be in agony. Joe’s love for our father rose swiftly to the surface as he pushed the little blue packet into my hands and said, “You better hope it’s a fucking grimace.”
As I withdrew the small syringe from its nesting place inside the cushioned kit, my heart sank. What if my brother was right and I was wrong? What if, after all was said and done, our father could hear what was being said and, even more distressingly, wanted to hear? What if, at the end of this journey, he longed for the last vestiges of human sound to ease his way?
“Can you hear me, Dad?” I asked, removing the small cap from the tip of the syringe. The hospice nurse had shown me how to administer the drug, by pressing the syringe into the flesh of my father’s cheek and waiting until the small barrel had been completely emptied. I knelt beside my father’s bed and studied his face. Although I had not yet given him the morphine, the grimace appeared less extreme than it had only moments before and, looking around for verification, I was startled to find I was alone. Joe had left; he didn’t like to watch as the grimace relaxed, leaving our father’s face as smooth and blank as a mask.