How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  Naked except for a pair of woolen socks, my father’s body looked like that of a young man. His torso was smooth and virtually unwrinkled, his limbs were fine and strong, there was not a mark on him. Unscathed, this body was, despite its eighty-three years of hard living. Seeing my father’s naked body for the first time in my life did not unnerve me, nor did it sadden me. His body was surprisingly youthful. I took pride in his corporeal beauty and, if I did not look at his ravaged face, it was almost as if I were bathing my son.

  When I pulled off the socks the hospice nurse had insisted would keep him warm, I stopped. The sight of his feet, untended for weeks, shocked me. His toenails, coarse and yellowed, had grown so long that they curled over the tops of his toes. This sight was extremely unsettling, and I felt my father’s humiliation as keenly as I might have had he been conscious. This negligence, more than any other single indicator, revealed to me the extent of my father’s helplessness. Never would he have allowed this, so great was his personal vanity. He would have hated having his oldest daughter witness this final act of betrayal. When did it happen that he knew he could no longer take care of himself? One morning, overcome with fatigue, he must have looked at his unkempt feet and said to himself, Who gives a damn? Did he sit there for a moment, realizing what this meant? My father was a proud man, very careful with his appearance, and it disturbed me deeply to think that he had deliberately hidden his unsightly toes and said to himself, This is the beginning of the end, and by the time my negligence has been discovered, I will be long past caring.

  “Look at his feet,” I said to my sister, who was watching between slatted fingers.

  “Oh my God,” Jenny whispered. “Why didn’t he tell somebody?”

  “Too vain, too tired, too sick,” I replied, drawing the warm washcloth over my father’s chest.

  “Jesus, Kate. Promise me you won’t let my feet get like that,” my sister pleaded. “I don’t think I could bear that.”

  “You won’t have to bear it, you’ll be dead,” I said, taking my father’s hand in mine, and gently cleaning between the fingers. He had managed to maintain his beautiful hands. This effort, however laborious, he had made on a regular basis because the nails were trimmed and neat. Hands he himself must have recognized as unusually attractive. Without question, they had been admired. These he had protected from shame until the last moment.

  “Just make sure you hire someone to take care of my appendages,” Jenny whispered, watching intently as the washcloth traveled over my father’s body. I lifted each arm by the wrist and washed his underarms. I washed his penis, I washed his belly, I washed his knees. I carefully bathed his feet, his toes with the monstrously overgrown nails, and experienced a sudden wave of pity so strong that I had to stop for a moment.

  “What’s wrong?” my sister asked, frightened.

  “I can’t look after your appendages because I’ll already be dead,” I said, dipping a fresh washcloth into the basin and bringing it to my father’s face.

  The face was ready for death. Ashen, drawn, cool to the touch, none of my father’s features would ever relax into themselves again. The cloth moved across his forehead, his eyes, his cheeks. His beard was sparse but still growing, another one of the indignities of dying, I thought. I was not going to shave him, that would be pointless. Something to do when there is nothing left to be done.

  “You don’t know that you’re going to die first,” Jenny said, pulling her hands from her eyes and placing them over her mouth, as if uncertain of what might emerge from it next.

  No, I don’t know that I’m going to die first, I can only hope, I thought, gently drying my father’s body with a worn terry-cloth towel.

  “Wren, get me a clean pair of pajamas, will you?” I asked, putting the washbasin on top of my father’s bureau. For many years, he had emptied his trouser pockets and thrown loose change on this bureau at the end of the day, nickels and dimes and quarters, and if one of us dared to creep into his room in the dead of night to filch a coin or two, our father’s eyes would suddenly fly open and from the darkness of the bed he would roar, “Out, you little thief!”

  Jenny handed me a pair of carefully pressed blue pajamas, and I said, “Now, you can help me put them on him.”

  My sister stood there, frozen.

  “But I bore witness,” she said, defensively.

  “Knock it off, will you? Just give me a hand,” I demanded.

  Together, we dressed him in his immaculate pajamas, and pulled fresh socks over his feet. We lifted the blankets and folded them carefully over our father’s inert form. I took a small black comb from his bedside table and ran it gently through his white hair, startled by its softness.

  “All done,” I said and, leaning in, kissed my father’s cheek.

  “Wow,” Jenny said, “I’m glad we did that.”

  “Wren, do me a favor and take the basin and towels downstairs, would you? I’ll be down to start dinner in a minute,” I assured her, knowing that she was unlikely to leave of her own volition.

  Reluctantly, Jenny gathered the dirty pajamas and rolled them into the bath towel. These articles she put into the still-full washbasin and, noting my expression, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll throw it all into the washing machine. But first,” she added, sighing heavily, “I need a smoke.”

  I wanted a cigarette badly myself but had begun the difficult process of quitting, and often played games with myself to strengthen my resolve. Nothing, I instructed my weaker self, could be more important than being completely present to this moment. Sitting on the bedside next to my father, I allowed my eyes to wander slowly around the room, taking in the neglected objects of a fifty-year marriage: my mother’s chest of drawers and vanity mirror, unused for decades, pushed into a corner to make way for the large table my father used as a desk; a whitewashed bookshelf featuring a framed photograph of me taken when I had won a poetry contest in the eighth grade; a beautiful oak chest covered with frayed blankets and old newspapers; books littering every available surface; a long, narrow mirror nailed to the wall; the incongruously lush forest green carpet laid wall to wall lo, those many years ago, when such an addition would have been considered luxurious.

  The bedside table had been reordered, and now the paraphernalia of a terminal illness had usurped the items so familiar to a child’s eye—the pack of Pall Malls, the ashtray, the lighter, the library book. This table contained a small drawer, one which had long been off-limits. My father had never stated that it was, in fact, forbidden, but this is the mystery I attached to that drawer, and so had never known its secret contents. I glanced at my father, then pulled the drawer open. The small enclosure was untidy, clearly intended as a receptacle for afterthoughts. An old silver lighter rested on its back next to a faded black-and-white photograph of Tessie. Beyond the photograph, gathering dust in the nether regions of the drawer, lay an old passport. Eagerly, I fished it out and flipped it open. Astounded, I saw my own face staring back at me. Looking at the expiration date, I searched my memory until, with an exclamation of surprise, I recalled the reason for the discarded passport. I was twenty-one years old and had been visiting home for a weekend before I had to leave to shoot a film in Ireland. At some point over that weekend, I had opened my bag and realized, to my horror, that my passport had expired.

  Frantically, I had beseeched my father to prevail upon his friend Chuck Murphy who, as the postmaster, could issue a temporary passport in time for me to make my flight to Dublin. My father had sought this favor from his friend, and the next day I had driven down to the post office, where, to his growing discomfort, the postmaster had been made to listen to the extravagant effusions of gratitude that only a twenty-one-year-old actress who had narrowly escaped disaster can offer.

  What I could not explain to myself was why my father had kept the passport. This was puzzling to me, and I longed to solve the mystery. Did the postmaster return the expired passport to my father one day, over drinks at their customary haunt? Did Mr. Murphy perhap
s intimate, throwing the document on the bar counter, that he found it both amusing and intriguing that his pal T. J.’s daughter needed a passport renewal in order to get to Ireland in time to make a movie? Did my father, then, insist on buying a round of drinks, over which he downplayed the entire episode? She’s a piece of work, all right, an oddball like her mother, he might have suggested, smiling. Yes, but, T. J., let’s face it, Mr. Murphy may have responded, your oddball kid’s got a first-class ticket to Dublin to star in a movie with Richard Burton. My father, accepting his first drink of the day from the bartender, may have lifted his glass to Mr. Murphy and said, That may be true, but she wasn’t going anywhere without your help, pal. They would have touched glasses, father to father and friend to friend, and that would have been the end of that.

  I think some feeling must have swelled in him, seated at the bar, that day, and that is why he tucked the passport into his jacket pocket until, sitting on the edge of his bed that night—just as I was doing now—he had recalled the words of his friend Chuck Murphy and, crossing the room to retrieve the passport from his jacket pocket, he had looked at it, chuckled softly, opened his bedside drawer, and tossed it inside.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Mexican approach to death is level, unfettered by sentimentality.

  “When?” Lucy wanted to know.

  We sat across from each other at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Lucy made coffee just as I’d taught her twenty years earlier, with freshly ground beans and a touch of cinnamon. The house had not yet stirred. I knew enough not to pull any punches with Lucy but, at the same time, I needed to protect my brother. This would be a fine dance, given the natural antipathy between them.

  “Soon,” I answered, “maybe even today. But I don’t have a crystal ball, so it’s impossible to predict exactly when.”

  Lucy nodded, and rose to get the coffeepot. As she poured the coffee into my cup, she said, “I visit el señor last night, after I put Beanie to bed. He no look so good. Maybe he ready. He in a lot of pain, señora.”

  “We’re on top of that,” I assured her.

  “How you on top?” Lucy demanded, pushing the creamer in my direction.

  “We’re giving him the morphine every few hours, we’re watching his pain.”

  “You can tell when el señor need the morphine?” she asked, pointedly.

  Not wanting to sound defensive, I told her the truth.

  “He’s dying, Lucy, we’re certain of that. His days are numbered—maybe his hours are numbered. We’re keeping him as comfortable as possible.”

  “I no understand what that mean, señora. The señor, he tell you himself he uncomfortable? He ask for the drug? No, he don’t speak. Just the look on his face, señora. That tell the story,” Lucy said.

  “And I am watching his face very carefully,” I countered, not without an edge.

  “I think you watch el señor’s face but you wait until is okay with the nurses. Until is okay with Joe,” Lucy said, her dark eyes flashing.

  Defeated, I put my head in my hands. This was a battle I did not want to engage in, given the willfulness of the adversaries involved. Joe and Lucy shared an antipathy born out of an intuitive and mutual distrust, a dynamic that confounded the rest of us and one that, despite our best efforts, we were unable to rectify.

  “I can’t win, Luce, no matter what I do. I just can’t win,” I complained, fatigue getting the better of me.

  “You can win, señora. You a strong woman,” Lucy stated, already moving to the sink. As she pulled on yellow rubber gloves, the back door swung open and Joe walked in. He allowed the screen door to bang shut but stayed in the back room, stamping his feet on the doormat.

  “How bad outside?” I asked my brother.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit,” he replied, unzipping his down jacket.

  “Have a cup of coffee,” I suggested, indicating the chair opposite me.

  “I don’t drink coffee, Kate,” my brother explained, as if to a small child. “I drink tea. How many times do I have to tell people that?”

  “As many times as it takes to get a cup of tea, I guess,” I replied, rising to put the kettle on.

  “Thanks, Bate,” Joe mumbled, crossing to the chair without acknowledging Lucy. A high-wire act could have been performed on the line of tension between them.

  “You get any sleep last night?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  My brother shrugged as if to say, What does it matter?

  “How’s Dad? Any change?” Joe had asked this question every morning for the past week, and every morning I had delivered a short update on our father’s decline.

  “His breathing is completely erratic,” I said. “The grimace is pronounced.”

  Joe sighed, just as his father had sighed; heavily, accompanied by a sound of tremendous fatigue.

  “That fucking grimace trumps everything, doesn’t it?”

  My brother had not started the day well, had probably slept little the night before, and knew that the hours about to unfold would do so with agonizing slowness.

  I did not respond, but went about the business of making him a cup of tea.

  “How about some eggs?” I urged, standing at the stove.

  “Christ, no,” Joe replied, emphatically.

  Soon, we would make our way up the front stairs and into my father’s bedroom. Soon, but not yet. There was time enough for a hot drink, a word, before it began all over again, this exacting process of seeing our father to his death. My patience with the life force was wearing thin, although I didn’t dare to openly admit it. If I scratched at the surface of this anxiety, the truth would soon be revealed, and I would be forced to acknowledge it.

  My father had captured it so effortlessly: I don’t fear death, but I don’t welcome it, either. Death did not frighten him, or so he had said two weeks earlier, fortified by many drinks. To be finished with life, one needs to be utterly exhausted, and worn out by heartache. The loss of Maggie at three months followed thirteen years later by the death of Tessie had swung savagely at my father’s well-being, crippling his confidence. His failing asphalt business, his compromised health, his increasing need for drink, all of this contributed to my father’s passive appraisal of death, where once he would have fought like a lion. It was this transformation from lion into a creature he could no longer identify that led my father to his own demise. This man, who had once loved passionately, fought fiercely, laughed often, now spent his days in an empty room doing crossword puzzles.

  It is any man’s choice to do crossword puzzles or not and is not in itself diminishing. What eroded my father’s pride more than anything was the bitterness he had promised himself as a young man would never get the better of him. Observing his own father’s behavior, he had sworn to be a different kind of man, and so he believed he was when he met and wooed my mother. My mother had the artist’s inner sight, however, and that is why she resisted him for so long. She knew that somewhere in my father’s character, somewhere as yet hidden to her, there existed a terrible wound, and that one day, because of this damage, he would be forced to abandon her. Not physically, of course, but in the far more effective way of disappearing through emotional escape. When it became clear to my father that he had lost his wife’s regard, he decided to make for himself a new way of life, one that demanded only a modicum of communication. As my mother’s disappointment deepened, my father drank with increasing abandon. In this way, he neither acknowledged nor felt the pain that, with exquisite denigration, reduced him to a man who had traded companionship for crossword puzzles.

  There is a slim chance that my father did not recognize that he had substituted someone else for himself, but only a very slim chance. After all, he was unusually adroit at crossword puzzles and had spent his years of idleness becoming a master wordsmith. He knew the significance of things. He knew that his days no longer constituted a meaningful life, at least not as he had once understood a meaningful life to be. He knew that he had succumbed to his fa
ther’s weakness, and this alone was enough to separate him from his own life, and the person in it whom he had loved unconditionally. It is little wonder, then, that he could wax philosophical about death. Whatever else he would be made to endure in this life, he knew would be reasonably quick, and that the suffering that had come to define him would soon be over.

  Trudging up the stairs, I felt again a surge of tenderness for my brother, whose love for his father was virtually unstained. I envied him this innocence and wanted to protect him from the loss of it, but at the same time I found the daily inching toward death almost intolerable. Grief manifests itself in many ways and is often perverse. In me, it whipped up an intense longing to see my father at peace, safely removed from the prying eyes of the excellent hospice nurses, the expressions of morbid curiosity on the faces of the children, the fraying nerves of those keeping the protracted vigil.

  Joe’s love for our father was not like my love. His was a love without criticism, without judgment. If anything, his love for our father was purer than any other love he had experienced. Even his passion for a wild, blond Irish gypsy who would bear him three children could not surpass the devotion he felt for his father. His childhood, his youth, his manhood, and all of his dreams were somehow made right by this love. It was the one relationship that had both defined and sustained him. He did not want his father to die.

  In the bedroom, we assessed the situation. Our father’s breathing had become ragged, his inhalations profoundly disturbing, as if he had been held underwater and could break the surface only after protracted periods of submersion. It was torture to watch his chest expand, his rib bones stretching the skin of his torso in a desperate attempt to take in oxygen. Equally torturous were the periods of stillness that followed, and the terrible uncertainty of what that stillness meant.