by Kate Mulgrew
Joe gazed at his father’s face with the expression of a young boy who knew he had come to a primal, unavoidable rite of passage but who, nonetheless, longed to turn back time, if only for a week.
Undeniably, the grimace had deepened, forming angry clefts in my father’s brow. I put my arm around my brother’s shoulder and said, “He’s clearly in severe discomfort, Bo. We need to do something about it.”
My brother looked at our father and then, without a word, turned and left the room.
I waited. No one else was present, the day had just begun. Within minutes, Joe returned and, walking over to me, extended his hand. In it, lay the small blue packet containing the syringes of morphine. He did not meet my eyes, but transferred the packet to me abruptly, with barely concealed disgust.
“You do it,” he whispered. In these three words, fury, contempt, and despair were unmasked.
Joe did not linger, but walked quickly out of the room, leaving the door ajar.
I stood at the foot of the bed for a moment, holding the blue packet. It did not occur to me to close the door. Instead, I waited until my father drew another breath, and then I moved to his side. Sitting on the bed, I placed the packet on the bedside table. Inching closer to my father, I lowered my head until my mouth reached his ear.
“If you can hear me, Dad, I want you to listen. It’s time to let go. I love you, we all love you, but we don’t want you to suffer anymore. It’s enough. I’m going to give you something that will put you to sleep, and that will be all. Okay?”
Pulling back, I searched my father’s face for any sign of response. There was none; not in the eyes, motionless beneath blue lids, not in the pale lips, not in the coarsely veined nose. No pulse struggled in the darkening throat.
I took the packet and unzipped it. Inside, six syringes of morphine were arranged in tiny cots. Withdrawing a single syringe, I gently opened my father’s mouth. Inserting the syringe into his cheek, I held it there until I was certain the drug had been absorbed. I continued to do this until only one syringe remained.
My brother was pacing downstairs, but his grief reached me upstairs, sitting by our father’s side. I stroked my father’s face, his white hair. Holding the last syringe, I put my lips to my father’s ear and said, “I love you, Dad. I love you. Let go now.” Carefully, I moved the syringe into the flesh of my father’s cheek, and as I did this, I thought I discerned some movement in my father’s face. For a brief, unnerving moment, I had the idea that he was attempting to shake his head, but the movement was so slight, so far away, as to be almost imperceptible. Still, I returned the empty syringe to its cot and sat there, scrutinizing my father’s face.
There had been no movement, of course. Such an effort far exceeded my father’s capacity. It had been a figment of my imagination, nothing more.
The only movement I would recollect in years to come was the suddenness with which my father’s grimace disappeared. It was as if it had never existed at all.
Chapter Fifteen
Sitting on my father’s bed, waiting for him to die, I took my time before calling down to Joe. I wanted to be alone with my father, I wanted to rest with him. I studied his face for what I knew would be the last time and felt as I had always felt when my father slept; that he was never really completely asleep but only waiting to be disturbed by the rude noises of children, his wife playing Chopin badly on the piano, a car full of friends pulling into the driveway, a daughter across the hall packing her suitcase, cursing the insufficiency of her wardrobe.
He had been eager for me to leave the nest. This was something I felt acutely, and consequently I had moved in that direction with preternatural focus. Why he was so anxious for me to get out of the house and into the world remains a mystery, and one that will never be solved. The evidence, however, suggests that he was self-centered and maybe a little jealous. He was tired of watching me monopolize my mother’s time and attention and was further frustrated by her obvious pride in me. She had always championed me and, in an act of deliberate perverseness, my father took the opposite approach. Perhaps he thought he was preparing me for the harsh realities of the world, or perhaps he didn’t give a damn. I’m inclined to believe that he didn’t really care what I did or where I went, as long as I got the hell out of his hair. In fairness, I think he felt this way about all of us. What had begun as a romantic ideal had ended in weariness and grief. This was the result of producing too many children at too rapid a rate and then, out of a general sense of indifference, leaving them to grow up essentially unsupervised.
My father saw me perform exactly twice over the course of thirty years. The first time was when I played Tamora in a very fraught production of Titus Andronicus at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Sitting in my underground dressing room, shared by all of my fellow actresses, I heard my father’s voice rising above the din: “When the hell is halftime?”
Many years later, my father escorted me to a screening of an independent film I’d shot in Ireland with Richard Burton. He agreed to do this because the film was being shown at a theater in Dubuque, Iowa, to help raise funds for a local charitable institution. When it was over, I leaned in and asked him what he’d thought of it, to which he immediately responded, “Couldn’t understand a goddam word.”
Curmudgeonly and critical though he may have been, at the root of it he simply couldn’t be bothered. He knew enough about my career to take his jabs with precision. Kitten, a nickname I loved, was more and more often replaced by sobriquets such as Hollywood or Big Shot and, though he made it clear this was all in jest, it always stung. I was careful to conceal this from my father, who was extremely intolerant of petulance and whose response to hurt feelings was to further belittle the victim. If he was unpredictable as a young father, he was seldom cruel. It was only after Tessie died and he’d sold his business that he became increasingly solitary but, when his solitude was threatened, he could move with the lightning speed of a scorpion. We cannot escape our DNA, and as my father advanced into old age he withdrew into himself rather than become the brute his father had been. As for his mother, none of us was encouraged to come home for her funeral. “Don’t bother,” my father had said to me on the phone, “she’s dead as a doornail.”
And yet. I never ceased to long for his approval, for a warm glance, a wink. I had, after all, danced on his shoes when I was five, and according to him it was I who drove him to drink when, at the age of six months, I discovered the unutterable delights of solid food and expressed this unbridled passion by dumping whole jars of pureed bananas on my head. It was not disappointment but rather heartbreak I experienced when, at the age of seven, I felt myself being lifted into my father’s arms and heard him say, “This is the last time I carry this one up the stairs. Jesus, she’s all there, isn’t she?”
He could convert himself into a frighteningly perfect gorilla, and would chase us through the house until, screaming for mercy, we threw ourselves at his feet. He could roll up the rug and transform the dining room into a dance floor, if he had a mind to. For a long time, he made my mother laugh until she cried, and for many years he carried himself with aplomb. When his beauty eroded, he accepted it with apparent grace, and went about the business of growing old with discretion and dignity. It’s true, he was a terrible miser, and for this he cannot be forgiven, but even this was overlooked when he’d accept a drink, a head rub, or a soft-boiled egg and, looking at you, say, “You’re aces in my book, sugar.”
He had, for me, a charisma that remained undimmed by time. In his presence, there was always the possibility of love. It hovered ever near and, though it seldom showed itself, it was distinctly real. Occasionally, finding myself alone with my father in the living room, I would sense the distance between us softly closing, and something else opening up. It was more than the need for a drink, or the sudden impulse for company. It was a silent bridge that we acknowledged, a bridge that ran between us, one that we saw and felt but somehow could not cross. He would glance up, then, as i
f surprised to find me there and, in that moment, I would read in his eyes what he could not say, and I understood that in this withholding lay all of the sorrows of his life, and all of the regret.
Chapter Sixteen
At twenty, I’d had some minor success on television and wanted to show off, so I stepped off the plane wearing a navy double-breasted merino coat that fell midcalf, and a matching deep blue beret. My mother usually started waving from inside baggage claim as soon as the plane touched down. Neither a frantic nor a friendly wave, hers was a very singular greeting, both arms fully extended and raised high above her head. In those days, the Dubuque Regional Airport was not much bigger than an old-fashioned wraparound porch, and as we approached the gate I could always make out her trim figure behind the glass pane. This time, she was nowhere to be seen. She must be late, I thought, or she might be parking, although neither of these possibilities seemed plausible. My mother was never late, and the rules of parking eluded her altogether. She simply pulled into any spot that could accommodate her car, turned off the ignition, and left.
I descended the steps of the twin turboprop plane, crossed the postage stamp of a tarmac, and quickly made my way into the terminal. Having fully expected my mother to pick me up, I was at first surprised and then bewildered to find my father standing on the far side of the small baggage carousel. My father had never, in all the years I’d been flying home, collected me at the airport. According to him, this was a duty reserved for my mother, and so it should be, allowing mother and daughter to work off some of that heady separation steam that kept the two of them locked in a world of their own for what often seemed like days. Yet here he was, wearing a forest green windbreaker and his Timberland work boots, one hand lightly tucked inside the pocket of his khaki pants, the other holding a cigarette low to his side. From the tone of his getup, I concluded that he had taken a break from whatever road he was currently blacktopping and had told my mother that it would not be inconvenient to pick me up. Undoubtedly, she had been both surprised and perplexed by this offer, but my mother was not one to fight a good impulse, and so she had said, “That’s a novel idea,” and he had probably replied, “Might be a couple of hours,” which had startled my mother into a brief silence. “Well, don’t be late picking her up, Tom,” she’d cautioned him, as he walked out the back door. “I’m never late, and neither is Kitten!”
It was clear my father was not about to move toward me, so I crossed the room with a broad smile and said, “Dad! What a surprise! Did you come to get me?”
“No, just thought I’d take a drive, check out the beautiful Dubuque International Airport,” he said.
“Ever dazzling,” I agreed, and leaned in to kiss his cheek. The cheek was smooth, freshly shaven, and smelled of Old Spice.
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” he said.
While we waited for my suitcase to arrive on the carousel, my father fielded greetings from many people. People I had never seen before approached my father with an ease and cordiality that never ceased to amaze me. They came up to him and shook his hand and said, “How are you, T. J.? Haven’t seen you around much. This your daughter?”
Airports allow for a familiarity that other venues discourage. My father answered each of these strangers in turn, introducing me as he did so, until finally my little valise emerged through the mysterious black flaps behind which all luggage exists in a kind of limbo, eliciting a small shriek of joy from me. It was always a crapshoot, sending my bag to Dubuque from New York through Chicago. A fifty-fifty shot, I’d say, and when it didn’t make it there was almost a sense of relief. I knew, then, that I could wear my mother’s funky cotton pajamas with impunity, perhaps adding one of her soiled sweatshirts to ward off the chill. This was the preferred ensemble and one I did not alter until the day of my departure, when I reassembled myself into the snappy girl who lived in New York City.
A pleasant, portly man in his fifties came up and, looking at me, said to my father, “Well I’ll be damned, T. J.! This the girl who went off to seek her fortune in New York?”
“Allegedly,” my father answered drily, setting the stocky man off into chortles of approval. To this man, my father was not only successful, good-looking, and personable, but he was also one of the wittiest men in town. Hard to be witty and get away with it in Dubuque County, but my father had the gift, and it was appreciated. When my father introduced me to this man, he shot me a stern look, warning me to be polite and, if remotely possible, gracious. I instantly flipped the internal switch that regulated my attitude, took the man’s hand, and smiled at him warmly.
On our way to the car, I again expressed surprise that he had come to get me, to which my father responded, “The work site is nearby, and it’s almost lunchtime. Thought I’d save your mother the trouble.” He looked at me, checking my face for signs of disappointment. He found none.
“How about a bite at the Coach House before I take you home?”
This invitation, following so hard on the heels of his apparent pleasure in picking me up at the airport, gave me pause. Invitations to the Coach House were so rare as to be almost nonexistent. This was my father’s club, insofar as a vintage roadside tavern off Highway 20 could impersonate a club, ideally situated, as it was, between his office and his home. He went to the Coach House for lunch, and more nights than not stopped for a drink on his way home. Clearly, this explained my father’s almost perpetual absence from the dinner table. In this habit, he was not alone. His cronies, too, enjoyed a long liquid lunch and a quick stop-by before returning to their respective houses, wherein lurked a danger so palpable that none of these men were able to confront it without fortification. By this, I mean their wives, and their ever-growing broods of children. The danger lay not in the women and children per se, but in what might happen to the men were they to arrive in their kitchens unprepared to greet the discomfiting sight of so many ravenous mouths, crudely devouring whatever facsimile of meat loaf the wife, attired in sweatpants and greasy apron, her hair flattened with sweat and stinking of beef chuck and onion, had managed to place on the table before falling into her chair and succumbing to a sinking spell. “Sinking spells,” a form of modern-day midwestern neurasthenia, were very common among mothers when I was growing up, and my mother was no exception. After struggling with his responsibility as a father for perhaps a minute as he left his office and headed in the direction of his home, my father concluded that his time and goodwill were better spent among people who were more appreciative of his natural talents. Thus, around six o’clock his car would turn off Highway 20 into the small gravel parking lot outside the Coach House, and my father would enter the environment that had become his home away from home.
Naturally, it was an establishment that strongly discouraged the presence of children. Even wives, caught in the middle of a domestic emergency, were frowned upon. Should a woman suddenly appear tableside, it was considered unseemly, as if she had walked in on them all naked. She’d frantically communicate the nature of the catastrophe to her husband and, in what usually involved a brusque and irritable transaction of funds, he would then dismiss his wife by lifting his glass and shouting to the bartender, “One for the road, Mary!” It was seldom one for the road, however, what with this one buying this round, and that one buying another, and all of it drunkenly elliptical in its rules and regulations.
The Coach House had a mystique and an allure that was incontrovertible. Of course, I questioned my father’s motives in wanting to take me to lunch on a Friday, after I had just arrived from New York. Was there something he wanted to tell me? He hadn’t seen me in almost a year, during which time I’d landed a big part on a new soap opera and was living in a high-rise on Central Park West. My father did not mention the soap opera, not once during the time it took us to get to the Coach House from the airport. This struck me as odd, as it was his dearest wish to see us all completely independent and self-sufficient. However, experience had taught me to take his indifference in stride. I asked him how bus
iness was, he said fine, not getting as many bids as he’d like, but it was steady. And Mother, I inquired, how’s Mother doing?
“Your mother is fine,” he replied. His words were measured, and implicit in them was the warning not to come at him too hard about Tessie. My sister had died a year earlier of an astrocytoma brain tumor. She was fourteen years old, and her death had fractured the family.
“She’s got her goofy coterie of pals. Mother Columba, her painter friends, the priest out there, what’s his name?”
“William,” I said. “Father William, he’s the chaplain.”
“Right. And she’s got her studio—she’s in there all the time. Don’t know what the hell she’s doing in there for hours at a stretch.”
“She’s working, Dad,” I responded, incredulously. “She’s an artist. What do you think she’s doing in there?”
“How the hell would I know? That goofy music she has turned up so loud you can hear it all over the damn house. Door locked. Death masks, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is a death mask?” This was clearly a rhetorical question. He didn’t want to know why my mother was sculpting death masks, or what it meant. In the silence that fell between us as we approached the old tavern, there existed everything that could not be said without a drink. Even with a drink, my father was unlikely to share his deepest feelings with me. Certainly not the grief that leeched the life out of him after Tessie died. He did with his sorrow what he did with his love—he hid it. Intense feelings were better off compartmentalized, allowing life to go on, at least on the face of it.
We pulled off the road and onto the narrow strip of gravel that served as a parking lot. The Coach House was banked just off the highway, a nondescript single-level structure composed of dark wood and a metal-framed front door. To my surprise, my father came around and opened the passenger door, indicating that I was to precede him into the tavern.