Let Me Be Frank With You

by Richard Ford

  Though every Haddam citizen I have a word with—not that many, admittedly—seems on board with the new austerity, even if it promises a dead stop to what was once our reality. “Feeling the pinch,” “cinching the family belt up two notches,” appear to make us feel at one with the rest of the world’s economic downturn—which we know to be bad, but not that bad, not yet, not here.

  Possibly I’m the only one paying close attention. I still possess a municipal memory from my years of selling and reselling, mortgaging and re-mortgaging, eventually overseeing the razing and replacing of many a dream home. Clearly, though, some wound has scarred our psyche. And it’s a mystery how it will sort out before the last sprawl-able acre’s paved over and there’s no place left to go but away and down.

  MY MISSION INTO THE NIGHT’S SINISTER WEATHER, four days before Christmas, is to deliver to Ann a special, yoga-approved, form-fitted, densely foamed and molded orthopedic pillow, which she can sleep on, and that’s recommended by neurologists in Switzerland to homeopathically “treat” Parkinson’s—of which she’s a new sufferer—by reducing stress levels associated with poor sleep, which themselves are associated with neck pain, which is associated with too-vivid dreams, all associated with Parkinson’s. Ann has resided in the Beth Wessel, able-bodied/independent wing since last June. She has her own two-bedroom, Feng-Shui-approved apartment, does her own cooking, drives her own Focus, occasionally sees old friends from De Tocqueville Academy, where she once coached the Lady Linksters, and has even acquired a “boyfriend”—a former Philadelphia cop named “Buck.” (He has a last name, but I can’t pronounce it, since it’s Polish.) Buck’s a large, dull piece of cordwood in his seventies, given to loose-fitting permanently-belted trousers, matching beige sweatshirts of the kind sold at Kmart, big galunker, imitation-suede shoes, and the thinnest of thin pale hosiery. Somewhere, someone convinced Buck that a sculpted “imperial” and a pair of black horn-rimmed Dave Garroway specs would make him look less like a Polish meatball, and make people take him more seriously, which probably never happens—though he’s officially on the record as “handsome.” He could pass as the “good” cop who genially interrogates the poor black kid from the projects, until he suddenly loses his temper, bulges his eyes, balls up his horseshoe fists in the kid’s face, and scares the shit out of him. Buck’s carrying around a different John Grisham book every time I see him and refers to himself only as a “first responder.” (I’ve seen his old Blazer in the parking lot with “Frst Rspndr” on his yellow Jersey plate.) I regularly encounter him lurking in the big public “living room”—he doesn’t have enough to do, with no robberies and home invasions to get his mitts into. He likes the idea that Ann (who he infuriatingly calls “Miss Annie”) . . . that Ann and I “go way back,” which isn’t quite the word for it; and that he and I share private, implicitly sexual understandings about her that men such as we are would never speak about, but that in the aggregate are “special,” possibly symbolic, and render us both lucky-to-have-lived-this-long foot soldiers in Miss Annie’s army.

  Like me, Buck’s a prostate “survivor,” and his personal talk is the sort that would drive Ann straight to the rafters. It includes his rank disdain for Viagra (“. . . no need for that junk. I prize my stiffy, lemme tell ya . . .”); his die-hard fandom for the Flyers; the existence of a “horse pill,” obtainable online that makes “us prostate guys piss like Percherons,” thereby avoiding the “men’s room blues.” Needless to say he doesn’t like Obama and blames him for shit-canning the American dream by creating a “lost decade” when it came to “little people keeping up.” “He’s a nice enough guy”—meaning the President—“but he wasn’t ready to assume the mantle . . .” Yippity, yippity, yippity. Bush of course was ready. Ann, I’m convinced, spends time with him only to display for me the limitless variety of Homo sapiens who can easily fill my long-empty shoes. Though why should affairs of his heart (and hers) be less inscrutable than the affairs of my own?

  It’s not, however, the simplest of emotional transits to be driving out four days before Christmas to visit my ex-wife (we’ve been divorced thirty years!) in an extended-care facility, suffering an incurable and fatal disease, and with whom I’ve not been all that friendly, but who’s now a twenty-minute drive away and somehow or other presenting issues. Relations end nowhere, as the poet said.

  HOW ANN DYKSTRA CAME TO RESIDE TWENTY MINUTES from my doorstep is a bittersweet tale of our time and should serve as cautionary—if one’s “long-ex-wife” constitutes a demographic possible to comprehend and thus beware of.

  When Ann retired off the athletic faculty at De Tocqueville (it was not long after my Thanksgiving injury in 2000, from which I was a god’s own time recovering; two to the thoracic bull’s-eye leaves a mark), she’d begun keeping time but expecting nothing serious, with one of her De Tocqueville colleagues, the lumbering, swarthy-skinned, curly-haired ex–Harvard math whiz and life-long mother’s boy, Teddy Fuchs. Years before, Teddy had been headed for celestial math greatness, but had suffered a “dissociative episode” on the eve of his thesis defense on rectilinear quadratic equations and been banished to prep-school teaching at De Tocqueville, a not-long drive from where his parents lived on The Shore in Belmar. At De Tocqueville, Teddy was regarded by all as profound and gentle and (what else?) super-bright, and as having “this special connection” with kids, which persuaded everybody that prep-school teaching was his true métier, rather than being a chaired professor at Cal-Tech with a clear shot at a Nobel, but possibly never being “rilly, rilly” happy like the rest of high school teachers.

  Teddy, at age sixty, had never married, but had avoided the standard smirks and yorks and back-channel eye rollings about “his sexuality,” by being benign. There were no rumors or Greenwich Village à deux sightings, or mysterious “friends” brought to faculty cookouts. Some people really are what they seem to be—though not that many. Teddy and Ann began “seeing each other,” began being a couple, taking trips (Turks and Caicos, Tel Aviv, the Black Sea port of Odessa) and speaking exclusively in terms of the other (“I’ll have to ask Ann about that . . .”; “You know, back when Ted was at Harvard . . .”; “Ann has a tee time . . .”; “Teddy wrote an influential paper about that his junior year, which caused a lot of stir . . .”). These are mostly things she would never have said about me, since flogging suburban houses on cul-de-sacs that once were cornfields in West Windsor rarely gets you noticed by the folks at the Stanford linear accelerator.

  I know any of this only because our daughter, Clarissa Bascombe, now a veterinarian in Scottsdale, told me. Clarissa has always kept semi-taut lines with her mother—though much tauter with me and her brother. Back when it was all getting started with Teddy, Clarissa believed her mom could “tolerate” only a “platonic relationship,” and that there was neither hanky nor panky afoot; that Teddy, though large, Levantine, hairy, and apparently sensual, was in fact harmless and “remote from his body” (lesbians think they know everything). And that after Ann’s two marriages to two unsatisfactory men—one of them me—being with a man like Teddy (thoughtful, hopelessly reliable, obedient, occasionally mirthful but not that much, no bad history with women, a good cook, and most important—Jewish, guaranteeing, Clarissa believed, no unwanted sexual advances) . . . Teddy was all but perfect. Like most explanations, it’s as plausible as anything else. Plus Clarissa liked Teddy (I only met him twice, by accident). They had Harvard in common and for all I know sat up late nights singing the fucking songs.

  Long story short (it’s never short enough), Ann retired and so did Teddy, whose mother had conveniently died at age ninety. Ann had dough from her second marriage. Teddy had his dead parents’ three-thousand-square-foot condo overlooking the sea in Belmar. A charmed coming-together, it seemed, was forged for both parties: an acquaintance that hesitantly blossomed into “something more,” instead of the usual less; a mutually acknowledged, if somewhat not-fully-shared sense of life’s being better when not spent dismally alone; a w
illingness to try to take an interest in the other (learn golf, learn calculus). Plus the condo.

  Ann and Teddy sent around at home announcements—one actually came to me—declaring “the uniting of all our assets—real, spiritual and virtual.” I took note, but not serious note. As far as I was concerned, Ann had simply embarked on another new course in life, the main source of interest and primary selling point of which was that it carried her further away from being my wife and nearer to becoming just another person I might never have known, whose obituary my eye might pass over without the slightest pause or twinge. Which is the goal and most perfect paradigm of what we mean when we say divorce.

  Though of course that’s crazy. The kids see to it. As does memory—which, short of Alzheimer’s, never lets you off the mat.

  Following which, and after four years of landing on glaciers in minuscule airplanes, walking the Via Dolorosa barefoot, two trips to the Masters—a life-long dream of Ann’s—back-country treks into the Maghreb, plus any number of books-on-tape, videos of Harvard lectures on neuroplasticity, trips to Chautauqua to hear washed-up writers squawk about “what it’s like to be them,” plus four visits to Mayo to keep up with heart anomalies Teddy believed he’d inherited from his Harvard experience—following all that, Teddy simply died one morning while sitting, an oversized baby, in the Atlantic surf wearing pink bathing trunks. An aneurysm. “Dead. At sixty-four,” as Paul Harvey used to say. Ann, who was on the tenth-floor balcony watching him with pleasure, saw him topple over face-into-the-sea. She thought he was playing a joke and laughed and waited for him to right himself. He had a comic side.

  Ann lived on in the condo after Teddy’s death. I had no idea what she did or how she did it. “Mom’s fine,” was the most Clarissa would allow, as if I was not to know. Paul Bascombe, our son—an unusual man-apart on his best day, and now happily running a garden supply in KC—maintains only a distant fondness for his mother, and so had nothing to inform me about her. Complications and unfathomables in “dealing with” one or another aging parent seem now to be the norm for modern offspring.

  SALLY AND I SOLD OUR BEACH HOUSE ON POINCINET Road, Sea-Clift, in the late selling-season of ’04. We’d thought about it for a while. Someone, though, just came driving past the house one day in a Mercedes 10-million SEL, saw me on the deck glassing striper fishermen with my Nikons. The guy came to the foot of the side stairs, shading his eyes, and asked out of the blue what it’d take to buy the place. I told him a lordly figure (this kind of thing’s not unusual; I was always expecting it). The guy, Arnie Urquhart from Hopatcong, said that number sounded reasonable. I came halfway down the steps. He came halfway up. I said my name. We shook hands. He wrote a check for the earnest right on the spot. And in three weeks Sally and I were outside supervising Mayflower men, getting our belongings into storage or off to the auctioneers in Metuchen.

  Our move to Haddam, a return to streets, housing stocks and turbid memories I thought I’d forever parted with, was like many decisions people my age make: conservative, reflexive, unadventurous, and comfort-hungry—all posing as their opposite: novel, spirited, enlightened, a stride into the mystery of life, a bold move only a reckless few would ever chance. As if I’d decided to move to Nairobi and open a Gino’s. Sadly, we only know well what we’ve already done.

  And yet, it’s been fine—with a few surprises. The hurricane. The recession. Nothing, though, Sally or I consider embittering or demoralizing. Ann Dykstra (Ann Dykstra-Fuchs—she and Teddy tied the knot on one of their glaciers, in Greenland) was not in our thinking. She was “someplace” nearby, but out of sight. I couldn’t have said precisely where. In time I knew about Teddy’s departure, the renewed widowhood made somberer by the feeling (I filled this in) that Teddy was the best she’d ever have. Divorcing me decades back, leaving the children stranded, marrying a turd like Charley O’Dell—her second husband—and ending up alone . . . all that had been prologue to a door opening on a long beautiful corridor and to a much more cleanly lighted place where she’d ever been lucky enough to live, if only for a precious few years. I was happy not to think any of these things. Though I think them now. She was fine—just the way her daughter put it.

  But then Ann began to “notice her body” in a way she hadn’t. Athletes, of which Ann is a classic example, notice goings-on in their muscular-skeletal underpinning long before the rest of us, and long before they notice depression, despondency, psychic erosion or anything “soft-tissue” in nature.

  “I realized I would only swing one arm when I walked down the fairway,” she said when we went for Mexican lunch at Castillo’s in Trenton. I now see her more, which Sally thinks is “appropriate,” though I have less good feelings about it. “I thought, ‘Well, what in the hell is this about? Did I wrench my arm going to the bathroom at night and forget all about it? I guess I’m losing it.’” She grinned a big, amazed, open-faced June Allyson grin across our two plates of chiles rellenos. Discovering the disease that’s going to kill you can apparently be an exhilarating tale of late-in-life discovery—if only because genuine late-in-life discoveries are fewer and fewer.

  There, however, turned out to be “just the slightest tremor,” which was confined to her “off hand” (she’s a righty), something she attributed to age and the stress of widowhood. Her penmanship (the numbers she penciled onto her scorecard) had grown smaller and less clear. Plus, she wasn’t sleeping well, and sometimes felt more tired the longer she slept. “And I was constipated.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head and looked up. “You know me. I’m never constipated.” When we were married we didn’t talk about this little-known fact.

  An entirely scheduled physical proved “concerning.” Abominable “tests” (I’ve had ’em) were performed. “Nothing really conclusive,” she told me. “You can’t diagnose Parkinson’s. You eliminate everything it’s not, and Parkinson’s is what’s left.”

  “Surveillance” drugs were administered, which, if successful in eliminating the tremor, the fatigue and the bowel issues, meant (perversely) Parkinson’s was likely the ticket. And Parkinson’s was indeed the ticket. Continuing the drugs, however, would keep the symptoms at bay, though there might be some nausea (she’s had it) and some bp drops. But life as we know it—the elusive gold standard—could be anticipated, she told me, possibly for years, assuming continued exercise and patience with dosage adjustments. For all of which she’s a natural.

  “Who knows,” she said the day she told me the whole story at lunch, “in a year they may figure the whole goddamn thing out and I’ll be good as new—for sixty-nine.” In later years, Ann’s begun talking like her late father, Henry, a man I dearly loved long after Ann and I went in the drink. Henry was a feeder-industry magnate for the automotive monolith (he produced a thing that made a metal thing that caused a smaller third thing not to get too hot, and work better; these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite). Henry was a tile-back, tough-talking, little banty-rooster Dutchman, not above carrying a loaded pistol onto the shop floor to face down a union steward. Coarse talk, sexual parts, bodily functions were never in his daughter’s repertoire when she and I were experiencing marital bliss in the ’70s. But they seem to be her choices now. I’d be lying, though, if I said I didn’t miss the softer, callow girl Ann was before our son died and everything went flying apart like atoms splitting—our civilized etiquettes along with it.

  The other unexpected news come to light since Ann moved to Carnage Hill is that I’ve learned she’s lied about her age the entire time I’ve known her—a long time now. When I met her in New York and we were a pair around town circa 1969, I was a sophisticated (I thought) twenty-four, and Ann Dykstra of Birmingham, Michigan, a winsome, athletic, somewhat skeptical twenty-two. Except in truth, she was a winsome, athletic twenty-five, having run away to Ireland her sophomore year with a boy from Bally O’Hooley who had more distance on his fairway woods than anybody on the men’s squad, and to whom she dedicated eightee
n months of less than ideal life, before coming back humiliated to Ann Arbor. When I married her, at City Hall, Gotham, in February 1970, our marriage license clearly stated her age as twenty-three (I was by then twenty-five). I still have the diploma and over the years have had occasions to take it out of its green-leather envelope and to give it good, longing-filled lookings-at. I never saw her birth certificate, and she didn’t show me her passport. But when she asked me to look at her Parkinson’s work-up—she wanted me to know all about things for reasons of her own—there in the fine print at the top of page one was DOB. 1944! “Look,” I said (a dumb-bell), “they made a mistake on your birth date.” “Where?” Ann said. We were at Pete Lorenzo’s. She gave the paper a quick, absent look. “No, they haven’t,” she said impatiently. “It says ‘1944,’ though,” I said (a dumbbell). “You weren’t born in 1944.” “I certainly was. When did you think I was born?” “Nineteen forty-six,” I said, somewhat meekly. “Why did you think that?” “Because that’s what you said when we got married, and that’s what’s on our marriage license. And when I met you, you said you were twenty-two.” “Oh, well.” She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “What difference does it make?” “I don’t know,” I said. “It does.” “Why, exactly,” Ann said dryly. “Have you lost all respect for me now?” “No,” I said. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand that.” It was then that she told me about long-driver Donnie O’Herlihy or O’Hanrahan or O’Monagle, or whatever the hell his name was, and of her flight across the sea to Ireland and the ill-starred passions on the Bay of Bally O’Whatever.