My mother had driven her own car, and I had come with Ben and Paul so we could go to the election night party afterward. We met my father in the dayroom. It had pale yellow walls—a color chosen to be cheerful but not too arousing, a decor that would work for both the manics and the depressives. They had finally made my father shave. Without the beard that had covered his face for months, his skin looked baby-pale. He had lost so much weight so quickly that his skin hung in folds around his jowls and neck. He shook all the time now. I tried to remember how much he’d been shaking when he left the house for the hospital. Had he been shaking like this before the shock treatments? This trembling seemed to emanate from somewhere deep inside him, a small motor always turned on.
Though I could not stop what was happening to him, I felt a responsibility as his daughter to chart the harm being done, to serve as the recorder of events. I would have to be the guardian of his memories now too.
He gave us a weak smile that night when he first saw us. He was more communicative than he’d been on prior visits, when he’d just sat and fumed. As our conversation progressed, his facial expression turned placid, empty. Then suddenly, apropos of nothing in particular, his eyes filled with tears and his lip started to tremble, as if he were about to cry. Whatever had led to the tears flitted quickly from his mind. The tears aborted, an incongruous smile appeared in their place. It was as if he could not hold on to a thought long enough to sustain the emotion it carried.
He was in the midst of an enforced forgetting, an attempt to wipe all his slates clean.
My mother still held on to the belief that the doctors could simply excise the craziness and restore Ira to the state he’d been in before his breakdown. To me he seemed so radically transformed that I could not imagine ever getting him back.
Overly formal with us, Ira showed off his institutional setting with some pride of ownership, as shy as a third grader sharing his classroom at back-to-school night. In recent weeks, my mother had tried to recast the institution as a kind of summer camp where my father would have the benefit of fresh air and healthful nourishment, and would come back refreshed and rejuvenated. I tried not to imagine the shock treatments, the wires hooked up to his head, electricity surging through his brain. I was still trying to get a grip so the same thing would not happen to me.
“Want some ice cream?” he asked. “We have ice cream here.” My mother and I said yes. With great care, he went over to the small hotel-room-sized refrigerator and got three cardboard cups of vanilla ice cream and three small wooden spoons (there was no metal flatware allowed in the hospital). He carried them over to us, using his chin to support the stack of cartons in his shaking hands. We sat at a Formica-topped utility table that seemed slightly lower than normal adult table height. Up-close, my father smelled like talcum powder. After a while I realized that the talcum powder was only an overlay for something more medicinal, more chemical coming off his skin.
While my father ate his ice cream, he made the squeaky, half-grunting whimper in the back of his throat that guinea pigs or possums make when cornered. Tears began to collect in my own throat and made it hard to swallow. My ice cream melted and pooled in its carton, the cardboard growing damp and limp in my hands.
My mother had instructed us to engage my father in conversation about topics other than his health, paranoid fantasies, and the fact that he was being held against his will.
“Try to draw him out, get him interested in the world again,” she’d said in preparation for the visit.
Paul tried: “We’re going to Robert F. Kennedy’s election night party at the Ambassador tonight. The California Democratic primary was today, did you know?”
We weren’t sure if my father ever watched the TV that was on all the time in the communal living room.
“Remember I told you we’ve been volunteering in Bobby’s campaign?”
My father looked blank. He shrugged his shoulders, as if presidential campaigns belonged to some before-world he could not quite fathom. He resided in the realm of breakfast trays, pill time, arts and crafts, and procedure day.
“He’s going to win,” I added.
“Do you remember when you went to the Democratic Convention in 1960 and fought for Adlai Stevenson?” my mother said. He shrugged again.
“Daddy, are you proud of us for volunteering?” I said. He didn’t answer.
When my mother went off to the ladies’ room and was out of earshot, my brothers reading magazines across the room, my father’s mood darkened. He grabbed my forearm with amazing strength and snarled into my hair, “Your mother’s letting them scramble my brains. You need to get me out of here.”
I pictured the tensed muscles in my mother’s strong forearm, morning after morning, beating the eggs with a fork before scrambling them, and then imagined my father’s open skull, his brain clogged with an eggy, liquefied mess.
“Do you hear me?” he asked. He was shaking my arm till it hurt. His rancor filled the air like stale smoke.
“What do you want me to do, Daddy?” I said. “Mommy’s in charge. She thinks this will help you. I’m only sixteen! There’s nothing I can do about it. Just get better and then you can leave.”
“Aacckk”—an expression of pure disgust. He let go of my arm. “If you’re still my daughter, you’ll get me out of here.”
I shook my head silently and did not let his eyes find my eyes.
My mother returned from the ladies’ room and my brother Paul came over to where we were sitting.
“We have to go soon,” Paul said. “We don’t want to miss Bobby’s victory speech.” My father gave me a scornful look that told me I should be spending my spare time engineering his rescue. Why was I putting energy into Bobby Kennedy when my own father needed me? He would be holding me accountable; he would never forgive me for going along with this betrayal.
When my brothers and I arrived at the Ambassador Hotel, a large group of volunteers had already assembled in the Ambassador Ballroom on the lobby level. CBS had just declared Kennedy the winner, and the mood in the room was jubilant. Bobby would appear first in the Embassy Room upstairs, and then make a second speech, thanking the volunteers. A number of reporters, crusty-looking middle-aged men, with earphones that connected them to other reporters, huddled around the front of the room near the stage.
When we got word that Bobby had completed his victory speech upstairs, we began to chant: “We want Bobby, We want Bobby.” We felt exuberant, charged, alive, together. We were young and coming into power. Our chant went on for several minutes. The crowd grew more insistent, the chant shifting to the more raucous “RFK! RFK!”
What could be taking him so long? They’d told us that he had only to come down the elevator. Maybe he was a phony, after all, like all the other politicians, maybe he didn’t care about us low ly volunteers. The chant became angrier, as if we were jilted lovers who’d been stood up.
Then a dash of worry entered the room. The worry was always there in the background; after all, his brother had been murdered. Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King had also been assassinated. Lots of people hated Bobby Kennedy; these were volatile times, and he looked so fragile when he stood on the stage, as if he knew and had already forgiven us.
I wandered away from my brothers, near the front of the room where some reporters were congregated. I wanted to eavesdrop; I might become a journalist one day. And then I saw a reporter, a short man with a few strands of black hair combed over his bald head, grip a headphone tighter to his ear. He said, “What did you say? Are you sure? Are you sure?”
I saw something—a prelude to anguish—wash over his face. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he said.
It scared me. I wasn’t sure what it meant. The crowd was still shouting, revved up. I went over to where Ben was standing. “There’s something wrong,” I said. “I think something bad happened.” I pointed toward the reporters, who had begun to huddle at the front, and then to move quickly out of the room. The people near the fron
t of the room, on the right-hand side, where the reporters had been stationed, had stopped shouting. From where we stood, we could not hear them, only see the expressions of alarm on their faces. The message hadn’t transmitted yet to the other side of the room or the back, where people were still chanting, clapping, laughing, still trying to will Bobby to us.
Later, this would seem unbelievably cruel, this uneven delivery of information, this slow-motion loss of innocence—the disconnect between one side of the room and the other. Within seconds, the agony on the right side of the room moved through the crowd like a wave in a sports arena. Someone took the microphone and announced that Bobby had been hurt, and I heard a communal gasp of shock, and then a groan as the news traveled into our bodies. Finally the room filled with the sound of sniffling and then imploded with sobbing. Some people keeled half over, as if they were going to collapse, while others tried to steady them.
A man took the podium and made a more official announcement: “I want everyone to stay calm. Senator Kennedy has been shot.” Another gasp from the crowd. “He’s alive and he’s speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. The best way we can help him is to have an orderly clearing of this room. Please do not run. Let’s stay calm and walk out of this room.”
Hotel security and police appeared everywhere to usher us out, telling us that we had to clear the room, that it was important to exit the room in an orderly fashion. If he can speak, he must be all right, I thought.
“Let’s leave the room now,” the security guard kept repeating slowly, as if talking to children. People resisted, distrusting authority, suspecting that they were being humored. They hung back, as if by staying in the place where they had expected to see Bobby, they could reverse time, as if they might still conjure him up. Some grew irritable, as if to say, But don’t you understand, he was on his way here? We’re here waiting for him and if we just continue to wait then this bad thing you just said won’t be true. Don’t you see that we have to continue to wait?
“Walk, don’t run,” the security force kept repeating, and then, “Let’s have an orderly egress from the room.”
Dazed, I grasped Ben’s hand as we wandered into the massive lobby of the Ambassador, where all the rules of public decorum had changed.
Grown men, men I did not know, men dressed formally, in suits, ties askew now, shirts partly unbuttoned, took out their handkerchiefs and wept openly. Women gone white, their lips dry and caked, took off their shoes, and sat on the floor in torn stockings. A young Latino man fell to his knees crying, crossed himself, folded his hands, and began to sway back and forth, and pray in Spanish. People staggered, weaved, walked into walls as if drunk. A very distraught young man upended a heavy round coffee table, saying “No, no, not again. Not again.”
When I saw that, I became afraid for myself and noticed that I was trembling. It seemed that the potential for violence was everywhere. What if this was a conspiracy? The CIA? The Mob? Rumors raced through the crowd; the police were looking for a woman in a polka-dot dress. Someone had seen her flee the scene. I held on to a few words: He was speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. I held onto them all the way home. All the next day. He was speaking. He’s on his way to a hospital. People did not speak if they were about to die, I figured. They wouldn’t have taken him to a hospital if they didn’t believe they could save him.
Bobby lived through Tuesday night and all of Wednesday. They transferred him from one hospital to another; they performed surgery on his brain. I didn’t go to school on Wednesday, and my mother didn’t expect me to; we hadn’t gotten home till after 2:00 a.m. On Wednesday, my brothers, mother, and I kept the TV on all day, although mostly they just repeated the footage of Bobby lying on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel, a kitchen worker beside him, rosary beads placed in his hand. All day people conducted a vigil outside the hospital. Wednesday night at 10:00 p.m. or so, I went to bed.
On Thursday morning, my mother woke me.
“It’s time to get up for school,” she said.
With consciousness, it all flooded back over me. “How’s Bobby?” I said.
“He died,” she said, as if I should have known. It must have seemed obvious to her that he would not survive. But it had not seemed obvious to me. The abruptness of her words stung. I wailed and then started to sob.
Then came a strange, seemingly incongruous memory. I had been four when Princess, a neighborhood collie, had been hit by a motorcycle on the corner across the street from our house. Once Paul had taken my hand and put it on the bump on the back of Princess’s head, and then placed it on the bump at the back of my own head. “You’re blood sisters,” he’d said.
All the neighbors heard the crash and lined up on the sidewalk to see what had happened. The dog started to get up, and I heard a man say, “Princess is all right,” and I repeated loudly, with all my four-year-old self-assurance, “Princess is all right,” and then the dog lay back down and was still.
The next thing I saw was the boy up the street who owned Princess sobbing over her. “What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Doesn’t John have the right to grieve his own dog?” my mother snapped at me. As if I should have understood that Princess was no longer all right. I was ashamed of not having understood, of being caught unawares. I was ashamed of having hoped. Now I’d been caught hoping again, believing a man’s words again: He’s speaking. He’s on his way to the hospital. And I’d been trapped again by my mother’s rebuke.
“I’m not going to school!” I screamed. “How could you expect me to go to school when Bobby is dead?” What was wrong with my mother? How could she even think I would go to school? How could she be so cruel as to send me to that place where the majority of my classmates would not be grieving him, where some of them might even be celebrating his assassination, where I might hear the words “nigger lover” again? My mother threw up her hands in defeat; it was toward the end of the term and final tests, and I had already missed the prior day. “Whatever you want,” she said, “I can’t argue with you. I give up.”
That night on TV they kept playing a particular clip of him; I remember it as though it were on a continuous loop for hours. I watched it alone, sitting as close to our living room TV as I could get and still focus my eyes, close enough that I could almost touch Bobby’s face on the screen. At midnight, as my brothers lay in their beds in their shared bedroom and my mother lay in her bed at the other end of the house, I could not stop watching it. He was campaigning in Oakland at the end of May with football legend Rosey Grier. Rosey always sang “Spanish Harlem” on campaign stops, and on that stop, Bobby sang along. As he sang, his voice cracked and he smiled disarmingly; he could not carry a tune. He sounded like a thirteen-year-old boy whose voice was changing as he struggled to recite his haftarah at his Bar Mitzvah. Only he wasn’t embarrassed. He had transcended shame and gotten to humility. He took delight in allowing the crowd to see who he really was; exposing his own vulnerability made him jubilant. No one could fake that. And the crowd loved him for it; his openness opened up everyone else around him.
He’s right there, I thought, watching him. Wholly present. Completely himself. I could see exactly who he was, and I felt that if he had known me, he would have been able to see exactly who I was too. He seemed nothing like the other politicians, all veneer and pose and affectation. He wasn’t cool like Gene McCarthy; he didn’t have that superior, effete tone; he didn’t hide or fake his emotion. He was right in there with the people. Bobby was a tender soul like me, and I was that rose trying to grow up through the cracks in the sidewalks of La Crescenta, a miscast, and Bobby, Bobby would have seen my beauty.
As I watched the clip, I cried and cried. At one point, I parted the curtains and looked out our big picture window at the La Crescenta street. It was dark, not a streetlight or house light on. I tried to tell myself that if my father had been home, if he had not gone crazy, he would have been watching with me. He would have commiserated with me. But the fact was, I couldn’t ev
en be sure of that; my father’s emotional reactions had always been unpredictable. Even if he’d been sad, my father might have been expecting me to console him, rather than acting as a father taking care of his child. I felt completely alone.
The indifference of the universe, the fact that the living room, the neighborhood, the night sky, did not in any way reflect this loss that was monumental to me, made me feel as if shards of glass were being scraped into my open flesh. How could the world not be broken? A truck had driven through the center of my chest, and yet nothing around me outside of the reporters on the TV reflected this assault.
He had been the one I’d been holding onto. I had not cried like this in a long time—unselfconscious, deep, wracking, uncontrollable sobbing. So this is grief, I thought. This was what people meant when they talked about heartbreak and desolation. I cried so hard that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, felt like I was going to throw up. The intensity of my own emotion scared me; what if I couldn’t stop crying? What if I could never stop crying? I always had trouble believing that any current state—emotional or physical—was temporary.
I wandered in the dark to the other end of the house to my parents’ bedroom. This was my mother’s room now, orderly, neat, quiet. Nothing strewn around; no food trays, no pill bottles; no tummel. My father’s side of the bed was still made; my mother had barely mussed the sheets when she’d encased herself between them. In his absence, my father’s pillow had begun to gather dust.
Already used to sleeping alone, my mother would not have considered stretching out to the middle of the bed, moving from the narrow space to which she had consigned herself. She was turned on her side with the sheet pulled up over her head protectively. A warning not to approach. I leaned down and whispered, “Mom?” She didn’t stir. “Mommy?”
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