The Theft of Memory

by Jonathan Kozol

  “She—tiny she—gave me strength [and] seemed to be hovering over me like an angel. Hell! I was afraid of her and yet I loved this tiny mite. Goddamned selfish of me,” he had said, “oblivious to [the] harm I did to her….When she kicked up her heels in a restaurant with her society friends, I scolded her [in] a letter. What in hell right did I have to do this? I had abandoned them”—a reference to both Oona and her brother, Shane—“and their mother,” who was a writer by the name of Agnes Boulton, to whom O’Neill was married at the time he met Carlotta.

  After having made this reference to abandonment, O’Neill had asked my father, “Do you know what it is to have a guilty conscience?” Then, before my father could reply: “Is there any other kind?”

  In speaking of Chaplin, O’Neill had told my father, “When she married him, I blamed myself. I took it as self-retribution,” but, he added, “he will do better by her than I.” In a bracketed passage, my father noted that O’Neill’s use of the future tense (“he will do better”) gave the impression that he still was thinking of her as the teenage daughter she had been at the time she married.

  “Harry,” he said, “take care of her. She deserves it more than I.” My father had written, again in brackets, “This perplexed me.” But, because he didn’t demur at this request, he believed that he had made a kind of promise.

  The only other item in this file, a memo written on a piece of stationery from a grand hotel in Switzerland—the letterhead reads “Le Beau Rivage”—reminded me that my father had finally accepted Oona’s invitation and had traveled to Switzerland with my mother and talked with Oona and her husband at their home in a village called Corsiersur-Vevey, about a dozen miles from Lausanne. “I felt obliged to keep my promise…, and I did. Oona cried softly,” my father wrote, apparently on the evening after they had had this conversation—the first of several, it would seem.

  Reading these materials, written by my father so many years before, I was reminded once again of the depth of loyalty he’d felt to a man regarded often as a cold and distant person who was loyal, for his own part, only to his creativity. The rapidly developing intensity of my father’s attachment to O’Neill—or “Gene,” as he would call him in the course of conversations—had led into the most consuming and exacting medical relationship of his career. But the satisfaction he derived from giving up the better part of two and a half years to the service of an author he revered was, I knew, beyond all measure to my father.

  O’Neill, in his belief—and in the belief, I think, of most historians of theater—was not merely one more gifted author of distinguished works of drama along with maybe half a dozen other major playwrights that our nation had produced. In the grandeur of his reach, in the power of his capability to make us rage and weep, he belonged, as most critics saw it, in the company of August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and the great French classicists Corneille and Racine—and “at least in some proximity,” as my father ventured once, “to the Greek tragedians….”

  Suddenly now to have the opportunity to know this man in his emotional completeness and to try, with all the skill at his command, to ease the turmoil that O’Neill had suffered for so long was, for my father, a culminating moment in his clinical experience. This is why I’ve felt the obligation to pass on what he entrusted to me in its near entirety, even in its passages of unimportant acrimony or literary marginality, and even in some instances of playful triviality.

  Once, by way of playfulness, O’Neill took off his bathrobe—an expensive one, my father said, that Carlotta probably had bought him in one of the boutique shops she frequented in Paris or New York—and insisted that my father put it on during an examination. “It gives you the appearance of being quite distinguished,” he observed. My father said he knew that he was being teased, because O’Neill was rather tall “and the robe was much too big for me.” O’Neill, he said, “laughed outrageously to see me standing there, trying to be serious, in a robe that nearly reached the floor.”

  —

  Summer was nearly over now, and my dog Persnickety, who had brought so much delight and love into my father’s life, was suffering from a rapid growth in her malignancy. Up until the recent months, the cancer had progressed more slowly than the doctor had expected, but the period of grace Persnickety had been allowed was coming to an end. By the last week of August, her right eye was completely closed. She no longer had the strength to come upstairs and sleep beside me, and she had begun to lose her appetite and would eat only if I fed her with my hand. I knew the time would soon arrive when it would be wrong for me to try to keep her in this world.

  One night, I put her in my car and brought her with me for a final visit with my father. She was too weak to climb up on his knees or play the games of throw-and-fetch my father had enjoyed. She curled up on the rug in front of him and, when he reached down to stroke her ears, she licked his fingers and looked up at him. That was about the most that she could manage now.

  The owners of the building in which my mother lived had changed their animal-friendly policy a year before. So my mother hadn’t seen Persnickety except on one occasion in the winter, eight months earlier, when I was able to convince the woman who signed in people at the door to break the rules and let Persnickety come upstairs with me in order to surprise my mother on her birthday.

  At that time, Persnickety was not too lethargic to race into my mother’s room the way she’d always done, hop up on my mother’s bed, and slobber her with kisses on her mouth and forehead. My mother didn’t object at all to letting Persnickety sit there, virtually on top of her. Then Persnickety ran into the living room, found a bear my mother had given her, which had been propped up on a chair, took it in her teeth, brought it to the far end of the room, and shook it back and forth relentlessly.

  A week later, my mother said she’d had a dream about Persnickety. “We had taken her to the Four Seasons”—she and my father sometimes went for dinner there before he became ill—“and there was a group of little girls who were playing in the lobby. She was wearing a wide pink ribbon which the girls had placed around her neck and they made a circle around her and they danced and sang a song, ‘The Farmer in the Dell,’ and she began to dance with them!

  “She danced so nicely on her little feet that everybody was amazed.” A man in the lobby who, my mother said, “was in the movie business,” went to a phone and called a movie agent “and they decided to make a movie of Persnickety dancing right there in the lobby!”

  On another night, she had another dream about Persnickety. A boy I’d known when I was a teenager, before I went to college, whom she had never liked, had tried to kill Persnickety. In her dream, my father had said, “I never trusted him, and I was right. I always knew he had a twisted personality.” But she also said that, in her dream, she had asked herself, “Is this really happening? Am I awake? Or am I only dreaming?”

  In subsequent months, she questioned me about Persnickety. She knew I’d managed once to get her into the apartment since the rules were changed, so she grew suspicious as to why I didn’t bring her there again. As the summer went on and the tumor grew much larger, I tried to give my mother nonspecific answers. But her investigative instincts proved to be too sharp for me to fool her very long. Under her interrogation, I at last told her the truth.

  “I knew it,” she said, not as kindly as I would have liked, because she knew I’d been deceiving her.

  On August 25, she said she had this dream: “You sleep upstairs and there is a narrow stairway and sometimes Persnickety gets up from the bed and goes down to the living room. You woke up one night and you saw she wasn’t there, so you went downstairs and found her on the sofa. You sat with her and held her in your arms and she looked up at you, but her eyes were very sad and she wasn’t moving….”

  By the time my mother had that dream, Persnickety was no longer strong enough to go out into the garden. I put newspapers near the kitchen door and she reverted to the habit she had had when she was a puppy and I had be
en training her. The day arrived, soon after that, when she would no longer eat at all, even when I tempted her with her favorite treats. I called the veterinarian who had taken care of her since she’d been a few weeks old. He was kind enough to offer to drive over to my house to put Persnickety to sleep.

  After I had buried her in the garden where she used to play, I drove into Boston to be with my mother. I never got to finish the first sentence I began. As soon as I spoke Persnickety’s name, she lifted her arthritic hand and placed it on my arm. Julia was sitting with us in the bedroom. She later observed that my mother, fragile and dependent and distracted by her fantasies as she often was, had not lost the fortitude to connect directly with a painful moment of reality.

  “This is the penalty we pay,” my mother said.

  “Penalty, Mrs. Kozol?” Julia asked.

  “The penalty for love,” my mother quietly replied.

  Julia went into the kitchen then. When the tea was ready, we helped my mother walk into the dining room.

  Julia had a skillful way of settling my mother down into her chair. After we had had our tea, my mother asked if I would go and find the picture I had taken of Persnickety when she was a puppy, which was on the bureau in the bedroom. Once I placed the picture in her hands, she said that she would like to stay there in the dining room a while.

  “You can go now,” she instructed me.

  Julia went out in the corridor with me. I think she knew I would have liked to stay there with my mother for a little longer. The sudden sense of emptiness awaiting me at home was going to be hard for me.

  —

  It was mid-September now. I had delayed for the entire summer in putting aside my final hesitations about Daddy. In the ultimate event, it was not my mother’s firm determination, or the reinforcement I was being given by the other people I had turned to for advice, but an unexpected piece of information I was given by my father’s trust attorney, that impelled me to move forward.

  I had asked him several times over the preceding years if the funds he was investing for my parents would be enough to meet the very high expense of paying for the nursing home (the portion of that cost not covered by insurance or by Medicare), the extra attendants that were needed by my father, those that were needed by my mother, as well as my mother’s rent and food and all the other costs for the apartment. He had routinely answered that there was no reason for concern. “Your mother and father are in good financial shape,” or words to that effect. As recently as three years before, he had pegged their assets at about $2 million.

  Suddenly now, and only when I asked him, he told me that their total wealth, which had lost one quarter of its value in the market downturn that year and the two preceding years, would be depleted, at the present rate of their expenditures, in approximately eighteen months.

  At a meeting in which we did some hasty mathematics, he concluded that, with the subtraction of the nursing home expenses and a few additional adjustments, some of which might call for my ability to underwrite a portion of the salaries for those who would take care of them at home, my parents’ assets would not likely be exhausted for as long as three more years. At that time, if my mother and father—or either one of them—were still alive, they would be penniless.

  The next day I sat down with Silvia and asked if it was possible for her to extricate herself from any obligations she was under to the agency for which she had been working, in order to save the large amount of money the company was charging for its services. She told me that she didn’t think this would be a problem. (The agency director, once she understood the situation, gave us her agreement.) Silvia also said she’d want to have another talk with Julia so that they could figure out how many extra people they would need, especially when either she or Julia had to be away.

  I had joked with Silvia sometimes in the past about her strong “take-over” inclinations. Now I found myself indebted to her for those qualities. She moved into action with a furious determination to arrange things in a manner that would leave me free to act upon the many other details I would have to handle quickly.

  Lucinda, when I told her I had come to a decision, agreed to oversee the physical condition of my father on at least an intermittent basis in between her other obligations. Although she was prepared to do this without payment, I persuaded her to let me pay a modest sum, since she had a family to support and also had tuition costs to meet, because she had begun a course of training to become a nurse practitioner.

  It was Silvia and Julia, however, whom I would inevitably rely upon the most. Without them, I could not have brought my father home. Although a schedule was arranged in which the hours of two helpers would overlap for long enough that they could assist each other with some portions of the work that were impossible to do alone, there would also be long stretches of each day when one of them would find herself entirely on her own.

  The responsibility these women would sustain was going to require an unusual degree of moral stamina. In the absence of the close attention I had hoped for but in fact could not always count on from the geriatric specialist in Boston who would soon take on the role of primary physician for my father, Silvia and Julia would become the only thoroughly reliable and rapidly reactive health providers for the last years of his life.

  Those who work as home attendants and companions to the elderly are given little of the respect and, of course, a great deal less of the remuneration that are given to physicians and others in the higher reaches of the healthcare industry. But in many situations they are the only ones who truly know the patients and the ones who advocate with greatest diligence on their behalf. My father had always liked the word “clinician” better than “physician” because it held the connotation of direct, unmediated, never arm’s-length service to the people he’d been asked to care for. In this respect, it was the ever-loyal and perpetually watchful Julia and Silvia who came to be my father’s actual clinicians—all the more so as they gained in expertise by questioning Lucinda and by watching carefully when, as his condition might require, visiting nurses were dispatched to the apartment to examine him.

  All this was still ahead of us, however. Once I had convinced myself that Silvia and Julia had things under good control, I gave official notice to the nursing home. My father would be leaving on October 10.

  “Are we going home?” he asked after I had spent a final evening with him at the nursing home, as he’d asked with various degrees of urgency or wistfulness so many times before.

  “Yes, Daddy,” I replied. “This time, we really are.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A Sense of Exploration

  Silvia and Julia had made careful preparations. A wheelchair had been rented, and a hospital bed and various instruments to check my father’s vital signs had been set up in the smaller bedroom, directly adjacent to the room in which my mother slept.

  My mother went to sleep much later than my father. Her first question when she awoke was: “Did you wake the baby?” Then she would ask, “Did you give him his breakfast? Did you cook his oatmeal for him?” She had told Silvia: “He likes his oatmeal with a little cream and just a bit of sugar.”

  After he had breakfast, Silvia or Julia would bring him to the living room. Later in the morning, my mother would come out to keep him company. They would often have their lunch together in the dining area. Then my mother went back to her bedroom, while my father would remain there in the living room, usually sitting at his desk, as he’d done before he became ill.

  The surface of the desk and a table to its side continued to be piled up with newly arriving medical journals, as well as bulletins and correspondence from neurological and psychiatric institutes and occasional letters, from the dean of Harvard Medical School for instance, offering him congratulations on his birthdays or maybe simply making an announcement about upcoming seminars or conferences to which alumni were invited.

  Julia also told me he was still receiving letters from people who had no idea how old he
was or that he was ill, asking his opinion of an academic paper or, perhaps, soliciting his observations on a research study being carried out in one of those areas in which he had specialized. Since she knew he couldn’t read and understand these letters, she would often read them to him. If she held a letter right in front of him, she said, “he would look at it over and over” and would sometimes point to something that appeared to hold a glint of meaning to him, and she said he’d nod at times, as if in recognition of a name or institution, and might make a brief remark to indicate his satisfaction.

  He also began again to make brief jottings to himself—words or phrases, chaotic in their form and with no apparent continuity. He used the same blue sheets of fine-grained paper he had used in writing memos to himself for much of his career, which were in a wooden tray on the right front corner of his desk, where they had always been.

  Now and then he’d look into the desk and come upon an object that attracted his attention. One day, for example, he took out the nameplate, made of heavy metal, with the letters of his name corroded slightly, tinged in green, that had once adorned his office door. “He lingered over it,” said Julia. “He just kept on looking at it for the longest time….” He’d also sometimes pull out file cards, look at them, one after another, then when he was finished he would try to put them back where they belonged.

  I didn’t think my father’s interest in these items, or the random and staccato jottings that he made, were indications of a sudden restoration of some long-departed portion of his memory. I certainly did not believe that he was thinking to himself, “This is my office. This is the desk at which I used to work.” But Julia said she was convinced that he felt “some kind of connection” to that desk because he had a proud and confident expression when he sat there.