My Life with Bob

by Pamela Paul

  The greater stakes can make every tragic plot turn ever more real and painful. In the second volume of the Melrose series, Bad News, Patrick is in his twenties and addicted to heroin. One very long night, while bingeing on an appalling mixture of substances, he receives a message from home that his estranged father, the man who tormented him throughout his childhood, has died. The bad news of the title is multifold: a father has died, a son has been nearly destroyed, their relationship has been poisonous from beginning to end, any possibility of reconciliation ruined.

  On the surface, I had nothing in common with Patrick Melrose and his father had nothing in common with mine. But in that way of good fiction, Bad News prodded an uncomfortable personal question: What happens when an estranged parent dies? How do you tie up the complex emotions in a foreshortened amount of time? A deathbed reconciliation—too late, compromised, of questionable sincerity—might feel cheap or, worse, thwarted. There would be guilt, and regrets.

  The year before, on New Year’s Day, my father had been diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. People aren’t supposed to start dying when you’re angry at them, and my dad and I had barely been on speaking terms for months. He certainly wasn’t a monster like Patrick Melrose’s father; on the contrary, for most of my life, he and I had been close. But over the previous year we’d had a near-total falling-out; at times I felt like I hated him and, worse, that he hated me. Never do business with family is such a sensible maxim, it’s a wonder so few people follow it. I certainly didn’t, and instead made the mistake of hiring my dad, a commercial contractor nearing retirement, to renovate my house in Harlem. How much time and money and headache I’d save, was the deluded thought going in.

  Ten months of construction later, a period in which my family shuffled from floor to floor, fleeing dust and heavy demolition, cursing the construction workers who left behind a trail of half-empty Snapple bottles with cigarette butts swimming in the murk and child hazards everywhere—staircases without banisters, abrupt holes in the floor, rusty nails in the hallway—my father and I could barely tolerate each other.

  Our tense exchanges occasionally flared into fights in which we’d forcefully denounce each other from across the living room. I feel horrendous about it now and felt dreadful then, even if everyone agreed he had become impossible.

  I wish I could rewrite this part. My father had always been an irrepressible storyteller, refining and repeating cherished anecdotes over the years; I’d like to brush this story up. My father could have continued to be the same character he’d always been—the raconteur and the indulger and the practical joker. His final years could have been marked by a growing kinship, my father imparting wisdom to his grandchildren and sharing memories of his own childhood and parents. I’d be able to say that our mutual affection only deepened with time. This is the story I would have liked to write, and I would have been a better character in it, too, a solace and a sweetness to my father in his years of decline.

  He had been deteriorating for a long time. About ten years earlier, there had been three botched knee surgeries, one of which involved a nasty case of drug-resistant staphylococcus. Once an avid tennis player and hiker, he was no longer able to walk farther than a block, perpetually in search of a bench. Everything slowed down, including his curiosity, no longer free to roam. His default position was to splay his increasingly overweight form into a recliner, from which he’d only emerge accompanied by a stream of loud exertions. When he wasn’t complaining, he was coughing up a hair-raising amount of phlegm and spitting it out the car window to universal dismay.

  In 2011 he had received a questionable diagnosis of Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare autoimmune disorder. Even though tests were never able to confirm the diagnosis, his doctors prescribed all manner of antibiotics and sedatives; he sometimes fell asleep while driving, once with my children in the backseat. No more picking the kids up from school. Unable to climb stairs but deep in denial, he stopped overseeing the construction work in my house. Problems mounted; so did costs.

  A creeping black mold began to fester underneath the freshly installed, opalescent green tiles in my kids’ newly renovated bathroom, creating dark garlands around their bottles of shampoo like an insidious omen. Each night, the murky growth wended its way beneath a new rectangle of artisanal, recycled glass, my one splurge in the renovation. “It’s just the color of the glass!” my father repeated angrily every time I mentioned the sprawling decay. Or alternately, “It’s settling in. That happens with tile over time!” The tile was three months old.

  Sedated and autosuppressed, my father was no longer himself. Never what one would call an easy person, he had nonetheless been a character, the kind all my friends fell for and grew to love. People always wanted to spend Thanksgiving at our house, primarily, I think, for my father’s company. Everyone who knew him felt tremendous affection, and relished his all too imitable mannerisms. My brothers and I called it “speaking in Jerry” and we did so regularly among ourselves. A lot of it was about the Brooklyn accent and the hand gestures, usually indicating fatigue or dismissal, but there were also a few key phrases, such as:

  •  “I got Hank on the other line.” This was something you’d say when you needed to hang up the phone or were just ready to say good-bye. Hank was my father’s construction supervisor and the two of them back-and-forthed all day, first on a walkie-talkie, then on a car phone, and finally by cell. For maximum effect, my brothers and I would say it the moment the other person had begun sharing something deep or meaningful.

  •  “Horseshit!” This we would cry out in response to anything perfectly acceptable and true. You would have to say it with a decisive note, end of discussion.

  •  “Do you know what I find fascinating?” This could be Ulster County cemeteries, time dilation, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Powell and Pressburger, Balinese handicrafts, or the crazy people who still attended meetings of the Lincoln Brigade. My brothers and I would use it as a preface to anything deserving of time and attention.

  •  “Seriously, Pammy.” This is what my father did when he reprimanded me or delivered tough counsel. My brothers would use it to indicate I’d said something foolish.

  As my father grew sicker with a disease he didn’t know he had and increasingly medicated for a disease he probably didn’t, his Jerryisms waned. He became depressed, less conversational, more easily frustrated, and prone to outbursts. When his own mother had been alive, he’d ridiculed her for her gratuitously explicit descriptions of physical ailments; now he offered up the same vivid detail. At first, we thought he was imitating her as a joke, but he either became serious over time or had been serious all along. I was regularly treated to a lurid blow-by-blow of his most recent colonoscopy or toenail gone awry.

  In this last phase of life, he was routinely furious with someone who had wronged him. Increasingly, that person was me. After months of arguments, my father and I settled into a simmering détente. We would show up at the same family gatherings. We would communicate mostly through forcedly jovial exhortations to the children: “Look, it’s Grandpa!!” (My kids adored him and needed little encouragement.) Then, over Christmas break in 2012, while on a family vacation in Vermont, my mother got a phone call from my stepmother in New York. My father was in the hospital. He could no longer swallow food. They were doing tests.

  The ghastliness my father had been coughing up, it turned out, was cancer. But it wasn’t diagnosed as such until it had spread from his esophagus to his liver, now so engorged with malignant tissue that it bulged out of his abdomen like a balloon. At the time of diagnosis, I hadn’t seen my father for weeks. The last time we’d exchanged words was at his apartment during a holiday celebration for the grandchildren, when I noticed how much weight he’d lost. “I can’t keep a thing down!” he said balefully, in what I assumed to be exaggeration for effect, before shuffling off to a lounge chair.

  Upon returning from Vermont, I rushed to see him. Questions of wrongdoing and blame
were moot; there was no time to negotiate the peace, it was simply assumed. He was no longer angry with me nor I with him. Our fight was over. We rode side by side to his next hospital visit in the backseat of my brother Brian’s car, holding hands as we hadn’t done since I was in elementary school. Chemo, the oncologist said, wouldn’t cure my father and it probably wouldn’t prolong his life either. Nonetheless, he recommended it. When I pressed the doctor for odds, he said the chemo had a 30 percent chance of working, though in the absence of curing or prolonging life I wasn’t sure what working meant. “Tell me the truth,” I said to the doctor in the hallway. “To me, it looks like he’ll be dead in weeks.” The doctor merely shrugged in response.

  For two weeks, my father allowed visitors, and then he cut us all off. The last person to visit was Tobias, who spent an afternoon in his company. “I love that child so much,” my dad told me in what I didn’t know would be our last conversation. After that, he wouldn’t even come to the phone, no matter how much my brothers and I pleaded. My stepmother and a hospice nurse cared for him in his apartment. Every day, I’d call my stepmother, begging to see him. It wasn’t for my sake, it was for his. I had to tell him something. I had to tell him that I’d keep his stories alive forever, repeating them to his grandchildren so they would always know him. They would know that he played stickball in the streets of Brooklyn as a child and that his father, Tisme (nicknamed for answering the telephone with a spirited “Tis me!”), owned meat markets in the city. There really were meat-and-potatoes people; and these people were theirs.

  I would tell them how Grandpa had wanted to go away to college, but had to stay home and commute to Hofstra, that he’d gone to law school but had to drop out when my mother got pregnant. I would tell them his stories about the corruption at Idlewild Airport (“You know, it wasn’t always called JFK, Pammy!”), the wads of cash and the unions but also the excitement of taking part in the building of the city, and the pride he’d taken in the floor work he’d done for Delta Airlines.

  My children would laugh as I always laughed when I told them about the practical jokes he’d played in the army, many of them centered on the latrine. They would love the story about how he and my stepbrother Nicky mixed up a batch of fake vomit and spilled it all over the apartment so that when my stepmother came home she panicked at the sight of her son wiped out on the floor in a mess. How he never tired of depositing rubber rats and cockroaches and snakes around the house in Woodstock, then lying in wait. How he could inexplicably and repeatedly watch the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, never losing interest. “That Lisa Kudrow, she’s really something,” he’d tell me after each viewing, as if he’d only just discovered her himself.

  I wanted to promise him I’d frame the photographs he and the kids took of each other when he let them order gigantic milk shakes at the City Diner, their faces coated in chocolate. I would remind them about his days carpooling them home from school and giving them white Tic Tacs and spare change. The way his own father, Tisme, would offer me Five-Flavor Life Savers when I saw him. Even if I could do nothing to alleviate my father’s current pain, I needed him to know all of this, for him to hear it before he went. I had to convey the one message I could that would make him feel better.

  “He doesn’t want to see anyone,” my stepmother said.

  Finally, on the phone one night. I persuaded her to allow me to visit despite my father’s objections. Check with her in the morning, she said. When I called Friday morning, she said, “He can’t say no now.” I rushed to their apartment, where my father lay on a hospital cot surrounded by the detritus of the ailing—the wet wipes and salves and tissues. Years of accumulated body mass had evaporated and what remained was sunken into the bedsheets. His eyes fluttered intermittently, their surfaces milky and gray. I held the bare sheath of his hand and squeezed it as I delivered my final message. He moaned occasionally while I spoke; there was no telling whether in response to my words or in response to something that existed only for him. The uncertainty broke my heart, but I kept talking, repeating the important part, over and over. “I love you, Daddy, and your grandchildren love you, too. I will make sure you remain alive for them and be their grandpa forever.”

  Then I went to work, where I dissolved into tears at the first friendly colleague I saw in the elevator. That night, at six o’clock, my stepmother called as I got out of the subway to say that my father was dead. It had been one month to the day between diagnosis and death.

  After he died, my mind drifted. I would read pages over and over and over with eyes glazed. I wasn’t actually reading. Bob remained on his shelf, untouched, for weeks. With effort, I finally turned to my usual memoirs, the sadder the better: Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, the writer’s account of his diagnosis and last days of cancer. Jaycee Dugard’s A Stolen Life, about her kidnapping and abuse. I needed to cry about someone else.

  When I wasn’t soaking in dark memoirs, I looked to my other standby for solace: classic English novels. There is something reassuring and necessary about home literature—the books you grow up with, the ones you were taught in school, the cultural touchstones you consider your own. For me, this has always meant the great books I’d looked up to from an early age. No matter where I am, no matter what’s going on in my life, when I want something reliable, I reach for the Dickens, the Eliot, the Austen. The more boring the book title—The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Tess of the d’Urbervilles—the more stalwartly I cling to the familiar contours of its contents.

  These books have recognizable beginnings, middles, and ends. There’s the primary couple and the secondary couple. The friends and the sidekicks and the comic relief, the measured ways in which coincidence, lost opportunity, and hard lessons are meted out. Even the plot twists are somehow predictable. Inside these pages, I feel tucked in and at ease knowing that such books exist and continue to exist, that their characters endure.

  In an unfortunate twist worthy of Hardy or Wharton, my father died a month before I became the editor of the Book Review. He’d taken such pride in my working for the Times. He took every chance to boast about it to friends, as if he’d had a hand in my success. Well, he had.

  How happy he would have been to see me finally have all the books I wanted. To know that his indulgence at the Roosevelt Field Barnes & Noble had paid off. That he’d helped start something and nurture it along the way. When I look through the galleys as they arrive at the Book Review, I still feel the impulse to grab every new book about the Spanish Civil War or Catskills history, the latest John le Carré, the books he loved. When I read these books, I read them for him.

  CHAPTER 21

  Les Misérables

  Why Read?

  Not so long ago at a Kidlit book club gathering, one of our members asked a question that stopped us all: “Why do you read?” She asked this during an animated debate about the relative merits of the book under discussion (a children’s book, of course), one that had inspired widely divergent reactions. It may be that we responded to the book so differently, she implied, because we were after different things.

  “I’m serious,” she repeated. She happens to be a psychologist, so naturally she pressed us to really think about our answers. “Why do you read?’

  This was asked of a group of hard-core book people. Most of us were literary agents, English teachers, editors, or authors. We should have known the answer more or less by heart. Yet each of us looked slightly dumbstruck, as if we’d been forced to gaze inward and justify our very existence on the spot. It was obvious. Why hadn’t anyone thought to ask this question before? We paused to think. Then we went around the table and took turns giving answers.

  “I read for sheer entertainment.”

  “I read to learn.”

  “I read to make sense of the world.”

  “I read to find out something new.”

  “I read to escape.”

  “I read because it makes me happy.”

  “I read for discov
ery.”

  For each of us, there seemed to be one core need that drove us to read on. But it was more complicated than that, as the ensuing conversation soon revealed. Everyone experiences most of these urges at different moments, or during certain periods of our lives, which is why most good readers read widely, even if they tend to go deep into one genre or another.

  And one’s primary reason for reading can shift over time, sometimes quite suddenly. A death, a divorce, an empty nest, a health crisis—these kinds of life changes might pivot that central motivation. Not surprisingly, several people at the dinner table offered tiered answers. “I used to read because I was looking for answers, but now that I’ve reached middle age, I fundamentally read for pure enjoyment,” one person explained. “I’m no longer looking for confirmation,” another said. “I want to be challenged.”

  When it was my turn, my first answer was, “I read to be transported.” It has always been this way. At base, I want to enter a world apart. To take off. Perhaps it’s that insecure desire left over from childhood—the wondering what it would be like to be someone else, some other kind of heroine, pursuing adventures more worthy and interesting than my own. Given the chance, I want to go elsewhere in time, place, perspective—whether to present-day Algeria or 1980s Montana or pre-Code Hollywood.

  It’s not exactly about escape. It’s about experiencing something I would otherwise never have the chance to experience. To know what it’s like to be a merchant marine in the South Pacific precisely because I never will be a merchant marine in the South Pacific. To experience a Norwegian boyhood in the early twentieth century like Roald Dahl’s because I would otherwise never know what it meant to grow up just outside the Arctic Circle, to walk miles to get to the nearest dentist, to be beaten with a cane by a cruel headmaster. Books answer that persistent question, “What is that really like?” By putting you in the place of a character unlike yourself in a situation unlike your own, a good book forges a connection with the other. You get to know, in some way, someone you never would have otherwise known, to live some other life you yourself will never live.