The Last Cadillac

by Nancy Nau Sullivan

  Carol was Irish and Serbian, tall, with short, wiry, dark gold hair, cut close to her head. When she called me up, I could picture her standing in her living room full of white and crystal lamps, jingling her bracelets, standing very straight while she walked briskly around the house with the phone.

  “What are you doing with yourself? Where have you been?” she said.

  “I live in Florida.”

  “Very funny. I know that, but we haven’t talked in a while. Are you OK?”

  “Oh, I guess.”

  “Tell me.”

  Not many people wanted to hear it, but Carol did. She drew it out of me, drilling like a dentist without Novocain, but I felt better afterwards. I needed that, although I never thought so at the time.

  “It’s pretty crazy sometimes,” I said.

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me with the set up you got yourself into.”

  “I know.”

  “You need to get some time for yourself, girl, and not be running a nursery and a nursing home at the same time,” she said. “What’s that philandering ex-gigolo of a husband doing to help?” Carol was not a fan of the Ex. She had blistering words for any husband who played around, especially one who had kids at home.

  “He calls. My son and daughter see him, either down here, or he flies them up there for a weekend. They’re not happy about the arrangement, but it works for now. I guess.”

  “Oh, kid,” she said. “You know I love ya. How are you, and I mean you.”

  I told her I was fine. But I was not fine about the insidious decline I saw in my father and the increasingly furious schedule. “It’s been quite a year, and I think it’s catching up with me.”

  “Of course it is. And it can’t go on forever, without stopping, without you taking some time for yourself. I know how you are,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling. You need to hear it. You need to get someone in there to help you, every day, if necessary. He can afford it. Get out there for a weekend and go soak up some of that sun you’re sitting in the middle of and probably haven’t even seen, except to go to the grocery store, or to the doctor, or to drive the kids around.”

  “Oh, Saints in Heaven.”

  “No, I’m no saint. I’m your guardian angel. And if I have to come down there and perch on your shoulder, well, maybe I’ll do it.”

  “Alleluia.”

  She was a friend, even when I didn’t see her for months, or talk to her that often. This was how I treated my friends, and as a result, I didn’t have many. But I had Carol, and she was right. I needed to ask for help, but I’d been reluctant to go out and get it.

  I grabbed a glass of wine and went out to the patio. It was late afternoon when the craziness stopped for an hour or so.

  Carol reminded me that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I couldn’t do it all. Draining the glass, I looked up through the branches of the mango tree. Puffs of clouds flew over. Not a single answer happened by, except to say that I knew going down this road alone, nothing would be solved.

  “There’s no future in it,” my grandmother had said. She’d meant gambling, and I’d gambled on The Adventure.

  Finally, I really needed help on this one.

  But I didn’t want someone coming in and taking over. I really didn’t want to share my space. It was already crowded. And I didn’t want a chatty person around who might steal things, or abuse Dad. Maybe Dad wouldn’t like him, or her. I was ready to defeat the idea even before we got started.

  With some reluctance, I called the local HomeAid Agency that Dad’s doctor recommended several times, and I at once ignored. Now, short of yelling, “Help!” into the phone, I first decided to describe the situation. The home health aide listened. That was surprising, and welcome, so I continued. I told her we needed a “self starter.” Even though I didn’t know exactly what I meant by that, I knew I didn’t want to lead someone by the hand through each day. We needed a helper with common sense, to get along and care for funny, sweet Dad, to do some cleaning and make a meal or two. To start, that’s what it boiled down to, and then we would see how it all turned out. I told the aide at the agency that Dad was a big guy, so they had better send someone who was strong enough to hustle him in and out of the shower, up out of his chair to the walker, and God forbid, should he fall down, someone who could pick him up. So far, we had lucked out, except that I thought I might be working on a hernia as a result of all the necessary tugging and lifting to get Dad around.

  The agency sent Marilyn, a trim grandmother just a shade under five feet tall with short blond hair. I saw her walking up the driveway, and I thought for a second she was selling Girl Scout cookies. But then I saw her small face, like a walnut with a wide smile. She was bouncing along in her sturdy white shoes and carrying a large blue bag that read “Manatee HomeAid Agency.”

  I began to form the polite words in my head to get rid of her, but then she was in the door, dropping her bag, and smiling up at me.

  “Hi,” she said. Marilyn looked me straight in the eye and stuck out her hand. We bonded instantly. She had fingers like twigs, and then she flew past me across the living room and looked around. There was a bird-like quality about her, but she was all hawk, not sparrow, even for such a small woman. Dad was engrossed in an old World War II movie, guns blazing, Audie Murphy shouting in the background. He didn’t even look up until I took the remote out of his hand and turned down the volume. Then he fixed his baby blues on me, then on Marilyn.

  “Commander Nau,” he said, offering a hand toward her. He attempted to get out of his chair, but Marilyn gently pushed him back into it.

  “Stay, Commando,” she said.

  “That’s Commander,” he said. “Forty years of active and reserve duty in the U.S. Navy.”

  She nodded, and ignored the order. To Marilyn, he was always “Commando,” and Dad got used to it. Fast.

  Marilyn was top gun, totally in command, and from 9:30a to 1:00p, four days a week, I turned Dad and the house over to her. She sang out—loudly—to him in the morning to get him up. He groaned, resisting the call, but then she went to work on him until he shined like a new recruit. Gradually, he went along with her instructions. But then he fully cooperated because she could get him to the breakfast table in half the time, and he was a hungry man in the morning.

  I couldn’t have been happier. She gave him his “showa” (Marilyn was originally from Boston) and a “head wash.” She shaved him, helped him dress, and arranged his three-course breakfast, his vitamins, his ice water, his newspaper, his hat and jacket, which he needed for his trip to the patio to wait for Harvey the Egret. They rounded out their morning routine with an old movie, and Marilyn liked to watch old movies, too, fortunately. More importantly, she liked Dad and they got along fine together.

  Marilyn smoked, so Dad had a smoking buddy, though I told her he was strictly rationed to two, maybe three, a day. She pushed that a little, and sometimes I turned my head when they were out on the patio chatting up a storm and creating little clouds from her Virginia Slims.

  While Marilyn scuttled back and forth from the dishwasher to the washing machine, I went out to do errands, and when I came back I found that she had done as good a job as I could do, which was a total surprise. I wasn’t used to delegating authority and I wasn’t used to the help, so I didn’t know it was possible for someone else to do loads of dishes and wash and remove all the remains and spots and spills and do it so efficiently. Marilyn took over the kitchen, laundry, and bathrooms with unerring aptitude. I didn’t have to walk her through myriad details of running a household. She’d had plenty of practice, and we got the benefits of that practice.

  I got so used to Marilyn and our routine that I quickly became covetous of her time when the agency called and wanted to add to her hours in other households, because the word about Marilyn had spread. Home care of the elderly was becoming big business, especially in Florida. I paid the agency $14.25 an hour of which Marilyn received ten dollars. I wanted to pay her more, and
keep her all to ourselves, but she had a contract and she didn’t want to lose it. Marilyn went strictly by the book. So, we coasted along, and when she told me the agency asked her to work another weekend for someone else, or that she had worked twelve days straight, I shuddered to think she might burn out, or get on a plane back to Boston. But Marilyn seemed possessed of that common sense I saw in her from the start. After one particularly long stretch, she said, “I’m not working this weekend. If they want me to, I’ll tell them to go shit in their hat.”

  Four days a week, when I heard the front door click around nine o’clock, I sank back into my pillow, dropped the newspaper, drained my tea, and closed my eyes. It was Marilyn to the rescue.

  I held my breath through the good days, but I had my eye on Tick. He seemed to be doing all right in school, bringing home a few A’s in language but F’s in algebra.

  “What’s the point, Ma? If I ever see a hypotenuse in my whole life, I’ll walk right by it.” I silently agreed, but then I suggested a tutor. “I’ll ask Erin,” he said, dropping the matter and getting out the door with inimitable speed.

  “Erin?” I said, but my only answer was the sharp click of the door.

  Then I met Erin.

  It was a short time after Tick and Dad’s conversation on the patio—about the fight at school—when I came home from the grocery store to find Tick in the backyard with three boys and one girl—a lovely girl, tall and too thin, reminding me of a calla lily, if people are flowers. She was smiling at Tick, and Tick was laughing, his hat pushed up as he leaned back in the patio chair.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi, Mom,” Tick said. The chair clunked upright as he got up and pointed to the boys: “Pecker, I mean, sorry, Jake Becker, Jared Romeo, and Tony Mark.” I already knew Tony Mark, a quiet, sweet kid whom one of Little Sunshine’s friends named “Eggplant” for his ability to just sit there and not move—like the eggplant she’d spied on the kitchen counter.

  “Hi,” they said, a chorus of cracking voices, high and low.

  “And this is Erin,” said Tick. The girl named Erin came around the table and offered a slim hand.

  “Hello,” she said. Her voice was high and as thin as she was. I suspected she would fly off if I let go of her hand. She had clear, green eyes and wore a tight blue top and jeans that skimmed her hips. She seemed a little out of place, but relaxed, and maybe even older than these goofy boys who hovered around fifteen.

  I went off to rescue the groceries before they cooked themselves in the hot car parked in the driveway. Back in the kitchen, I peeked at the bunch of them sitting on the patio. They were all laughing, but soon they peeled off and I heard, “Later, Dude.”

  Tick bounded into the kitchen, sweaty but happy. It was a good time to talk. Erin had offered her hand to me, and I would use her, unmercifully.

  “What a nice bunch,” I said. “And that girl is darling.”

  “Yeah,” he said, leaning against the counter and reaching into a bag of potato chips.

  “What’s she doing hanging out with you guys?” Then I quickly added, “Not that you’re not darling, too.”

  “Yeah, Mom, we’re darling,” he said, grinning. “Erin’s cool.”

  “They’re all cool. I’m glad to see you’re having a good time,” I said, and then I ventured forth. “It’s been tough, hasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, kinda. But Erin’s helped me a lot. She’s older, but she kind of introduced me around, and she stuck with me in the cafeteria. We just hang out.”

  “I’m so glad.” I stopped moving from appliance to counter to cupboard and looked at Tick. He was intent on getting the last crumbs out of the bag, but then he looked up at me, and smiled, and I saw the sweet boy in there.

  “And she’s smart. She even knows some algebra—hypotenuses and stuff,” he said. “She’s wonderful.”

  No one could ask for better than that.

  28

  OOOOOOOOO LADY

  Along with The Leg and the stenosis, the residue of the stroke that made his left side weak and his brain confused, Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer several years earlier. But the condition didn’t seem to concern the doctors as much as the possibility that he might have another stroke.

  “A stroke will probably get him before the cancer does,” the urologist told me during one our trips to the doctors. “The prostate cancer is not a big worry, especially because it grows more slowly in the elderly.”

  I relayed part of that message to Dad—about the prostate cancer being slow growing, avoiding mention of the stroke business—but Dad seemed unconvinced.

  “That makes me leery, when you say not to worry,” he said.

  He was plenty worried about things that were happening to him, things he couldn’t understand or control.

  We sat in the doctor’s office one afternoon waiting to get the results of Dad’s latest Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test, which the doctors used to monitor factors in the blood for clues on the activity of the cancer. His PSA had been low, but it had to be checked routinely.

  The waiting room was packed with old men with whom I avoided eye contact. I sat with my nose in an ancient People magazine so I wouldn’t have to look at them and imagine their tortured genital areas. I usually didn’t have to feign interest in my reading material for long because this doctor was prompt about inviting us into his white and steel parlor—an unusual circumstance. Since bringing Dad to Florida, we had been coming to see Dr. Ranken infrequently for checkups for more than a year. I liked him. He got to the point, was thorough, and he explained the situation in plain English.

  The doctor came into the room and hoisted himself up on a tall metal stool. I knew he was a busy urologist, because there were always a lot of problems out there in his waiting room. I had no idea how much trouble men could have with their equipment until my father started to fall apart, and I started reading about prostates in the news and on the Internet.

  “You doubled it, that old PSA,” the doctor said. “We have to talk about that.”

  His PSA count had shot up from nineteen to forty-six in three months. Any count over twenty indicated abnormal activity, and in Dad’s case, the cancer was probably on the move. The news was not good.

  Dad started crying. “They cut off my Dad’s balls, and it didn’t do any good. I’m not going to let that happen. They won’t take my balls. I’ll go to my grave with my balls on.”

  I was at a loss for words. I turned to the doctor. Let him say something comforting, or change the diagnosis—and the subject—altogether. He was busy with the chart, so I reached over to pat Dad’s arm, which I noticed was dotted with dark red spots from the Prednisone for The Leg. We had arrived at a balancing act of managing one problem against the other, trying to put one condition down at a time while dealing with another.

  “Dad, they won’t do that,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.” I didn’t care if it were true or not; Dad was distraught.

  “Right, right,” the doctor said. “We don’t want surgery. You’re not a good candidate for it anyway. And it’s not the right thing to do at your age, in your condition. But we should talk about hormone manipulation in another way. We could give you a shot that cuts down on the production of testosterone.”

  “What’s the theory of the hormone thing?” Dad said. I was glad he’d stopped crying into a fistful of Kleenex.

  “We can take the air out of the fire,” said the doctor.

  “Sort of dance around it?” Dad said.

  “Yes, exactly; that’s good. The cancer does abate with the therapy, but it may come back. It’s worth a try.”

  Dad was remarkably lucid at the news. He was so relieved to know that he could get a shot and not have to lose his parts.

  “Dad, why don’t you go ahead and try the hormone therapy?”

  “I might as well. If it’s going to hamper my sex life, that’s no problem.”

  I’d heard enough about prostates and balls and testosterone, the most
dangerous hormone in the world, and I wanted to get on with it and get out of there. The doctor made sense, and he had settled our health concern of the day.

  The doctor gave Dad a shot of Leupron (at a cost of $1,800), which cut the production of testosterone. It was a type of chemical castration, but we did not refer to it as such, since the term seemed to carry the connotation of sexual deviation for perverts. I tried not to think of it in those terms either, or not to think of it at all, but the shot worked. He didn’t have to have the surgery that was once routinely prescribed for prostate cancer, because Dad’s PSA shot down to five and stayed there. He had none of the possible side effects, which included hot flashes and dizziness. He got a reprieve, of sorts. But the reprieve didn’t last long.

  The next thing I knew, Dad got an infection that brought about some unexpected benefits.

  As if the prostate cancer, The Leg, and the stroke situation weren’t enough, Dad also had been laid low with a scary bout of throat cancer at the age of seventy. It amazed me that he kept on going, despite the list of debilitating diseases and conditions he came up with, and once they started, they didn’t seem to stop. When the doctor found the throat cancer, he recommended that Dad’s larynx be excised, which would have left him belching out his words through an electronic implant. My mother went into a frantic spin trying to find alternate treatment, and she found it. One doctor was willing to give Dad a series of chemo and radiation treatments that proved so successful they left his throat smooth and clear of cancer to the degree the doctor couldn’t even detect Dad had had cancer.

  Five years after this full recovery, at the age of seventy-six, Dad took up smoking cigars and the occasional cigarette. He said he didn’t inhale, but I knew what that meant. To think that any of us went along with this, let alone gave him tobacco, gives me shivers to this day. His doctors knew he was smoking. “What’s the use,” they said, “at that age, a cigar or a few cigarettes a day can’t hurt.”