“Thank God,” he said, gripping my hand so hard it hurt. “You’ve come.”
“What is it?” I asked. I wriggled free of his grasp and put my hand firmly on top of his. It made me think of that game Violet and I used to play, one of our hands quickly topping the other’s in a struggle for dominance, until we were weakly slapping at the air, yelling with laughter. “Is something wrong?”
“They were here again,” he said.
“Who? Who was here?”
“The police, of course. Who did you think?”
I relaxed; it was only the dementia, banal and familiar now. In the beginning, I’d argue with him, try to point him in the direction of reason and sanity. But Mother died, don’t you remember? No, there are no patients waiting for you. It’s all right, you don’t need your keys. All the grief those uttered truths brought on. And his grieving was justified—it’s an abysmal thing to suffer such losses, to no longer need keys to anything. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’ll take care of it.” This had become my stock answer to every paranoid delusion he could dream up, and it worked more often than not.
I’d mostly given up trying to conduct ordinary conversations with him, so he was spared the terrible news of the larger world, and deprived of personal news, like Suzy’s engagement, which would have made him very happy if he could have comprehended it. When I tried to tell him about her and George, he merely looked quizzical. And I think he would have been sorry to learn about Ev and me, after all these years. There was so much that I was keeping to myself—experiences, feelings, ideas— especially now that Ev wasn’t home anymore.
My infrequent telephone exchanges with Ev were fairly formal and safe, about everyone’s health or something that had come in the mail for him. I didn’t tell him that I’d called Jeremy one day, and that Celia had answered the phone, sounding tearful. Yet she assured me things were better between them. They’d had a petty argument the night of the dinner party, and now she was just being emotional. Then she cried, “Why does it always have to be such a power struggle?” I might have said something about Jeremy being a middle child, and how he’d had to fight sometimes, against the battling bookends of his brother and sister, for attention and justice. But I didn’t really think that was the answer. I didn’t have any answer at all.
I went out to the nurses’ station to ask why my father was in bed, and was told that he’d become especially agitated at lunch, and that the doctor had prescribed additional sedation. He’d been sleeping on and off since then, and he seemed much calmer.
“Did anything happen to set him off?” I asked.
The nurse smiled. “Well, in his own mind, maybe,” she said, not unkindly, and I knew she’d had some version of this conversation many times before. I was in typical denial, still trying to make sense of my father’s insensibility. But his loss was mine, too, because he was my only link now to certain aspects of the past. True memories often require collaboration, or at least confirmation by another witness, preferably one in his right mind.
I went back to his room and this time he was asleep, his hands open at his sides. I studied him in that undefended posture, searching for his old, irretrievable self, the one who would never have let himself be looked at this way, like a specimen under the lens of a microscope. Some molecules of that person were still intact, though, because his eyes swung open, as if he had felt my impudent gaze.
“You dozed off,” I said consolingly. “It’s that kind of day.” In fact, it wasn’t that kind of drowsy day at all. It was a crisply beautiful and sunny autumn afternoon. There were gently swaying treetops outside his window and I looked toward them as symbols of my own thrilling freedom, my ability to simply walk out of there into their lovely, dappled shade. “Do you want to get up now?” I asked him, pulling his wheelchair closer to the bed.
He was weaker, I noticed, and very unsteady, though that could have been just a side effect of the sedatives, but he was still able to cooperate, to move himself from bed to chair with my assistance. When he was settled, I murmured, “Oh, that’s much better, Daddy, isn’t it?” and accepted his angry glare as just. To make up for my condescension, I said, “Would you like to get out of here for a while?” and he nodded his assent.
I’d taken him outside on other occasions, just for a change of scenery, and to put him back into the traffic of life, in touch again with the weather and the seasons. As usual, there were other people—relatives and aides— pushing other wheelchairs on the grounds of the home. I remembered pushing a stroller down a busy street with one of my children inside, and how my toddler would stare with avid interest at the mirror image of another toddler going by in her stroller. Suzy used to even reach out her hand, in greeting, maybe, or just to grab the other kid’s toy. But most of these adults, borne along in their oversized prams, strapped and tucked in like toddlers, shrank from one another’s glances, as if to avoid being recognized as someone reduced to this, someone so completely stripped of autonomy.
I took my father to a secluded area close to the high, black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property, where ordinary pedestrians and cars passed once in a while, just to remind him that the moving world hadn’t stopped in his absence. I sat down on a bench, arranging his chair to face me. He looked around him in an alert manner, and then up at the parasol of trees above us, with their pale, feathery leaves. “Acacia,” he pronounced, and I felt inordinately pleased, as if my child had said his first precocious word.
“Yes,” I said, eagerly. “Do you remember that we had a pair of them in the garden at home? They would get yellow flowers every spring.” Do you remember? would be my theme, my refrain for the entire afternoon.
“Helen liked them,” he said. Past tense, I noted, and he seemed reflective but not terribly sad.
“She did,” I agreed. After a moment, I said, “Daddy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the old days lately.” He returned my gaze, but he didn’t answer, so I went on. “I’ve been thinking about those trips into the city that Mother and I took when I was little. Do you remember—we would come to your office to meet you? And those wonderful dinners we had.”
“Barbetta,” he said promptly. His favorite theater district restaurant, where everyone knew him by name, and the maître d’ always kissed my mother’s hand and then mine. “The Russian Tea Room,” my father continued, squinting into the past. We were favored guests there, too, who never had to sit upstairs in what was disparagingly referred to as “Siberia.” And the waiter would bring a plate of pierogi to our table before we’d even looked at the menus. I saw myself in a dress of jewel-colored velvet, ruby or amethyst, and patent-leather shoes that reflected the omnipresent Christmas ornaments.
“And everywhere we went, your patients came out of the woodwork to adore you,” I said. He couldn’t keep himself from smiling at that. He was still in there. “You were a very good doctor,” I added, trying out the past tense, leavened by praise, in direct reference to him, to his self-image. He didn’t seem offended or dismayed, so I went on. “You saved so many lives.” And of course he only sniffed haughtily at that; he didn’t need verification of his bona fides from me. A laboratory at Mount Sinai had been named in his honor, and I still have the letters I rescued from his discarded files, sent by some of the men and women whose days on earth he’d extended— oh, just a few more moments of happiness! Sunlight winked at us between the moving fronds of the acacia. In the distance a woman’s voice called, “Tony! Tony!” over and over again, as if to summon someone back from the dead.
The first person you saw when you entered the reception room to my father’s medical suite was his secretary, Miss Snow. My mother called her “the dragon lady,” because she was so fiercely protective of my father’s privacy and his time, although she was soft-spoken and pretty. Miss Snow reminded me of those secretaries in the movies, after they’d removed their spectacles and unpinned their hair. If I could have looked like anybody, besides my mother, I would have picked Miss Snow. She was usual
ly seated at her desk when we arrived, but sometimes she was in my father’s consultation room, taking dictation. Parksie’s smaller office was right next door to his, and the examining rooms were on either side of a long corridor off to the left.
There were plaster models of various human organs in the consultation room that opened on hinges to show the intricate network of their interiors, the arteries and veins depicted in soothing nursery colors of pink and beige and blue. My father used the models to explain surgical procedures to his patients, and after extracting my promise to be careful, he’d let me handle them when I visited. This was probably done more to trigger my interest in science than to entertain his bored child. But I was entertained, and horrified at once. He would put my hands on my own body, on the places that held those hidden parts—the kidneys like twin toilets discreetly flushing waste, the vulgar-looking liver, the amazing, hectic heart— and I only half believed I housed such unlikely machinery.
“I loved coming to your office,” I said, and I thoroughly meant it, although so much of that pleasure was inextricable from the attendant rewards, bracketed by that first sight of my mother waiting for me at school and the ride home hours later in the iridescent darkness.
“My appointments,” he said. His voice was a little higher-pitched now and growing irritable.
“It was the end of the day,” I reminded him. “Your appointments were over.” I wanted to keep him on course—we were getting somewhere—but it was like trying to steer a large, unfamiliar vehicle through tricky traffic.
“Parksie,” he said. He could have been summoning her, not just saying her name, and I found myself glancing around, as if I expected her to step soundlessly right out of the air to answer his command.
“She was always there when Mother and I came. I used to sit at her desk, drawing or working on the puzzles in Highlights.” Her hand rested lightly on my head as I bent over the page. The colored pencils, newly sharpened, had a harsh, woody fragrance. The intercom near my writing hand muttered static. “You spoke to me over the intercom. You called me Miss Brill, and I pretended that I was your secretary, instead of Miss Snow. Do you remember?” I aspired to be a secretary then, or a waitress or a salesgirl, someone both officious and submissive, and with a pencil and a pad—so much for those inspirational models of the liver and the heart.
My father looked at me and put his fingers to his chin—an old, contemplative pose, the same one he’d struck for his official Bachrach portrait. “Take a letter, Miss Brill,” he said, and I felt like whooping for joy.
“Dear Sir,” I prompted, and found I had to swallow. “Dear, dear sir . . .” I leaned toward him in ardent conspiracy, but he was looking up into the foliage of the trees again. “Daddy,” I said. Wait a minute, don’t go.
He didn’t answer, though; the trees had him in their green, leafy embrace. I stood up and released the brake on his chair. “Why don’t we move,” I suggested. “Let’s get out into the sun.” And I began wheeling him briskly in the direction we’d come from, away from the shadows where our reminiscences had stalled. But at the other end of the path, two familiar, bent figures were lurching toward us. One of them waved, fluttering a handkerchief or a scarf, and I veered abruptly onto the grass and kept on going.
My father grunted as the chair swerved, its wheels catching in the turf, tearing up blades of grass like a lawn mower. The seat belt must have grabbed him in the gut. “Sorry,” I said, “so sorry,” but I didn’t slow down, even when I heard Marjorie Steinhorn’s urgent soprano. “Alice! Yoo-hoo, Alice dear! Wait for us!” Instead I began running with the chair, bumping it over the uneven terrain, and my father’s thin, fair hair flew up into a rooster’s crest. “Hold on now,” I told him, unnecessarily; his body was already stiffly braced and he was clutching the armrests.
A couple of minutes later, we were on another path, this one leading to the wide-open wings of the west gates, and I went forward at a steady but slower pace until we were through them and out onto the street. Only then did I stop long enough to look behind us. Marjorie and Leo were nowhere in sight. “We lost them,” I said excitedly, like a criminal who’d cleverly eluded the police in a car chase. The police! I had entered my father’s delusion. And it occurred to me then that I was a criminal, of sorts, that I had just kidnapped my father, springing him from the prison to which I’d also condemned him.
Except for his cataract surgery, he had only been away from the premises of the home once since he’d entered it, almost a year ago. Ev and I had picked him up by car one day in early March, when he still had frequent spells of lucidity. It was his birthday, and we took him to our apartment for lunch, where we served some of his favorite foods—smoked salmon and Brie and country pâté—at our family table, without the mess-hall racket of the home’s dining room. Ev put a CD of Mozart on the stereo, and it played softly, lyrically all around us. It was a good day, an accomplishment, really. My father was alert and genial most of the time, and he ate with a genuine appetite, remarking on the silky sweetness of the salmon, the rough perfection of the pâté.
But on the way back to Riverdale, we got stuck in stop-and-go traffic on the West Side Highway. There was a grisly accident—an overturned SUV and a small, accordion-pleated sports car—that we approached at a funereal pace. My father was in the backseat of our car, craning to see, like everyone else, as we crawled past the glitter of ground glass, the sputtering flares.
When I turned around to reassure him, I saw the nervous glimmer of the emergency vehicle lights play across his pale, altered face. “I’m a physician, you know,” he said, and his hands plucked fretfully at his seat belt. “Stop the car, driver,” he ordered Ev, although we were at a complete standstill at that moment. He wanted to get out, to offer medical assistance.
It was something he’d done at least once before, in Chilmark, more than forty years ago, when he and my mother and I were coming back from a dinner party. There’d been a collision then, too, and the driver of one of the cars, a young woman, had suffered a crushed windpipe, which my father punctured with his pocketknife before inserting the empty tube of someone’s ballpoint pen, enabling her to breathe until the ambulance arrived to take her away.
I’m sure I didn’t see any of that—my mother would have shielded me from it—yet my recall of the scene is graphic in its detail. The impromptu surgery was done by flashlight, the victim’s face dramatically lit, as in a Sargent portrait. She sounded as if she were gargling. This memory was probably fostered by my imagination and the excited stories I overheard at the beach the next day. My father was a great hero. For all I knew, he was responsible for the fiery sun and the flying clouds and the surf that crashed and sucked at our feet.
But that day after his birthday lunch, he was only a bewildered old man who’d been overstimulated and fed too much rich food. All the charm he’d managed to muster at the table had completely vanished. “Let me out of here!” he kept shouting, long after we’d gone past the accident. “Why am I being tied up? Untie me, you bastards!” And between these outbursts, he kept belching loudly, the way Scotty used to do at dinner to annoy Suzy.
Later on, Ev would speak ruefully of “our noble experiment” and say how sorry he was that I’d had to go through it—the excursion had been his idea in the first place—but then he was hunched anxiously over the wheel, muttering to himself as he drove, things like, “This is just great,” and “Oh, fuck,” while I alternately jabbered at my father as if he were actually listening, and wept, wiping my eyes and nose on the sleeve of my down jacket. It was the saddest event of my life, even though no one had died; maybe because no one had died. By the time we got to the nursing home, I wanted nothing more than to turn my father back over to his keepers. You would think there was a bounty on his head.
The neighborhood near the home is residential and upscale. As I pushed his chair along the street, a woman in a bathrobe came out of her house and collected her mail. Another woman had two beribboned poodles on leashes at the curb. �
�What are you waiting for, girls?” she said to them. “Don’t you want to go shopping?” It was the sort of scene that would have amused my father once. But now his profile could have been on the prow of a ship, or on the face of a coin. His expression was fixed yet unfocused.
Still, I didn’t concede defeat. When we came to a coffee shop a few blocks away, I tamed his hair and then mine with the same comb, and wheeled him inside. We were hot and thirsty from our adventure, and I ordered tall glasses of iced coffee with whipped cream for both of us. As he slurped his noisily through a straw, I said, “I wanted to continue talking to you, Daddy, without any interruptions.”
He blotted his lips on a paper napkin and bent to the straw again. “You kept the door to your office locked sometimes, didn’t you?” There were two doors, I remembered then, one in the reception area where Miss Snow sat, and the other in Parksie’s office. He looked up at me, with foam dissolving on his lips, giving nothing away. I knew that I was being too direct, too impatient. The earlier rapport between us was totally gone, and I wasn’t doing anything to reestablish it. I sounded more like a cop grilling a suspect— that metaphor again—than a daughter trying to revive nostalgic moments with her old dad. But it was already late in the day, and he looked exhausted. I was tired, too. Damn those trees. Damn the Steinhorns. “Your office,” I repeated, insistently.
“Office,” he echoed, and in a worried tone, “I don’t have my keys.” He patted the pockets of his windbreaker, carefully at first, and then frantically, as if he were frisking himself.
“That’s right, you don’t have any keys,” I said sharply. “So just stop looking for them, okay?”
He put his hands obediently on the table, and I stroked them in a feeble attempt at conciliation. “But you used to,” I said. A whole clangorous ring of them, denoting possession and authority. “Keys to the house on Morning Glory Drive and to the Lincoln. Keys to your vault at Chase. And keys to your offices at the hospital. Please try to remember, Daddy, won’t you?”
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