“I’ll do no such thing.”
“Perhaps I should talk to my father.”
“Margaret—”
“Admit it.”
He struggled through his shock and humiliation for exactly what he was supposed to be admitting. He’d never thought his wife capable of cruelty, and wondered what had brought this on.
“Very well.” He gave in. “If it makes you happy to hear me say it: This is your house.”
That night, in bed alone again, he ran those words around a loop in his mind. This is your house. Your house. This is your house. Not mine.
15
That evening out with Lucy, I nearly ended up at her apartment. But not quite. Instead, I came home and called Dhara, and at last she picked up the phone and let me back in. It’s hard to recall the precise details of that night, in light of what would happen only a few days later. I remember following Lucy out of the train at the Clark El station, heading along the grimy corridors and listening to a trio of buskers harmonize to “You Send Me,” then rumbling north over the river, the walls of the city closing in and opening up to avenues, yellow streetlights and headlights, red signal lights and brake lights streaking by.
At Armitage we got off the train, and there was a moment on the escalator where Lucy gave me what I thought might have been an expectant look. We stepped off and continued through the turnstile, then down to the sidewalk in Lincoln Park. This time we didn’t stop at the corner but continued on up her street, walking close, and I felt that curious combination of excitement and nausea that precedes something perilous. My hands were in my pockets. I tried to find a mantra or some way to clear my head, and in the middle of this effort a black Jeep full of college kids, probably from nearby DePaul, came racing past, four or five obnoxious boys bent on outdoing one another, two of them standing in the back, clutching the roll bar. One yelled at us, “Fuck you!” and another added, “Fuckers!” Their cackling laughter trailed down the street, followed by a squeal of tires as they turned up Armitage. And that was all it took for me to lose whatever nerve I might or might not have been trying to gather. I don’t know if Lucy felt it, too, but I sensed the mood, whatever it was, had been broken, and more than that: the Jeep, the laughter had been a premonition, some kind of warning flare.
And so we went our separate ways.
You didn’t have to walk me home, she said, as if to erase other reasons we might have arrived at that juncture.
It was the least I could do.
And then I was on the train again. North/Clybourn, Chicago, Merchandise Mart, Clark, and State. I slipped into my father’s apartment quietly. His bedroom door was closed, lights out. I sat on the dog-smelling couch, asking myself how many nights would I have to sleep there. I woke Dhara with my call, and had just begun my plea when she said The door’s unlatched. You can let yourself in. I wrote a quick note to my father: Headed back to my place. Thanks for the hospitality and the stories.
Dhara and I kept a fragile peace those next few days. I don’t recall much in the way of conversation, only that I tried to cook, clean, and compliment my way to a suitable apology.
It was Dhara who pointed out that I hadn’t checked in on my father since the weekend. We both got dressed, and she headed off to work. We had planned to meet for lunch at the Green City Market, which was opening for the season that morning. Wednesday, May 6, 2009.
I took the elevators down and up and knocked on my father’s door. When he didn’t answer, I took out my key and poked my head in. It was seven thirty. By now he was usually padding around, but I couldn’t hear him stirring, only saw that his bedroom door was slightly ajar.
I brewed a pot of coffee, got two mugs from the cabinets, and put some food out for Wing Biddlebaum. I poured myself a cup and read the Trib and the Times on my iPhone. Federal regulators were running stress tests on the major banks. Fears of the swine-flu pandemic were lessening. And John Edwards, the presidential candidate who cheated on his terminally ill wife, was defending himself against charges that he’d misused campaign funds.
By eight thirty I’d had my two cups and might not have bothered to peek in on my father had Wing not been acting strange. He ignored the food I’d put out for him, he meowed in a way I hadn’t heard before—deeper, from the back of his throat—and when I was getting ready to leave I found him pacing in the foyer, as if trying to block my exit.
Slowly, I pushed open my father’s bedroom door.
“Dad,” I said.
When he didn’t respond, I repeated myself.
He was lying on his side, halfway under the covers, facing the balcony. The light through the blinds striped his face.
“Dad!” I yelled, half-expecting him to sit up and snap back at me. I approached with a sinking feeling. His eyes were closed. He had an unearthly placid look. I shook his shoulder and thought I saw a slight heave of his chest, but when I put my finger under his nose no air came out. I touched his face with the back of my hand, and his cheek was cold.
I have no idea why, in that moment of actual crisis, when I had every reason to fall to my knees or jump onto the bed and furiously attempt CPR, I just stood there. I waited I don’t know how long—a minute, five minutes—before calling 911. And instead of screaming Send an ambulance right away! I told the dispatcher that my father was gone. She asked me about the breathing, asked me to describe his color. Pale and gray. She told me to try taking his pulse. I fished his limp arm from under the sheets and held two fingers to the back of his wrist. “Nothing,” I said.
The paramedics came and confirmed what I knew. Then the police were asking me whether the death was expected or unexpected. And I struggled for an answer. I said I’d been expecting this for years—he was nearly eighty, his health in decline—but, no, it was unexpected; he’d been more spirited lately than I’d ever seen him.
While we waited for the coroner to arrive, I went to the living room and called Dhara. She didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail with the news, and sent a text as well. She returned the call right away, and was at my father’s apartment within minutes.
“I’m so sorry.” She embraced me for a long time, there in the hallway, with the door still open. And that’s when I wept. “I’m sorry, too.”
The coroner asked about my father’s medical history. I told him about the heart trouble, so he looked at the labels on the pills in the medicine cabinet. He called the cardiologist, and I learned that my father had been in Stage C heart failure, functional but declining, just on the verge of Stage D. D for dying.
The next hours spun by, as I made phone calls and arrangements. I reached my half brothers in New York and Boston. Neither sounded too surprised. “I’ve been waiting for this call,” Michael said. “I bet he left behind an incredible mess.”
“Actually, no,” I told him. “The apartment is clean. It looks as if a maid came through here. He was selling off his stuff right till the end. And it appears that he died in his sleep.”
“Bizarre. I used to have nightmares that he’d get drunk and cross the median, crash head-on into a family of four.”
This got my blood up. “He was a drinker, but only at home. He never went out,” I said. “And is this really a time to talk that way?”
“I’m sorry. He could be brilliant, but he was also a pain in the ass.”
Eric was no better. I’d called and allowed the news to sink in. He’d plied me for details about discovering the body, and told me he wanted to talk to his wife and kids. When he called back a couple hours later, all he seemed to care about was my father’s bank account. Did he have debts? Were we going to have to pay some enormous bills—to the Feds; to the credit-card usurers? Was that foreclosure fiasco over with? Or was somebody going to come after us? “I can’t afford to write another check, Adam. We could be looking at teacher layoffs across the state. And this is Massachusetts, for Chrissake. The last sane place in the country. If I get canned, what are my kids going to eat?”
“The foreclosure went through,” I
said. “That’s all behind us. I don’t know about the rest, but first things first. Dad just died. I have a lot to figure out.”
“And the funeral costs?”
“He was your father.”
“He didn’t raise me.”
“I’m not getting into this,” I said.
The coroner determined that my father had died around 2:00 a.m. Body temperature falls two degrees per hour after death, so it was just a matter of counting backwards. Since there was no evidence of foul play and the doctor had said my father’s heart could have gone at any minute, the coroner skipped the toxicology screening and said there was no need for an autopsy. I asked if I could request one, anyway, just to be sure—I was remembering what Lucy had said about old people and suicide—but the coroner told me I’d have to order that myself, and the base fee in Cook County was at least a couple thousand dollars.
I called the cardiologist back. I wanted to believe that my father had gone peacefully in his sleep, but a part of me wondered if he hadn’t taken a bunch of pills, left them in the bathroom so no one would suspect anything, or if he had knowingly mixed too much heart medication with his usual four or five glasses of alcohol. If I let him go without an autopsy, I might never find out, so I asked the doctor how long people survived with Stage D heart failure. But he wouldn’t give an estimate, even when I pressed him. He did say it would have been months, not years, before my father would no longer have been able to get around on a cane.
“What would have happened then?” I asked.
“We’d have moved him to the hospital for round-the-clock care.”
“And you told him this?”
“He knew his condition,” the doctor said. “I made it very clear.”
I hung up none the wiser: Either my father had died of heart failure, or he had self-euthanized, knowing full well what his future looked like: needles and tubes, doctors and nurses telling him what was good for him, when in fact nothing was good for him.
The coroner signed the death certificate. Dhara went back to our apartment to research funeral homes and arrange to have the body transferred. I gathered some papers and books that were sitting on a chair beside my father’s bed, and stacked them on his desk in the living room. From the nightstand I removed his empty glass, an amber film of dried Diet Rite at the bottom. I was going to rinse the glass, but changed my mind, and moved it to the kitchen cabinet. Here was his last drink, his Rite of Devotion.
I went into his room and sat down on the chair at his bedside. I lifted his hand and held it for a while, something I’d never done when he was alive. Then I pulled the sheet over him and closed the door.
Sitting at his desk, I stared out at the buildings and the cloudless sky, listened to the rush-hour bustle below.
Dhara called to say she’d found a funeral director and was sending him over. “I know these things are expensive,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’ll figure a way to pay for it all.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I have savings. The cost doesn’t matter.”
She offered to take care of everything—find out if my father had a funeral plan, track down friends and colleagues.
“Where should we have the funeral?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Morbid as he was, he refused to talk about last wishes and wills. When I brought it up, he called me a grave watcher, whatever that is.”
We agreed to hold off until we’d found some kind of instructions, and if nothing turned up we’d decide in the morning. Marinette, where his family was buried? Normal, where he finished his career? Chicago, where Sherwood Anderson made his name?
While I waited for Dhara to come up, I turned to the stack of books and papers that had been at my father’s bedside. At the top was his biography, Sherwood Anderson: Volume One. Beneath it were Winesburg, Ohio, and his other favorite book, Anderson’s story collection Death in the Woods. Under that was the manuscript box I’d seen before in the Harbor City storage cage, the one marked “BOG” for Book of the Grotesque. I opened the box with that same queasy anticipation I’d felt walking Lucy home a few days before.
For the most part the contents were the same, and appeared to be in identical order to what I’d already been through: title page on top, then nothing but notes, fragments, and folders. In addition to that one chapter I’d seen before, about George Willard’s arrival in Chicago, I found another piece my father had written, a short story, it looked like, called “The Writer’s Writer.”
As I was getting ready to read the story, I noticed, sitting at the very bottom of the box, an envelope. I picked it up and saw that it was marked “Adam.” I’ve never seen a ghost, but stumbling upon my name at that moment, in that place, made me feel what it must be like. I set “The Writer’s Writer” aside, ripped open the envelope, and pulled out the typed letter.
Dear Adam,
I want to apologize for any trouble I’ve put you through on this day and in this lifetime. I was as difficult a father as you were easy a son. I hope it was not a shock to find me. I’ve been combing my hair and making things presentable in preparation for what we both knew was coming. You were expecting this, yes? No one likes an unpleasant surprise. I owe you a pleasant one, after all these years, and that’s what this letter is about.
But, first: arrangements. I would like a small cocktail party, but please: no toasts (I’ve never heard an honest toast and would hate for my pyre to be set to sea on the breezes of false praise). The party could take place in Chicago, perhaps here in my apartment (remove the body, run a vacuum, serve plenty of liquor). I’ve left my address book in the top right-hand drawer of my desk, and have placed asterisks by the names of those I’d like invited. A short list, I’m afraid.
About the body: burn it and do what you will with the pixie dust. In life, I scattered to the four winds, so why stop now?
Something I’ve been meaning to tell you: I did not have long to live. After the doctor gave this prognosis, I was depressed for days, then suddenly elated. I could finish something and finish it well. If I was careful, I would not have to go out as Sherwood Anderson did, felled by a toothpick, or like the actor—I forget his name—who died onstage in a swordfight during the last scene of Macbeth. No, I would get my house in order. I would own my departure.
Remember Elizabeth Willard’s tin box, the one she plastered into the walls of her hotel/prison, the inheritance she meant for her son but was too far gone to bequeath? That story, “Death,” had always haunted me, until I realized that I could rewrite the ending.
In the same desk drawer with my address book you will find three keys on a Chicago Cubs ring. One is to my storage locker in Little Italy, where I still have a few belongings of limited value. One is to my storage cage in this building, where I have put boxes of research material, including my abandoned manuscript for Volume Two. And the third key is to a small safe hidden under blankets and shoes in my bedroom closet. You should look there, and recall how “Some time it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.”
Farewell.
Love,
Dad
P.S. Please take good care of Wing.
I read the letter twice and was reading it a third time when a knock came on the door. It was Dhara.
“You’ve been crying.” She helped me out of the chair. We held each other on the camelback sofa, and after a while, I handed her the letter. She read it and returned it to me.
Her eyes welled with tears. “How do you think he did it?”
“Liquor and pills,” I said.
“Do you want to make sure?” she asked. “We can still order an autopsy.”
“You remember what the coroner said: They’re expensive.”
“I’ll pay for it,” Dhara offered.
“He wouldn’t want someone cutting him up, and the letter is pretty clear. He just doesn’t say exactly how. He looked good. That’s the miracle of it.”
“Is the letter dated?” Dhara asked.
I che
cked. It wasn’t. “I wonder when he wrote it. Yesterday? How long has he been planning this?”
“Since the diagnosis, it sounds like.”
“I wish I’d never sent him to that doctor,” I said. “This never would have happened if I’d just left him alone.”
“He made his own choices. He didn’t have to go to the doctor. You didn’t force him. If anything, knowing that his time was limited gave him a chance to ‘own his departure,’ as he said.”
“I can’t help feeling responsible.”
“But you’re not, Adam. He could have had a heart attack on the street, in an elevator or some public place, a bunch of strangers circling him or walking right by. He died at home. In bed. Probably fell asleep without any pain. Who wouldn’t want to go that way?”
When the funeral director and another man arrived with a gurney, Dhara showed them to the bedroom, then steered me to the balcony. We stood and watched the State Street Bridge lower in the wake of a sailboat flotilla. The sun was going down. The streetlights cast a gold glow on the river. And the warning bells rang and rang as the Clark, LaSalle, and Wells Street bridges rose into the sky.
The funeral director poked his head outside, and we arranged a time to meet the next day. After the men wheeled the gurney away, Dhara and I went into my father’s room, and I pulled his comforter taut to erase the impression his body had made on the bed.
“What a day,” I said. “Like a thousand days pressed into one.”
Dhara put her arm around me and rubbed my back.
“Could you do me a favor?” I sat down on the squeaky bed my father had picked up at some estate sale. “Could you get the keys from his drawer and open that safe? I’d be much happier if you did it.”
Dhara left the room and returned with the address book and keys. She handed the book to me, and I thumbed through the pages. Indeed he had put asterisks beside twenty or so names. I wished there had been more, and even now was wondering who else to invite to this “cocktail party.”
The End of the Book Page 20