The Story of My Father

by Sue Miller

  I had begun, only a year or so before, to send stories out, first to magazines that might pay me something, then to little literary magazines. Nothing had been accepted, but I’d had what writers call “good” rejection letters, personally written ones; and I had an odd kind of confidence in myself, an assumption that it would happen—my work getting taken for publication—and it would happen soon. I’d begun to meet other writers through a few classes I’d taken, and then among the parents in the day-care center where I worked. The winter before, I’d applied to graduate writing programs—not so much for the sake of the course work as because I thought I might get a fellowship that would let me stop working and write more or less full time for a while.

  I did get a fellowship—several fellowships, actually. I could choose where I wanted to go. The biggest dollar amount, though, was from Boston University’s Creative Writing program, the program that would also be the least disruptive to my life. I could stay home. More important, Ben could stay home. There would be no complicated moves and adjustments to make. I accepted BU’s offer and was looking forward to living and working in a community of writers for a year. What I feared was that my parents’ arrival might threaten that in some way. Nonetheless, I found them a big lovely house to rent about five blocks away from mine.

  On the evening they arrived down from their summerhouse in New Hampshire, they came first to me. Mother was tearful and tired, overwhelmed—unreasonably, it seemed to me—by the thought of the cat they were going to have to care for: it came with the house, and she foresaw difficulties because of their old dog, who came with them.

  Already! I thought, irritated with her.

  I drove up with them to show them the rental. We entered through the back door, into the big kitchen. There, on the table, was a note from the friend of the owner who was in charge of the house while the owner was gone.

  Groans from Mother: Oh, God, what on earth was this about? She started to read it out loud to us.

  The friend welcomed us. She told us where things were, who to contact in case of various kinds of emergencies, how to reach her. Then she said that she was sorry to have to tell us that, tragically, the cat had recently died.

  Mother whooped with mean joy and literally danced around the kitchen. Dad and I couldn’t help laughing with her. By the time I left she’d poured herself a stiff drink and was happily taking in the big open rooms they would live in for four months.

  Nothing happened that fall as I’d feared it could. It was as though the convenient and welcome death of the cat were a kind of perverse blessing. My mother, who had begun to write poetry again after years away from it, enrolled in a class at the Radcliffe Seminars and was almost as busy as I was. My father went daily to the Divinity School Library at Harvard. I saw them only two or three times a week, sometimes for a meal, sometimes for a shorter visit. They poked around Boston and Cambridge together, and I think Mother felt, in a way, returned to her youth; her father had had a church in Belmont when she was an adolescent. They took care of Ben, who was then eleven, on the day he had no school in the afternoon, which was one of my longest days on campus at BU. It was an easy, lovely time for us all. I remember that my father came over one day and helped me plant a dogwood in my front yard. They both came over for Thanksgiving—Ben was with his father—and between courses, my father and I raked and bagged the fallen maple leaves in my tiny backyard while Mother sat wrapped up on the deck in the slanted gold afternoon sun, drinking wine and crying out from time to time about how divine this was.

  I gathered, though, that my father’s work wasn’t going very well. My mother confided to me that being a dean for fifteen years had “absolutely ruined your father as a scholar.” I wasn’t sure how to take this—whether it was just part of the usual drama she always tended toward, or of the jealousy she’d always felt about the extra demands being dean put on my father and about the freedom the president of the seminary had felt to call on Dad at virtually any time.

  But he complained, too, of not getting much done. He had a grant during this sabbatical to work on a revision of his biggest text, The History of Christianity, 1650–1950, and he clearly felt his usual strong sense of obligation to accomplish a lot on that account. But he also saw the text as embarrassingly hostile to Catholicism, something that seemed particularly egregious in these post–Ecumenical Council years. He wanted very much to change it, because the world of the church itself had changed and he along with it. It was odd, then, and probably more distressing to him than he said, that he was off his stride somehow with his scholarly work.

  My mother, on the other hand, was working very hard at her poetry and was unusually happy—except for her own beloved mother’s sudden illness, a stroke, which had kept my mother driving frequently to New Haven from mid-fall on to see her. By Thanksgiving, though, it seemed clear my grandmother would survive and recover completely, and my mother was ready to turn to her end-of-the-semester paper on Elizabeth Bishop with enthusiasm.

  The ten days or so after our Thanksgiving meal together were busy for me too. I had several term papers and also some fiction to write. My son went off to stay at his father’s house for a week, and I holed up with my typewriter and a lot of take-out food and didn’t see my parents until December eighth, the day after I turned my last paper in.

  That morning was unusually warm and sunny for December. I picked my mother up at about ten and we went Christmas shopping together, hitting one funky Cambridge store after another. She loved the shops, so different from those in Princeton. She was cheerful and exuberant. At Mobilia they were serving mulled wine. “Why, certainly!” my mother said, and she had two glasses full as we looked at things.

  Later in the day, she called me to tell me that my younger brother’s first child, a boy to be named Michael, had just been born by cesarean section. I stood in the kitchen, listening to the italics in her voice. She sounded high, exultant. Oh! she had to rush off now, she said. She and Dad were going out to tea in Belmont at my great-aunt’s house. Later I found out that Mother got into an intense political argument there—she enjoyed nothing more. That evening, I knew, they were to go to a dinner party in Cambridge.

  I was alone that night, finally with time to work on Christmas presents. When I’d finished sewing a few things, I took advantage of my son’s absence to go to bed early and read. I had turned the light out, but wasn’t asleep, when the phone rang around midnight. It was my father. He apologized for waking me. My mother, he said, had collapsed at dinner and been taken to the hospital with an apparent heart attack.

  “And?” I said. “How is she?”

  He cleared his throat. “She’s gone.”

  I cried out, “No!” (My tenant, a dear friend through all these years, says she remembers that night, remembers the wild cry she heard through the walls and only later learned the cause of.) After a moment, I was able to ask a few questions. And then suddenly it seemed crazy to be talking on the phone. Here we were, only a few blocks apart. I had to be with my father. I had to go. I got dressed and drove up Avon Hill, and we sat in the rented kitchen, dry-eyed and stunned, until around four-thirty or five in the morning, both of us—as we said again and again—fully expecting my mother to waltz in at any moment and begin pronouncing on one thing or another.

  I think this feeling was compounded for him because he hadn’t seen her again after her collapse at the party. She’d been wearing her evening dress, talking and drinking, and then suddenly she sat down, yawned once or twice, and slumped over, unconscious. When the ambulance came, the EMT guys asked my father about her medications. He wasn’t sure of all of them, so he drove home to gather them up instead of going in the ambulance with Mother.

  By the time he got back to the hospital with her collection of pill bottles, she was dead, though he didn’t know it right away. He sat in the waiting room as they continued to work on her for a while. When they came to tell him their news, he asked to see her, but they discouraged him; they told him what they’d don
e to try to save her had been invasive and might be difficult for him to confront. He acceded to them, as was his nature. (And indeed, when we picked up her rings and clothing a few days later, there was blood—Mother’s dried brown blood—on everything.)

  But I think now that not seeing her dying, or dead, made it hard for him to accept completely what had happened. That, and her dramatic and bottomless vitality. One moment she was herself, theatrical and full of vivid life; then she was gone from the stage, disappeared forever. No wonder in his delusional life a few years later she was often there, alive and busy with one thing or another.

  Over the next few days we planned a service and made the arrangements. My siblings and their families assembled slowly, my poor younger brother leaving his wife and day-old son in a hospital in Colorado to come east and mourn his mother. The rented house was noisy, full of the exuberance of the young kids, almost all boys.

  The doorbell rang one morning in the midst of this. I answered it. It was the director of the funeral home who’d arranged for Mother’s cremation. He’d come to drop off her ashes. I took the box. It was glossy cardboard, square and white, like the boxes that held the corsages boys gave you in high school. I remember standing with it in the wide front hall after I’d closed the door, listening to the happy shrieks of my nephews and my son playing wildly, unsure what to do. My father was upstairs in his room with the door shut, which seemed to be the way he was managing his grief. I didn’t know whether it would be an intrusion to knock on the door and give him the box. I couldn’t even decide on an appropriate place to set the box down if I didn’t take it upstairs. I don’t remember, actually, what I did do with it—but I remember feeling overwhelmed, suddenly, one of many moments through those days when I felt as though the simplest choices were beyond me.

  We had the service in New Haven, near where my grandparents, then in their mid-eighties, lived and a location central to many in Mother’s vast family. Each of us, my grandfather included, rose and went up to the pulpit to speak or read something in the service. My father had the 23rd Psalm. I read a poem of Mother’s.

  The day was long. We had arranged a lunch for the whole extended family at a local hotel. I was sitting two seats down from my grandfather at the long table. I remember that at one point he reached over and pushed the full plate away from the person sitting between us as he spoke to him, as though this poor man’s lunch might distract him—and surely he wouldn’t want that!—from what my grandfather was saying. I remember thinking how like him my mother had been in her hunger for attention and admiration.

  After lunch we stopped at my grandparents’ retirement condo to visit my grandmother, still recovering from her stroke and unable to come to the service. Then there was the long dark drive back to Boston. The next day, my brothers and sister left and Dad’s rental house seemed suddenly vast and silent. We began to clean it, and he, slowly, to pack things up.

  My father couldn’t go back to New Jersey until February; my parents had rented their house out for the entire semester. They had taken the Cambridge house only until just after the New Year, having planned to travel together for the remaining time. This was something he couldn’t imagine doing now, alone. Instead, just before Christmas he moved in with me for a month.

  His possessions sat for those weeks in boxes and suitcases heaped against the wall in the kitchen. It was only on the second or third day that I noticed the white corsage-sized box that held Mother’s ashes in the pile, as though it were of no more importance than the books or clothes. For my own ease of mind I tucked it away below other things, so my father’s dog or my cat or the kids running in and out wouldn’t bump into it and knock it to the floor, but it startled me as a fact about Dad that he would treat the ashes so casually.

  I needed to explain it to myself, and the way I did this was to attribute it to his complete lack of sentimentality: for him, I concluded, no part of Mother was contained or represented by the ashes, by the idea of the ashes, by the presence of the white box. Wherever her memory, her soul, dwelt for him, it wasn’t there.

  Was I right? I don’t know. Maybe, I think now, he was already a little Alzheimer-y, flattened in his response to some things, as in his apparent forgetfulness of the meaning of the box. Maybe another, intact version of Dad would have been more careful, more . . . reverential somehow about it. But maybe not.

  We tried to live a normal life. On New Year’s Eve we went to a Scandinavian friend’s house for a splendid dinner, and in accordance with Norwegian custom we stood on our chairs and jumped down from them as the New Year commenced, signaling our new beginnings.

  We drove out to Lincoln one night to have dinner with my aunt and uncle, my mother’s youngest sister and her husband. Dad’s birthday was January 11. He was sixty-five, officially elderly, as I told him (as I was now, at thirty-five, officially middle-aged). I cooked a fancy dinner and made a cake, and he blew out the candles. Ben was there, and a cousin had stopped by for the night, so it felt, I thought, festive. Festive enough.

  We went to movies; we took Ben and friends out for hamburgers; we stayed busy. But there was often a slight sense of strain, the awareness of silence, of the absence of the person who would have been decrying something, exalting something— even tediously describing something—but occupying center stage, at any rate, and thereby letting the two of us off the social hook. We missed her. My father usually had one drink before dinner, and I took to having one—and often several others— with him. It made things easier for both of us.

  Over these weeks my father’s behavior made me hopeful that he would approach his new solitary life with the discipline and curiosity that had marked him in all his endeavors: a new subject to study, a new sad project to begin. It seemed this might be so; he had a note pad, and he followed me around the house, asking questions and writing down the bits of useful information he was gathering. “About how often do you vacuum?” he’d ask, and write down my answer. (My answer! I hope I gave him the theoretical number.) “How often do you clean the toilets?” Scribble, scribble. He listed household products I used and asked and noted how I used them.

  I had to show him how to balance a checkbook—astonishing to me, and then not: of course she’d kept the accounts. She’d run the whole show. Everything to free him to be purely, only, the brilliant scholar she felt him to be.

  I discovered, going over their books, that they had no money to speak of, that when they’d loaned me $5,000 for the bulk of the down payment on my house, when they’d loaned my siblings money for their houses as well, they were cleaning themselves out each time, giving us everything they had, in checking as well as savings. I think none of us would have guessed this or perhaps we wouldn’t have felt so free to ask. Of course, they knew they had his pensions coming, that their retirement would be essentially salaried—they didn’t really need a nest egg—but this radical generosity to us was, nonetheless, extraordinary, and the more extraordinary to me for having been kept secret.

  The day Dad left to drive back to New Jersey was frigid, the old snow on the street frozen and grimy. His car, a battered dark-green Volvo parked in front of my house, was packed full of boxes of papers and books. I’d fixed him a lunch for the road. Maybe, he said, he’d save it for dinner when he got home to New Jersey. I thought then of the new absence he’d have to confront there, the empty house, the silence, Mother’s things, her arrangements, everywhere.

  I went out on the front porch to wave goodbye to him. He was wearing a ratty balaclava and the slightly-too-big tweed coat that my mother had bought for him secondhand somewhere; she had always bought all his clothes for him. He led his old dog out to the car and helped him into the passenger seat— Kolya was by then maybe sixteen or seventeen, an arthritic black Lab mix who’d gone grizzly white from the bottom up. Then Dad crunched around to the driver’s side, breath blurring, got in himself, and started the car. I watched them as they rounded the curve out of sight. He honked once. I was tearful again, suddenly stricken with sor
row for all I couldn’t do for him, for his solitude, for all the lonely tasks ahead of him. I remember thinking, Please don’t, don’t let Kolya die for a few more years.

  Through the next days and weeks, I tried to reassure myself with the beginnings I had seen. I thought of my father, making his notes, working out the rules for his new life. I thought of a poem I found, complete, in my mother’s papers after she died, about the differences between them.

  His habit is to work.

  Diurnal, steady as the sun

  He rises, dominates the day, it seems.

  Lies down at night

  Stinted.

  Her habit is to moon about.

  Waxing, waning—

  Flux.

  Some days full-face, smiling, whole.

  Others attenuated as a nail paring.

  Written off.

  Surely this is how he would proceed—steady as the sun, working—even in his grief.

  This was not the way it happened, though. That steadiness, that dailiness, that seemingly permanent temperamental need to be always at something fell away from him. And my education into the disjuncture of his dying, its inconsistency with his life, began here too. No wonder I resisted understanding it.

  It helped me in my resistance that he seemed much the same interpersonally for several years. He was interested in all our doings and stimulated by company, by intellectual events. He and I spoke and wrote often. I kept most of his letters, his script precise and vertical as always. He described things he’d seen and done.

  Reds [the movie] is well worth seeing. The hero looks like Ben. It’s long and sprawling, but finally focuses in on a taut and convincing triangle—O’Neill, Reed, and Louise. And the climax in Russia in the revolution is wild adventure. There is a fascinating chorus of elderly survivors: Eastman, Henry Miller, etc., who reminisce periodically, and Emma Goldman, Lenin, Zinoviev play their parts in the action.