by Sue Miller
He sent me advice about my new life teaching, about my work:
Don’t be intimidated by your students. After all, the incoming freshmen are fresh out of high school and the senior prom. They are enormously different from first-year graduate students, even those who are only twenty-two.
And:
I’m sorry that you were bumped from the advanced writing class. I suppose the dean figures that since he has to pay the full professor’s salary anyway he might as well get a full work load out of him. But if you are producing, that’s better yet.
He sent me clippings from the paper of things he thought I’d be interested in as well as things that amused him. One about a man who’d “accidentally” shot his mother-in-law (not badly), claiming he’d mistaken her for a raccoon. Another:
A Hopewell [NJ] man allegedly snipped off the long braided ponytail of a Cranbury woman as she jogged along Pretty Brook Road Sept. 19, about 5:50 p.m. The braid extended down to her waist, according to police.
The woman told police she screamed and the man ran north on Pretty Brook Road. She ran to the nearby Pretty Brook Tennis Club where two staff members and a club member pursued a suspect.
He was cornered by the three hiding in a pond on Princeton Day School property, within a patch of lily pads. The man was held at bay until the arrival of police. . . . He allegedly used a pair of scissors in the assault.
I can still laugh out loud when I read this old clipping, so like the germ of a Cheever short story. And it reassured me that my father would notice and be amused by such a thing. He still had his sense of humor then. He still took pleasure in what was offbeat in life, what was Thurberesque.
It’s just that he had also pretty much stopped doing things. The first summer after my mother’s death he never got around to getting a fishing license. He gladly hiked with me and Ben when we visited him in New Hampshire, and with my brothers when they went up; but not on his own, not with that self-propelled interest in the activity that had always marked him. And over the next few years I noticed that things began to come up that interfered with projects and plans he’d made. He’d forget to reserve a kennel spot for the dog and have to cancel a retreat or miss a reunion. He’d just never quite get around to arranging to meet my aunt to watch the hawks migrate.
He began, for the first time in his life, to get negative student evaluations. The enrollment in his classes dropped.
My two courses seem just barely enough, five or six each, so that I can’t cancel either. There is one advantage to the light load, in that I am finding it hard to get back into the rhythm of teaching, and to organize effectively.
Within two or three years of Mother’s death, he seemed to me to be reduced, slightly withdrawn, increasingly without initiative.
And now the old friends and relatives began to talk to me, that series of conversations conducted, really, behind his back, the questions I couldn’t answer: What’s wrong with your father? Is he lonely? Depressed? What did you notice? Aren’t you worried? What are you doing about it?
But I talked with him face-to-face too, and at first he was characteristically candid—and insightful and intelligent— about what he saw as his failings. He fooled me, maybe he fooled himself too, by being so open and clear about it. He said he couldn’t stay focused in class. He’d begin a thought, and by the time he’d made his way through two or three sentences he would have forgotten where he was heading, and he’d have to do some tricky intellectual footwork to make it seem he’d had a point at all. He said he was making no progress on his writing projects. He laughed at himself, ruefully, for his lack of discipline, for watching too much TV. “The old man’s comforter,” he called it.
It was at the end of this period—six years in all—that my sister and I persuaded him to move to Denver.
I still don’t know exactly what we were seeing in Dad at that time. But whatever it was, I know I pushed it away—thinking about it, trying to understand it, even, sometimes, seeing it. I chose, I think, not to notice as long as I could.
Why? Because, I suppose, he was still so smart, so interesting and interested. Because the disease’s onset was lurching, halting, and the good times made me dismissive of the bad times. Because I could argue to myself it was partially depression over my mother’s death.
Sometimes I thought that what I was seeing plain for the first time was the lifelong forgetfulness, abstractedness, that had driven Mother slightly crazy but that her compulsive perfectionistic control over their life together had shielded him from revealing. Now of course it was exposed, now that he had to manage his life as well as live it. Even I, who had so idealized him, got irritated with him occasionally early in this period for forgetting to do things he’d said he would do—for me, for Ben.
But I also think that at the heart of my not-seeing was my astonishingly naive set of assumptions about death. This could not be what was happening to Dad. Not to my father. That he would be diminished, and diminished again, before he died? That I would lose him, over and over, before the final loss? That I was already losing him? Some childish part of me simply said no—this couldn’t be the way he would die, he would end—and continued to say no even after it ought to have been clear that it was, indeed, the death he was moving toward.
Now that they’re both long gone, it is my mother, the one who died earlier, the one whose death I did not see, whom I sometimes dream alive and whole again. What I imagine in my sleeping life is that it was all a mistake, the notion of her dying—some sort of confusion on our part. And when I wake after these dreams, occasionally I believe in them for a few moments: I believe she is alive.
I never have such dreams about my father, though he comes to me often enough. But the dreams aren’t a denial of what occurred in life. Too often, they confirm it. Something terrible is happening to my father in the dream, my father is trying something and failing, my father is speaking and making no sense. And always, always in these dreams, I am useless. In spite of my tortuous, dreamlike efforts, I am utterly unable to help him.
Chapter Seven
THERE WAS another reason to deny what I saw coming— saw, but turned from seeing as long as I could. In the years between my mother’s death and my father’s diagnosis, my father and I took up our relationship again. We began, I would say, to know each other. Basically it was a matter of learning to talk to each other as we once had, before my mother’s anxiety about that made it difficult. A matter of being together enough to grow comfortable with her absence, which initially loomed as large between us as her presence once had.
For both of us, I think, there was some terror about this. Late in the spring after my mother died, he and I took a long trip together, driving across the country in his car with a trailer hooked onto the back, a trailer we had packed with all the furniture and china and possessions, mostly Victoriana, that had come from Mother’s family, which my father now thought proper to distribute among her children. The plan was to take about ten days to wend our way from one of my sibling’s homes to the next. Anticipating this, I remember thinking, and saying aloud to friends too, “God, what are we going to talk about all that time?” When later in the summer his friend Peggy Grant told me he’d expressed the same fear to her, I laughed at how like each other in many ways we were.
The trip did have its awkward moments, and somewhere perhaps in Pennsylvania I launched myself into a new bad habit as a result of my anxiety, tearing and biting at my cuticles until they bled, a habit I’ve yet to cure myself of completely. But it was a test of sorts, and we passed it. I remember one particularly David Lynch–like moment on Mother’s Day—which we’d both forgotten completely, never having celebrated it in our family (my mother thought it was a bogus holiday). We arrived in a packed roadside restaurant somewhere in Nebraska to discover the Mother’s Day brunch coming to its caloric conclusion. I told the dubious man in charge of welcoming us that I was a mother myself and was given a wilted corsage to pin on. He explained that things were winding down and
seated us somewhat reluctantly. The waitress came over, seeming irritated, and told us what we couldn’t have. And before we had finished eating, everyone else having risen and left nearly as one slightly earlier, a midget began vacuuming the room, slowly closing in on us. We actually had to lift our feet as he poked the roaring machine under our table, never meeting our eyes. Which was just as well, as we were sniggering and choking on our laughter at the absurdity of the whole event.
During the long days on the road we learned to talk in the desultory but intimate way that such a trip makes possible. We spoke of Mother and about Dad’s plans for teaching. I talked about myself—I’d had my first stories accepted for publication that spring and was full of the sense of my possibilities. We spoke of my siblings and about the summer coming up. I can’t say I wasn’t relieved when the trip was over—it was work, it was a strain too—but it changed something between us, mended some rift or gap formed long ago.
I saw much more of my father in the following few years than I had before. We took other long trips together: to family events and reunions, to weddings. We drove to Pennsylvania for a family funeral and stayed on a few extra days with a favorite aunt because my car broke down. We drove to Chicago for a Christmas with two of my siblings and their families and came back together, making our way cautiously through an ice storm that scared both of us. I spent much of each summer with him in New Hampshire. For some of these years I was still single, and I confess I thought sometimes of those nineteenth-century spinster daughters who take care of their widowed fathers into their old age. I knew this wasn’t possible for me—I was too committed to my freedom, to my work, to my privacy—but I enjoyed the fantasy. No wonder I denied the first symptoms I saw. The second, the third. Just as I was coming to feel I knew my father again, he began to disappear into his illness.
Our rescue together of the cat house contained both these elements: knowing him and losing him. Here’s the story. For many years, since the mid-fifties, my parents had rented one cottage or another in a little town in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where many academics summered. They’d come there originally, actually, to visit friends who lived on our street in Chicago; the husband was a colleague of Dad’s at the Divinity School.
A few years after my mother’s death, the cottage my parents had spent at least a decade’s worth of summers in was offered for sale. Suddenly my father was faced with a decision. He’d wanted for a long time to buy a house in New Hampshire, a place where the family could gather, a place he could leave to all of us, but he’d been perfectly comfortable too in the rental cottage. Now that it was for sale, he had to think about all his options.
The more he thought about it, the more he felt the Stevens cottage didn’t make sense. It needed work of a structural sort, and none of us knew how to do it. It wasn’t winterized, and he thought a place that could be used year round would be a better investment. He looked at several other cottages for sale, and then he began to focus on the Mitchell cottage. I don’t know how he first learned it might be available. It wasn’t on the market. It might have been the real estate broker who planted the seed—that this beautiful, derelict shingle house, owned by the deeply eccentric Bill Mitchell, who lived there reclusively with many cats, might be had for a song.
Bill was probably in his late sixties then, though he looked much older. Life had been hard on him. He came from some money, he’d gone to Harvard and then Harvard Law School, but he’d never been able to launch himself into the world, and he was clearly incompetent to manage the vagaries and difficulties of modern life. When his mother died, she left her money in a trust. Bill and his brother were to get an annual allowance. After some years, though, Bill had somehow broken into the trust and began to use up the principal to support what amounted to his addiction: cats. Now he had no more money, and the house was in terrible shape—partially because of the cats, partially because he’d done nothing to maintain it. He was willing to sell it for very little in order to continue to support the cats, all of whom he was going to move into two trailers perched on the land of another animal-loving friend.
When I told a local friend of Dad’s interest in Bill’s house, he said, “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, and neither should your father.”
But Bill was willing to let the house go for $30,000, and my father had accumulated that much in the years after Mother’s death, since he had no expenses to speak of: he didn’t buy clothes, he didn’t travel, he still drove his old car, he ate simply, his mortgage was paid off. Buying Bill’s house outright would mean he needn’t undertake a new mortgage—something that scared him. That fear and his vagueness about money management—which might have been reflective simply of his lack of experience or might have been the Alzheimer’s—made the Mitchell deal seem attractive.
A complication was that Bill wouldn’t let us in to look at the house. He said he wanted to get it cleaned up first; he was ashamed for anyone to see how dirty it was. My gentle father could understand this; he was sympathetic with Bill about it. Besides, we already knew the house was large and beautiful— we’d been in it years earlier, before Bill bought it. It had six bedrooms and a vast living room, wainscoted to eye level, with a huge stone fireplace at one end. The land below it sloped down to Moose Brook. The wide porch that wrapped its front looked east across the valley and directly up at Mount Madison and Mount Adams. In the evenings the setting sun lighted their rocky peaks orange, then pink, then purple. How bad could it be? We’d have to clean it, we figured—scrub everything, air it out, set off bombs for insects. It would surely smell of cat for a while, but my younger brother, a vet, knew various products that would help with that, as would applying polyurethane to everything in sight. We were all for it, except for my dubious older brother, who was allergic to cats. The rest of us, though, offered to help; we saw it as an adventure. Dad made his offer and was accepted.
But Bill kept postponing the closing. He wasn’t well, and he just didn’t seem to be able to pull himself together to do the cleanup, which would be step one in putting everything into motion. Step two, obviously, would be moving the cats out, no small project. By his own count, there were more than eighty of them.
Several deadlines came and went. Finally my father gave Bill a kind of ultimatum, combined with an offer to help with moving the cats and cleaning up. Bill reluctantly acceded and they set a date. I cleared my schedule for a few days and went up to New Hampshire.
I arrived in time for dinner at the Stevens cottage.
Well? I asked. How was it?
My father was clearly stunned by the scale of the mess. He couldn’t bring himself to describe it; he just said it was “unbelievable.” He was quieter even than usual at dinner and through the evening, as I chattered on about clean-up strategies and transport for the cats.
The next day my father went down to Bill’s house after breakfast while I drove to town to buy equipment: mops, buckets, scrub brushes, cleansers, trash bags. Then, wearing my overalls, I drove to Bill’s house too, ready to go. At this point I’d ripped out walls in my own little house in Cambridge, sanded and finished floors by myself, replastered, painted, done primitive plumbing. I knew it all, I thought, and I loved a project.
Nothing could have prepared me for the scene in Bill’s house. It was like walking into a deeply perverse ecosystem, an embrowned hell, with the terrified cats, dozens and dozens of them, inbred and bizarre-looking, unused to any other human but Bill, shifting in massive waves of feline life with every motion you made. Shit was the operative word here, the word no one had mentioned—not even the real estate agent, whom I began to regard from that moment on as fundamentally criminal. (Instead of a percentage, he’d taken as his payment a twenties-era LaSalle Bill had up on blocks in the garage.)
At some point, Bill had given up. Instead of cleaning the shit up, he’d chosen to walk around it and then, inevitably, to step on it. The floor was made of it, ten to twelve inches deep in some parts, we later discovered—and thi
s had come to be the essence of life for a whole happy ecological universe. The cats made the shit; blissful flies bred in it, flew around, and tapped the walls and windows, which were lightly coated in a brown like the darkened glaze of ancient paintings. Spiders nearly as fat as my fist dangled in corners and from the ceiling, barely needing to exert themselves to feast on the flies. The cats had clawed the damask curtains to shreds, here and there pulling them down. The beautiful old furniture was deeply grooved, scratched, gummy with shit. The posts on the elegant open balcony and stairs at the end of the living room opposite the fireplace were clawed to stalactites and stalagmites, only occasionally still meeting in their narrowed middles.
My father’s eyes in his defeated face were steady on my own face, which I’m sure revealed everything I felt. It was hideous. It was ruinously awful.
He owned it.
I had a sense at the moment of the transfer of responsibility, of picking up a burden. He looked whipped. I couldn’t afford that, for his sake. Someone needed to say it could be done. Someone needed to feel that. All right. All right. It would be me. It was nearly a physical sensation, taking it on. I don’t remember, actually, what I said. I know I was furious, but somehow I didn’t aim that at my father. Bill, I suppose, felt the brunt of it, but even there I was restrained. I set aside my useless cleaning tools. We decided for the moment to focus on the cats—catching them, putting them into boxes, laundry hampers, crates, anything they couldn’t escape from that would also let them breathe.
My father and Bill made the first trips, while I stayed behind, boxing up more of them. At the end of the second day, I made two trips myself up to Stark, where Bill’s trailers were set on a hillside, one for himself and the nursing mothers and kittens, one for all the other cats. In the car as I drove, the terrified cats yowled and threw themselves around in their containers. I could see the boxes lurching and bouncing in the rearview mirror, and I prayed, I prayed no cat would escape while I was still on the road.