by Daniel Smith
I turn into the asphalt driveway that leads to our family home, a brick ranch that’s among the largest in town. It was the first in the region to be powered strictly by electricity, earning us a big sign that stood in our front yard for nearly a year that read: “A Gold Medallion All-Electric Home!” I remember thinking that our new house, built in 1959, complete with a bomb shelter to protect us against any Russian nuclear attack, proved we Fentons stood on the cutting edge of the future, whatever that meant. Our house was adjacent to the Juniper Medical Clinic & Hospital, at its height a 40-bed facility Dad owned. He came to Juniper in the mid-50s and began a 40-year run as the town’s general practitioner and only doctor.
While Dad was setting broken legs or pinning hips, Mother was busy doing anything she could to pretend we didn’t live in this little cow town in backwater Texas. Raised in Oklahoma City and educated at Oklahoma University, Louise Jenkins abandoned her chemistry degree to marry Robert—“he looked so good in his Navy uniform,” she often told me—and, doubtless, imagined at first building a congenial life as the wife of a well-to-do doctor. Instead, she fled that world for a make-believe one: she developed a strong interest in community theater, the Black Land Players, where she directed and acted in numerous productions (my favorite was “Dirty Work at the Crossroads,” even then a laughable melodrama), much to the chagrin of Dad whose patience for a wife so clearly uninterested in playing the role of a traditional doctor’s wife—socializing with other local rich folks in various bridge clubs and golf outings—grew very thin. With my mother dragging me to her play productions and regaling us over countless family dinners about critical books we all needed to be reading and art we should be appreciating, Dad must have sensed he and Mother were on very different pages regarding how their life together would play out. Sure enough, by the time I entered graduate school, they divorced. My dear mother, post-divorce, moved to North Carolina where she took up with a professor at a local college and remarried. He was as cerebral as Dad was materialistic, which made for more of a mutual admiration society than a love match, but at least they had learning in common. When she died in a car accident about ten years ago, both Jeff and I realized we had lost a huge part of who we had become. I still miss calling her up and leaning on her for advice. Not being able to reach out to her over my many life worries these past several years, I am left to imagine what she might have told me. Probably something like what she said when I agonized over ending my marriage with Shelly Ann many years ago: “if what you do, Brian, makes life better for those around you, it’s probably the right thing.” A divorce rarely makes life better, but breaking up with Shelly Ann improved both of our lives.
As I sit in the car outside the house in Juniper, my cell rings. It’s Danny. I almost hit “decline,” but then, I figure, what if there’s some fresh bit of craziness I need to know about? Maybe he’s left our house and finally headed home. So I answer.
“Where you at, Pops?”
“I’m sitting right outside the house.”
“Oh, good. Glad I caught you.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Sure, it’s all cool here. I was calling to see how Grandpa’s doing.”
“Well, I don’t know yet. I’m just about to go see him and Claire. If you really wanted to know, you could have called Grandpa or Claire yourself.”
“Yeah, well, but I figure I’d get the real skinny on him from you.”
“So are you still at my house?” I ask, trying to figure out when the Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave is leaving.
“Yeah. Me and Dawn. We’re rethinking things. Spending some quality time with Mom too.”
“Really?” This, of course, is potentially frightening information, but I’m just unable to fully process it right now.
“We went to court this morning,” Danny says in his breezy way. “They delayed the case for a few days.”
“Is that good news?” I realize upon saying this, why am I asking my son about a legal maneuver, when he knows next to nothing about the law?
“Looks like it, Pops. They’re going to allow more time to depose Jack’s friends—you know, to find out what this wife-killer was REALLY up to.”
Frankly, I couldn’t care less about Jack and his problems. I just hope the outcome is good for Corinne. I guess my brain and heart can handle only one crisis at a time, and—spoiler alert—I’m definitely focused on yours truly.
“Look, Danny, I’ve got to go inside, see Dad and Claire.”
“No, I got ya. Just wanted to leave you with one thing you should tell Grandpa.”
“You have a message for my dad?” I can hardly wait to hear this choice bit of wisdom from a young man for his grandfather—a man he mostly thinks about every Christmas when, at Claire’s insistence, Dad gives us all (including grandchildren) very significant gifts of money.
“Yeah. It’s this: tell him to stay strong cuz I’m gonna come visit.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. It’ll give him something to look forward to. You get to that age, I’m sure everything’s in your rear view and depressing and all; I wanted him to be looking out his front window for a change. A man’s gotta have a future or what’s the point of living, you know?”
“OK. I’ll tell him,” I say, and then click off the phone. At first, I’m appalled at Danny’s self-serving message: “Please stay alive and alert, Grandpa, at least long enough to make sure that my rare (and doubtless final) visit with you is a good one.” First off, Dad will not recognize his only grandson. (The same can be said for his granddaughter, Jeff’s girl, Jeanie, who just graduated from college.) And I have to wonder how much disdain Dad feels towards Danny’s uneven career track. More than once, he’s asked me, “That boy of yours ever find a job?” Back when Danny was a little boy Dad really got close to him—he admired Danny’s athleticism and good looks, and loved showing him his doctor’s paraphernalia (stethoscope and reflex hammer), perhaps in hopes that someone in the family would follow him into the medical business. So if Dad once shared his hopes with Danny, what’s the harm now—here in a truly desperate moment—for Danny to offer his Grandpa a little hope as well?
I go inside the house and I am immediately hit with the chaotic world of Robert Fenton. As I enter the den/TV room, I hear Dad yelling, “Take ‘em off! Take ‘em off!” He’s sitting completely naked in his wheelchair and pointing vaguely toward his body.
“Your clothes ARE off, Robert!” Claire all but screams in his face. With Dad’s advanced hearing loss, his hearing aid does little to improve things so if you have any hope of being heard (let alone understood), you have to really get in his face and hope he can read your lips.
“Get ‘em off!” he angrily yells at Claire, balling up his fist as if he’s about to hit her, meanwhile remaining oblivious to his own nakedness and Claire’s repeated gesture to his clothes lying on the sofa he’d insisted taking off moments before.
I don’t know whether to make my presence known or wait at the door for this episode in severe confusion and anger to pass. Alas, Claire catches sight of me, and she seizes on it. “Well, look who’s here, Robert!”
I slowly enter the room and give my dad a big, hearty “hello” wave. He looks at me like an unknown but possibly kindly intruder who may or may not help him in his failed quest to get his clothes removed from his entirely naked body. Dad throws Claire a “who’s this guy?” look and Claire quickly jumps on the moment to divert Dad from his current craziness, reminding him, “This is Brian! He’s come to visit you!”
I bend down to get closer to eye level with Dad and tell him that, yes, I’m here and feeling so glad to see him. “Those are your clothes, Dad,” I say, pointing to his pants and shirt lying next to him on the sofa. “You need to put them ON.” The glazed, faraway look in his eyes suggest so much confusion, it breaks my heart. It’s as if he’s trying to process in a single moment a host of deeply perplexing questions: “who is this guy, what does he want, why has he come to ‘visit’ me
, why won’t Claire take off my clothes after I’ve asked her a million times? Is there ANYONE here who can help me??”
I pull out a small, wrapped gift I had brought with me and hand it to my naked father. “Look, I brought you something, Dad.” He looks at it carefully but doesn’t touch it at first, as if it might be dynamite. So I open it for him. Once he sees it’s a box of chocolates, a craving he’s had long before dementia set in, he gets a whole new focus. He drops the “take ‘em off!” mantra, and happily eats a couple of dark chocolates from the box. “You like it?” I ask.
He responds with a “so-so” kind of reaction, but his train of mind has been altered so now Claire is able to put his clothes back on him. “Why the hell did he want his clothes off?” I ask.
“Who knows?” she says, as if I’d ask why he prefers dark to milk chocolate. Apparently, he had frantically ordered her no fewer than four times that morning to take off and then put back on his clothes—for virtually no apparent reason. “Every day it’s something different,” Claire observes, helping Robert put on his shirt and pants, while he focuses on downing chocolates from the gift box. “It’s an adventure,” she says.
Later, we have dinner, a delicious meal of salmon and asparagus spears that Claire expertly prepares. My God, I’ve always thought, Dad not only gets loving care from his wife, he gets high-end meals from a first-rate chef. Refocused on eating his meal, Dad now takes notice of me sitting across from him at the dinner table. After studying me a long moment and in between bites, he begins asking where I’m from, what I do for a living, and then, joltingly wonders how my wife Louise is doing. Louise, of course, was HIS wife. I don’t know what’s more disheartening—that he doesn’t remember that she died ten years ago or that he now inexplicably thinks I’m married to my own mother! I try to bring up old memories he normally loves to talk about, especially those going back to college days when he played big-time basketball at Oklahoma A&M. But now whenever I ask about his days playing in Madison Square Garden in the N.I.T., he just looks at me, shrugs, and goes on eating his meal.
“Robert, Brian flew down here from St. Louis,” Claire gently reminds him in her unfailingly upbeat voice. “You remember when you attended Washington University there, and waited tables at the fraternity and so on?” This is a story we’ve all heard a dozen times, including as recently as two years ago when Dad could travel and came to St. Louis and had us drive him all over the Washington University campus trying to recall where he lived. What was a tiresome and frustrating story then—he never could locate any of his old haunts—seems positively brilliant and hopeful compared to the sad, lost-looking shrug Claire’s question prompts from him today.
When Claire goes into the kitchen clearing away the dishes, I decide to brave a new subject with Dad. “Dad, have you ever thought about one day maybe needing to move into a different kind of home, an assisted care place? If it was a really good one, a really comfortable one, where Claire could come visit you every day, do you think that might be an okay plan for you?” Dad gives me a look of incoherence, like he’s desperately trying to figure out what I was saying. Then the confusion turns to a look of being startled, then fearful. Finally, he says in a quiet, but defiant, whisper: “You want to put me in some damn nursing home?”
“It’s just an idea now that it’s getting so hard for Claire to take good care of you,” I say.
“You put me in a place like that . . . that’s the end.”
“It wouldn’t have to be the end, Dad. There are some really great places—” I stop as I see an air of total disbelief in his face that reminds me of how he looked when, as a doctor, he had to give the same bad news to aging patients that a nursing home was their next, and final, destination.
Claire returns carrying dessert just in time to hear this last exchange and she nearly drops the chocolate cake she has so lovingly created. Once again, chocolate proves to be the great diversion and Dad drops all his anxiety about the nursing home option. He devours his piece of cake as Claire and I look on and make inaudible small talk in front of him.
Later, when Dad returns to his favorite recliner to watch yet another western movie—which he can’t hear but because the story line is so familiar to him, he nonetheless enjoys watching again—Claire and I drink a final cup of coffee at the dining table a few feet away. She tells me how grateful she feels that I came down to visit again. “I know he can’t express it very well, but your visits do cheer him up.”
I’m not at all sure about that, in as much as he seems to think I’m married to his first wife—my mother!—and, for some reason, live in Milwaukee. “He has really gone downhill, Claire. I mean, does he know who you are anymore?”
She looks at me a long while and then tells me about her older brother, Frank, now in his early 90s, who had to go into a nursing home last year. “My sister and I can see the depression in his face every time we come to visit,” she says. “I know he’s getting good care there but that doesn’t mean it makes him feel better or feel loved. What Robert told you, I just knew that’s how he would see it. I can’t bear putting him in a place like that, Brian—even if I visit him every day—he’s the love of my life and I OWE him my life.”
“Claire, would he do this for you?” The answer, I’m sure, is no.
“I don’t know. And, you know, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that this is what I’m supposed to do. And what I want to do.”
“So, then, you want to leave things as they are, maybe bring in some home health folks to help you out?”
“He hates people he doesn’t know, Brian. You know that.” She stares off in the distance, as if she’s wondering just how her life—and Dad’s—has come to this moment. “Whatever I do, I want it to be out of love. And the way it’s going now with all the fighting and anger he shows, and the way I sometimes react, it doesn’t feel like love.” Then she looks at me, tears filling her eyes, and she reaches out and hugs me fiercely. “I must not really know Jesus,” she whispers in my ear.
“Why do you say that, Claire?”
“I keep praying for an answer and, and, well, there’s just nothing.”
“Maybe that means He trusts you to make the right decision yourself.” “You think so?”
“More than any person I know, Claire, you act out of love.”
As I get unpacked and ready for bed in my old bedroom, I remember how my life in this little room 45 or 50 years ago revolved around seemingly mysterious and impossible questions: would I ever get a girlfriend, what would it be like to have sex (assuming said girlfriend would even allow such a transforming event to happen), would I make the basketball team, would Joe Don Lanagan, the school bully, once again push me around in P.E. tomorrow? My questions now may be more mature and thoughtful, but they are no more pressing than those existential worries that kept me awake back then.
I realize I’ve missed some calls—one from Corinne and two from Jeff. I just can’t bring myself to call Jeff and give him a blow-by-blow account of what happened today with Dad and Claire. I’m too tired to face another round of emotional pressure from Brother Jeff.
So I call Corinne. She doesn’t like to talk on the phone, which is great, because I’m exhausted from the day I’ve had. She’s working in bed as usual but in a reasonably good mood. I give her the “tick-tock,” as she likes to call it, of my day here in Juniper. Unlike me, she’s not surprised at how far Dad has fallen into dementia. “There’s only one way for this kind of thing to go, Sweetheart,” she reminds me. “People at his age and in his condition simply don’t get better. The main reason you’re down there isn’t to make your dad feel better—strange as that may sound—but to help Claire and Jeff figure out the future of Robert’s caregiving. What’s happening there?” I tell her about Dad’s angry response to the mere idea of going into a nursing home and Claire’s confusion about what needs to be done. “Also par for the course,” she says.
“You sure know how every little thing is going to play out; maybe you ought to be
the one down here.”
“Somebody’s tired. You need to get some sleep.”
I want to get off the phone and hit the sack but I can’t resist one more topic: “How are our house guests?”
“Behaving so far, I’m amazed to say.”
What she means by “behaving,” I gather, is that there have been no fresh knock-down drag-out fights between Danny and Dawn and no new sketchy associates of theirs showing up at our door.
“Dawn, I think, is trying to bond with me,” Corinne notes matter-of-factly. I can’t tell if that’s a set-up line for a joke or a serious observation.
“Is that possible?”
“Well, she has some surprising depth.”
“Well, ‘surprising’ would be the right word.”
“I think she’s looking for a chance to start over.”
“Really?” You could make the argument she hasn’t started anything meaningful yet so I’m not sure what her idea of a second chance would be.
“This whole blow-up she had with Danny and the romantic triangle with her boss at the restaurant seems to have altered her thinking. So she wants to turn over a new leaf.”
“That’s fine—as long as it’s an Arkansas leaf.”
“No, I don’t think she imagines being back down there.”
Startled, I nearly jump out of my bed. “You don’t think she means starting over anywhere, you know, near US, do you?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say.”
“You didn’t ASK?!” I cannot believe how blasé Corinne has become about something she normally views as apocalyptic.
She laughs—also a bizarre, concerning sign. “Don’t worry. We’ll talk tomorrow. Just get some sleep.”
We hang up leaving me now to worry about my father and my son. Oh and then there’s my own sorry life facing yet another painful crossroads. Appropriately dubious about getting to sleep any time soon the natural way, I pop a couple of Benadryls and hope for the best.