by Anne Fadiman
He said “son,” not “daughter”—no surprise—but the message was clear. Aside from the minor drawback of having to die first, few prospects gave him more pleasure than leaving behind a legacy of wine.
When he was seventy, the climate had shifted. He wrote:
I am changing my mind about leaving wine to my heirs and assigns. I have come across an acrid injunction by the Roman poet Martial: “Never think of leaving perfume or wines to your heir. Administer these yourself and let him have the money!” I have no opinion about perfume, but Martial may be right about wine. Besides, as the Internal Revenue Service conveniently sees to it that most of us can leave very little cash in any case, I might as well make a clean sweep, do my best to enjoy what bottles remain, and let the next generation enjoy the satisfaction of starting its own collection.
I think he was whistling in the dark when he wrote that line about the next generation starting its own collection. Jono, maybe. Kim and me—well, a midlife conversion was always possible, but the odds were diminishing every year.
By the time he was eighty, he had affixed little handwritten price tags on his most valuable bottles, after consultation with Sam Aaron, so we wouldn’t get rooked if we sold them after he died. Although he rarely talked about money outside the family (English good manners), inside the family a different set of rules applied. His letters frequently contained news of profitable book deals and favorable tax refunds, with dollar amounts specified, and were often folded around checks that marked birthdays, augmented my children’s educational funds, defrayed the cost of my visits, or reimbursed me for ten-dollar bills I’d slipped him when he took me to dinner in New York and had nothing small enough for the tip. “Please don’t object,” he’d write, or “I suggest you use the enclosed as a down payment on the purchase of a new, mentally competent father.” A check that was not instantly deposited occasioned a second letter, more pointed in tone, inquiring whether it had “gone astray.” He tallied every uptick and downtick of his stocks on green-ruled 11-by-24-inch spreadsheets (I always felt this was like trying to tell time by watching the second hand) and, at year’s end, made an annual chart of his “Net Worth,” as if his value could be assessed in dollars. When an interviewer asked him to sum up his life in as few words as possible, he responded with four: “He paid his bills.” He was proud to have made so much money. He was proud to be generous. He was proud to be able to afford wines expensive enough to warrant appraisal, as if they were gems.
He showed me the bottles with the price tags on that visit to Santa Barbara. They may have been gratifyingly tangible evidence of his wealth, but he felt no pressing need to put them up at the Ritz. A man who does not permit a lettuce leaf to share a plate with a ham sandwich is unlikely to purchase a vibration-free, redwood-lined vault with temperature and humidity controls. The Santa Barbara house, unlike its predecessors in Connecticut and Los Angeles, had neither basement nor pantry, so my father stored his wine in a closet next to the downstairs bathroom, distinguishable from the broom closet only by rows of horizontal shelves to keep the corks moist and holes drilled in the door to ward off mustiness. He had entered his oenologically ecumenical phase: there were wines from France, Germany, Italy, Greece, and California—reds and whites, a few fortified wines, a few dessert wines, some ordinary, some extraordinary. One bottle was labeled “1907 Madeira, $100–$150.” Three bottles were labeled “Yquem ’37—Sell After My Death, $1000.”
“You can sell them to collectors and make a little more,” he told me, waving toward the Yquems. His voice was slightly muffled because he was smoking a panatela. “That will take some trouble, though. If you sell them to one of the retail stores here, they’ll take them off your hands in ten minutes, sign the check, and you’ll be finished.”
He told me that his best wines would be worth more with each passing year and that after our mother died, Kim and I might wish to consult someone in order to update their values. “But Sam will be dead,” he said. “Everyone will be dead.”
He sounded bleak and final, as if he were closing up a long-beloved shop. Then, suddenly, his voice changed. “Well,” he said slowly. “I suppose I may still buy a few bottles. Your mother once had a Clos de Bèze ’49 that she really liked.” He sounded dreamy. “That’s a great wine. It was very expensive back then. Fifteen dollars. I suppose it’s a hundred now. For her birthday, maybe I’ll get a bottle.”
19
VIP
I can easily picture my father at ninety. There he is, smiling beatifically, wearing a short-sleeved blue checked shirt he has owned for at least twenty years, his eyes bracketed by laugh wrinkles, his eyebrows still unruly, a respectable fraction of his old pompadour still extant (though now white as milk), sitting at a large desk, but not the large desk, since he and my mother have resettled in Captiva, Florida, and because it weighed more than a refrigerator, my mother regretfully decreed that it had to be left behind. The new desk is made of wood and laminate, and its area is considerably less than eighteen square feet, but, like its predecessor, it supports a Scotch tape dispenser and a box of Kleenex and an Indian brass receptacle full of pens and three precisely squared piles of manila folders. In its center drawer there is an envelope labeled “This envelope contains small screw for eyeglasses in case of loss of one.”
Captiva was the site of the king’s crown conch expeditions of my youth. In the late 1950s, when we lived in Connecticut, we spent a week on the neighboring island, Sanibel, each spring. Kim and I would look forward all year to the overnight train trip from Penn Station, with its perennial debate over which was superior, the upper bunk (novelty) or the lower bunk (window-shade control), and the rented cottage on stilts, perched on an endless beach, on whose porch railings we displayed our daily gleanings: prickly cockles, apple murexes, lettered olives, alphabet cones, lightning whelks. Thirty years later, when Santa Barbara started to get too crowded and too fashionable, my parents moved to Captiva because the islands had been the locus of our greatest family happiness. George and I visited frequently, and our children collected shells and learned their names and displayed them on porch railings, just as Kim and I had. Susannah had been joined by Henry Clifton Fadiman Colt. George’s father was named Henry Colt. We liked to say that his father had swallowed my father.
It all felt like an Indian summer, an unexpected warmth before the expected cold. I’d first noticed the phrase “As I near the end…” in one of my father’s letters when he was seventy-two. By the time he was eighty, he made death sound only minutes away. He proved an unreliable forecaster. His old age had lasted for nearly as long as I could remember, but his old old age lasted even longer.
My father’s longevity was particularly surprising because, over the course of his long life, he seemed to have suffered nearly every natural shock to which flesh could possibly be heir. He enjoyed boasting about his infirmities. “People talk about radiating good health, as if they were steam furnaces,” he once said to me. “What a vulgar thing.” In my file cabinets there is a thick folder with a label neatly typed by his secretary: MEDICAL HISTORY, CF—GENERAL. I own it, I suppose, since I am my father’s literary executor and therefore inherited all his files, but nothing in this folder is literary. It contains four decades of unpleasant diagnoses: diabetes, arthritis, bursitis, tendinitis, rheumatism, fibromyalgia, degenerative lumbar disc disease, spinal stenosis, atrioventricular block, thyroid imbalance, dysesthesia of the left hand, insomnia, prolapsed hemorrhoids, poison ivy, and flat feet. Also colon cancer, whose only lasting aftereffect, following the removal of a significant fraction of his large intestine a few months before he moved to Florida, was the relief of half a century of constipation. He asked Kim to drive him on a tour of the pharmacies of Santa Barbara so he could attempt to return several giant bottles of Senokot, acquired over the years, of which he would no longer have need and was delighted to be rid, especially if he could get a refund.
When I first opened that folder, I asked myself—as I have asked myself from t
ime to time when looking through the rest of his files in the course of writing this book—What am I doing here? Is it appropriate for a daughter to read about her father’s hemorrhoids? And what about the photographs he unaccountably kept from his numerous colonoscopies, unseemly pink landscapes that look as if they should never be exposed to light, let alone a daughter’s gaze?
Somehow, he survived all these afflictions. Perhaps it was the thousands of gallons of claret and Burgundy he consumed over the years, packed with resveratrol, a phenolic compound in red wine that has been shown to extend the life span of yeast, and possibly of human beings. Perhaps it was just good DNA. His father, Isadore, lived to ninety, though he decided that sounded unbecomingly old and claimed to be eighty-eight for three years.
Relationships with parents wax and wane, following their own natural cycles. I was fortunate to have loved both my parents, and been loved by both, but I sometimes felt closer to one and sometimes to the other. In college, when I was studying English literature, I felt closer to my father. In my twenties and thirties, when I was working as a reporter, I felt closer to my mother. In my early forties, when I started to write essays, the tide turned back in my father’s direction. Essays were his territory, and I might never have ventured over the border if I hadn’t been confined to bed during eight months of Henry’s gestation and obliged to find a literary genre that could be executed from a horizontal position. But something else had changed too. There comes a point when oaklings outgrow the diminutive and stop worrying about withering beneath the shadow of the oak. I no longer bristled—a slight sigh sufficed—when I was told, “You’re following in your father’s footsteps” or “You have your father’s genes.” He had my genes, too. There had been a time when nothing would have pleased me more than to be better known than he was, but as he grew frailer, I started to worry that someday this might actually happen. If my father were forgotten, the balance of my world would shift so disorientingly that I’d lose my footing. I still check periodically to make sure he has more Google entries than I do. Phew.
A few years ago I received a letter—I suspect something similar went out to every writer in America—asking me to donate copies of my books to the Mother of Civilization Library in southern Pakistan. “Honorable Ma’am,” it said. “We therefore anxious in collecting resource materials including any books of Honorable Professor Anne Fadiman internationally well-known, an American author, Editor and Teacher and daughter of renowned literary, radio and television personality Sir Clifton Fadiman.” Sir Clifton Fadiman! Now you’re talking! It was about time my father was elevated to knighthood. I felt like throwing my hat in the air.
All of which explains why writing essays wasn’t intimidating. I was no longer competing with my father.
I continued to call him “Daddy,” as I had all my life. When I was a teenager, he had correctly guessed that the name might embarrass me and signed one of his letters “Daddy (or ‘Dad’ or ‘Father’ if you seem too old for such nursery terms. Hell, call me ‘Chuck,’ if you want to!).” But the groove was so well-worn that there was no possibility Dad, or Chuck, would ever gain traction. Now that he was very old, I found myself welcoming the pecking order that “Daddy” implied. His life might be on the decline, and mine on the rise, but I wanted him to know that I still looked up to him and that, in some fashion, he could still look down on me.
As parents age and the balance of dependency resettles, relationships often sweeten and simplify. “I seem to be doing pretty well,” he wrote me. “I think often of how much you have done for your ancient father. This particular Lear has more sense than the original: I know a Cordelia when I see one. Love, Daddy.”
My father wrote that letter at his desk on Captiva when he was eighty-six, on stationery with an address about as far from Brooklyn as it is possible to imagine (“BEACH HOME 13, SOUTH SEAS PLANTATION”), peering through black-rimmed glasses as his fountain pen traced tiny, tightly spaced letters in upward-sloping lines. (His handwriting was as distinctive as a fingerprint. A friend of his once sent an anonymous sample to a handwriting analyst, who reported: “Here we have a genuine intellectual—a creative and original thinker and brilliant scholar. He is somewhat impractical and maybe fussy about small things.”) As I picture him four years later, at ninety, sitting at that desk in his blue checked shirt, not much has changed. But wait. Something is missing. Where are his glasses? He has worn a succession of them throughout my life: champagne-colored, gray shading to black, tortoiseshell, and, finally, plain black. Without glasses, his eyes look smaller, more watery, and more vulnerable, but you can also see the laugh wrinkles better.
The small screw will remain in its envelope in his center desk drawer for the rest of his life, but he will never need it again.
When he was eighty-eight, he woke up one morning with mildly clouded vision. Few things could have been better calculated to annoy him, since to go for a day without indulging what he called his “odd, parochial mania for decoding black squiggles on white paper” was like being asked to go without breathing. He estimated that since the age of four he had read more than twenty-five thousand books, an achievement that placed him, he said, in the same category as a three-legged chicken. He had spent most of his eighty-eighth year skimming a sizable fraction of all fifteen editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica published since 1768 in order to compile 669 pages of extracts, on topics from Phlogiston and Bastardy to Psychoanalysis and Relativity, a feat that, according to a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, called for “a superheroic anthologist, the literary equivalent of Indiana Jones.”
Indiana Jones’s work required a revolver and a bullwhip; my father’s required his eyes—or rather, at this point, his left eye, since a blocked artery had decommissioned the right one when he was eighty-six. I’d heard about that earlier mishap on the phone; he made it sound hardly more troublesome than a stubbed toe, perhaps because binocular vision is less important for reading than for walking around outdoors, something he took pains to avoid even though his house fronted directly on a beach dotted with tourists who had traveled hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of miles to walk on it.
But this time I happened to be on Captiva, with my family in tow. His local vision center told him he had an inflammation of unknown cause that would clear up soon, but on the second visit, when I pressed the ophthalmologist on the diagnosis, I didn’t like the way he wouldn’t meet my eyes—or his patient’s, not that my father would have noticed, since his vision was worsening every day.
Characters in trashy novels are often said to have “a bad feeling.” I have had plenty of sad feelings and hurt feelings, but this is the only time in my life I remember having an unequivocally bad feeling about something—the certainty, without any rational evidence, that a catastrophe was drawing near.
I told my father I was taking him to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. My mother wasn’t sure this was necessary, but I booked two plane tickets for the next morning. We woke to a wild storm that carried huge breakers high up the beach and bent the palm trees at improbable angles. In the taxi on the way to the Fort Myers airport, we heard on the radio that all flights had been cancelled. I asked the driver if he would drive us to Miami. He looked at me as if I were deranged—Miami was on the other side of Florida—but, after I offered him an exorbitant sum, he agreed. Highway I-75, locally known as Alligator Alley, was flooded; there were few other cars. As the taxi careened down the middle of the road, the waters parted like the Red Sea. My father seemed as unperturbed as if he were sitting in his living room. Of course, he couldn’t see a thing. I wasn’t sure our driver could either; the windshield was a blur.
We got to the hospital. Someone took a look at my father’s eye in the emergency room and quickly picked up the phone. By an implausible stroke of luck, one of the world’s best-known experts on my father’s condition happened to be working in her lab at Bascom Palmer. She arrived at a trot. After examining him briefly with an ophthalmoscope and a handheld lens, she exp
lained that he had acute retinal necrosis, the death of living cells in the retina; that it was caused by the reactivation of a chicken-pox virus that had been latent in his body for eighty years or more; that much of his retinal tissue had already been destroyed; that he would never regain normal sight; that he would be put on intravenous acyclovir to kill the virus; and that in order to try to prevent complete retinal detachment she would attempt to tack down what remained—a fragile, moth-eaten membrane, part viable, part necrotic—with a laser, immediately. Which she did. It was only after she finished that I realized no one had gotten around to asking for my father’s ID, let alone his insurance card: a sign of a true emergency.
That night, in his hospital room, dinner arrived on a tray with a little card that said “VIP.” “They know who you are!” I said. A tiny flicker of pleasure passed across my father’s face. Then it occurred to me that VIP might mean “Visually Impaired Person.”
I spent the night next to his bed, on a cot. Because the lights were off, we were equally sightless. It was the first time we had ever shared a room. He told me there were two reasons his life was no longer worth living: he would burden my mother, and he couldn’t read. He asked if I would help him die.
A few years earlier I had written an article about an elderly couple, members of the Hemlock Society, who had committed suicide, and he assumed I knew something about methods. I gulped and asked him to do his damnedest for six months, at which point we could have this conversation again. I didn’t say I would help him then, but I didn’t say I wouldn’t, which meant that I knew I’d spend those six months in a state of high anxiety.