She raps harder and harder, and soon the nurse unlocks the door to our left.
“That’s a racket,” the nurse, an older, easygoing woman, says. “We are looking for John Smith,” my mother says. “I think he’s on four,” the nurse says. “He used to be here, but try four.”
There is the same configuration on the fourth floor, but this time the nurse is on our right. She is in a white uniform, and ever briefly the thought of being pulled into the white starched bosom of Sue Flanagan crosses my mind. The memory surprises me, as if I suddenly fell asleep and was in some kind of dream.
The nurse unlocks the door with a key chained to her waist belt, and she seems pleasant enough as my mother asks for John Smith. We cross the hall with the nurse, and she unlocks the other door.
“If he’s sleeping,” the nurse says, “give him a good shake.”
“Is he on medication?” my mother asks.
“No,” she says, “but he sleeps easily.”
I can hear her locking the door behind us as we enter the room. Like on the third floor, there are twenty or so beds, and my mother and I cruise around the room, looking for my father, but I don’t know who I am looking for.
A man comes quickly up to us, almost on a run. His yellow pajamas are two sizes too big for him. Suddenly, he grabs me by the arm. I am a little alarmed, but he is not very big, and unless he has a gun I don’t think I have to worry about him.
“Give me my money,” the man says. His eyes are wide and seem directly connected to mine. I don’t think this is my father.
“I don’t have your money,” I say to him, trying to be calm and matter-of-fact.
“I know you have my money.”
“Tell him,” my mother says, “the nurse has his money.”
He doesn’t look at my mother. I am thinking that my mother knows her way around here.
“The nurse has your money,” I say.
“The nurse has my money?” he asks, like I told him his horse came in in the sixth race.
“Yes,” I say, “the nurse.”
The man turns and walks away just as quickly as he approached. He goes to the side of an empty bed and just stands there.
My mother smiles.
“They respect the nurses,” she says.
There is a post in the middle of the room, and my mother begins to walk around it. But she stops and gently lifts a finger in the direction of the bed behind the post. “There he is,” she says.
I see my father for the first time, lying there in a bed behind the post. He looks nothing like I imagined, and much older than his forty-five years. He is thin, but his stomach is large, as if they gave him a case of beer every night. He is clean-shaven and looks so different from how I remember him in the photographs. In one, he is in an empty lot in Brooklyn, holding a baseball glove, looking like a kid, trim and fast, trying out for the college team, maybe the Railway Express team, center field, casually leaning over to the left, his glove leaning with him, assured, knowing he’ll make the cut. He is a handsome man in that photo, and a wisp of hair falls over his forehead.
In the other, he’s in a big velvet chair, my mother on his lap, her legs, long and shapely, kicking out from a polka-dot dress, him, trim and good-looking in a white shirt and tie, laughing, his face a grin from ear to ear. Both photographs flash happiness like a neon sign, and I look closely now at my father and look for even the smallest sign that he is happy.
But there is no sign. There is no expression on his face, and I can think only that his nose is bigger than I thought it would be, but maybe that’s because his face is so thin. He would be handsomer if he smiled.
“Hello, John,” my mother says.
“Hello, hello,” he says quickly, as if that is all he has to say.
His voice is not large, and quivers a little.
“It’s Mary, John,” my mother says, “Mary.”
“Hello, hello,” he says again. “Give me a cigarette.”
My mother turns to me and she is whispering.
“They used to be able to smoke,” she says, “but there was a fire somewhere, and they stopped allowing it.”
“Do you remember me, John?” my mother asks.
“Hello, hello,” he says, this time adding, “Mary.”
“This is Dennis, John,” she says, pulling me forward.
“Dennis,” he repeats.
“How are you, John?” she asks.
He is not looking at my mother, but staring across the room, but at nothing in particular.
“Give me a cigarette,” he says.
“How have you been?” she asks again. “Are you eating anything but dessert, John?”
There is a stain on the front of his yellow pajamas, still wet, and I am guessing it is from his lunch. My mother takes a handkerchief from her pocketbook and wipes at it. He pushes her away.
“Who’s this?” he asks, gesturing towards me. He doesn’t look toward me at all.
“This is Dennis, John,” my mother answers. “Your son.”
“Give me a cigarette,” he says.
I have a pack of cigarettes in my pants pocket, but, still, I have never smoked a cigarette in front of my mother. Maybe I could sneak one to him.
“Do you remember Dennis, John?” she asks. “Dennis and Billy?”
“Hello, hello,” he says.
The hair at the side of his head is sticking out, and my mother pushes it back with her hand.
“You are looking pretty good, John,” she says. “I bet all the nurses are after you, huh?”
“Who’s this?” he asks, again indicating his thumb toward me.
“This is Dennis, John,” my mother says. “Do you remember Dennis and Billy?”
“Give me a cigarette,” he says in the same crispy but level voice.
“John,” my mother says, her hand on my shoulder, “do you remember Dennis? Dennis is now a man, see?”
“Hello, hello,” he says.
My mother goes around the bed, fluffing things up, taking the wrinkles out of the sheets. I notice that she doesn’t kiss him. He has been away more than sixteen years, and I wonder how many years it is since she kissed him last.
“Okay, John,” she says in the middle of a sigh. “You’re looking pretty good, and so I guess we can go.”
My mother reaches over and pats his hands, which are folded over his stomach.
My father doesn’t say anything and doesn’t look at us.
I have my hands in my pockets, and I think I should at least reach over and shake his hand. I grab a cigarette out of the pack as I pull my hands out.
I grab his hand as my mother begins to walk away.
“Goodbye, Dad,” I say, something I’ve never before said.
“Give me a cigarette,” he says.
I lean over next to his ear, and I whisper.
“I dropped one,” I say. “On the sheet.”
I am thinking as I walk into the main entry hall with my mother that these places are not dangerous. Things are just quirky here, and off balance.
I suppose I did know what to expect, after all. I have been thinking about my father being here ever since I heard Aunt Kitty jabbering away to Uncle Tracy that day more than five years ago, and reading everything I came across about mental disease and people who have it. And every time I think about it, I realize that there is a special kind of sadness that comes with the territory in these places. People get locked away and forgotten, and that is a desperate thing.
Maybe it is easier on the family to push mental disease into a family secret, or make up stories, like the guy fell off a truck one day and that was that.
It was hard for my mother to talk about my father, even to me. Her silence somewhere just got turned into a secret. It’s easier to have a secret than to explain to people, especially the children, that he is locked up and forgotten because no one else knows what to do.
It’s a very personal thing.
When I think about the attendants beating up my father and saying he fell in the shower, I get upset. I will never stop getting upset about that. But as bad as beating some defenseless person is, I guess there are worse things.
I’ve read about such things, what people do to defenseless young women and to children, and I wonder what kind of animal a person would have to be to abuse a young child.
Somebody like Mr. Dempsey, I guess. Mr. Dempsey should be in a place like this.
My father is a harmless person, but I know I can’t ask my mother why he just can’t come home with us and smoke all the cigarettes he wants.
My mother doesn’t have much of a life to begin with.
That would be no life at all for her.
We are now speeding toward the city, looking at the trees and the rock walls from the other direction.
My mother is quiet.
I’m quiet, too, sad from seeing my father like that. But I’m glad I was there, finally. At least, I saw him.
In all those years when I wanted to see him, I couldn’t. Then, after I found out where he really was, I didn’t much care to see him at all.
It was like he let me down, being sick like that.
Being in a wheelchair or on crutches is somehow heroic, admirable, something that, like Archie would say, would make someone put their chin out for whatever is coming.
I used to dream as a kid in St. John’s grammar school that one day a classroom door would open, and there would be my father on a pair of wooden crutches, and the whole class would cheer as I ran to him. But his being in an asylum was such a letdown to me, an embarrassment, maybe, something to become a secret that was to be kept at any price.
And, today, to see him remembering just that one thing, how much he liked cigarettes, and not being able to remember anything else, was pretty rotten, especially since he never has the chance to smoke any.
Maybe he’ll find the cigarette I left, and a match, too, and put back into his life the one pleasure he craves.
But I hope he doesn’t burn the place down.
All my life, I guess, I’ve been wishing that things would get better for us, for Billy and me, that my mother would be happier.
And that my father would get better.
But I can see now that my father will never get any better, and that is a hard and a bitter thing to know for sure. Before, when I thought about it, I thought it could get better for him if I prayed enough, but now I have seen it with my own eyes.
I’ll still say those same prayers, but I know it won’t make much difference, not for my father. God has kept him alive, anyway. And instead of asking Him to make my father better, I’ll just thank Him for that.
My mother pats my gabardine covered leg and breaks the silence.
“I’m glad,” she says, “that you came with me.”
“I’m glad, too, Mom,” I answer. “Even though it was pretty strange, like looking at someone in a movie or something.”
“He loved being around you and Billy,” she says. “His memory is completely shot now. Those shock treatments, you know. But he used to have a good, long-term memory of you and your brother. He would always ask about you.”
My mother looks away now, and I can’t tell if she is laughing or crying. She turns back to me and has a soft, resigned look on her face.
“He would remember you,” she says, “and forget me, because the wires for his short-term memory were completely cut somehow.”
“How did that happen, Mom?” I ask. “How did you find out?”
“I don’t know,” she says, holding her palms out, “nobody knows, really. They call it catatonic.”
“How …” I say, “how … I mean, how did it actually happen, how did you know?”
“I had no idea anything was wrong,” she says, looking down at her hands. “Everything was so normal. We were living in Sterling Place in Brooklyn. You had just been born in the Jewish Hospital and christened in St. Theresa’s. Billy was just a little over two.”
She stops now and looks at me, smiling.
“I remember,” she continues, “you and Billy were both in the same carriage, and we were out for a walk. I had you stuffed in that carriage like socks in a sock drawer, and when I got home I rang the bell for your father to come down to help me, and I rang and rang.
“It was his day off from the Railway Express, and I was hopping mad that he never came down, and so I asked some man on the street, a passerby, to help me up the two flights, and I took you boys one in each arm and carried you up the stairs, and the man carried the carriage. He left the carriage in the hall, and I opened the door. I saw your father’s legs in the living room as I thanked the man for helping.”
Her expression became serious as she talked, but now it becomes animated, like she is telling an old joke that she has learned to tell really well.
“I guess it was a funny scene,” she says, “because I saw him sitting in the big, blue velvet chair, and I began right away to complain about him not coming down to help me. ‘Here I am,’ I was saying to him, ‘all alone with these boys, and here are you sitting on your lordship’s ass and giving me no help at all.’”
As she is talking I can see a tear in the corner of each of her eyes, but she is laughing as she talks.
“And then I started to raise my voice a little,” she goes on, “because he wasn’t answering. ‘Well, say something,’ I said, ‘and don’t sit there like a wrapped package.’
“And then I went into the living room from the kitchen and saw him sitting there, his hands grabbing the arms of the chair as if he was falling off a cliff, and his eyes staring out in front of him like he saw a ghost or an army of bad angels. Oh, Dennis, I was so frightened.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“I have never seen a person like that,” she says, “just completely frozen to that chair, unable to speak or utter a sound. ‘What’s the matter, John?’ I kept asking over and over. ‘What’s the matter?’
“But he couldn’t move even his mouth. And so I went to a neighbor and asked him to run to the bar where your Uncle Bob worked, so that I could get some help. Uncle Bob came, and then the doctors and the police, and then the ambulance came. He was, completely, a different person forever after that, never knowing where he was or what was wrong.”
“God, Mom,” I say, putting my hand on her arm. “That was pretty hard on you, huh?”
She takes the handkerchief again from her pocketbook and dabs at her eyes.
“Well, I would say,” she says, “it was harder on your father.”
Her voice now is cracked and small, and she breaks into a laugh.