Hotel of the Saints (9 page)

I don't even know the words for grief.

How to grieve when you dont know the language of grief?

“Dr. Meyer … he talked with her parents,” my father is saying. His features are jagged, small. He has no flesh left to waste. Not much between himself and death.

But he is recuperating, I tell myself. He's not dying. Soon he'll get out of the hospital, and he'll only return to have his knees and hips repaired to match his youthful heart, to hike faster and higher than I ever will, to beat me at tennis, at everything I have tried and will try.

“You'll feel much better,” I say. “Once you get out of here and back into your own house.”

“She reads a lot, John. She …”

I can feel the fusion between the donor and my father—their only language the murmur of blood—and for an instant I feel left out. Envious. She has taken the space of the almost-child, the daughter who will release me from his aspirations.
What does that make her relationship to me, then?

“… has at least a dozen novels on her night table, some just started, some almost finished. Maybe Dr. Meyer can ask her parents if they'll let me borrow the books….”

In the room next door a woman and a man are arguing loudly above the television laughter.

“… she hasn't finished yet… so I can read those books for her.” That moment, somehow, my father feels closer to me in age. More contained. How much has the heart of this woman changed who he is? Is that even possible?

“You and books?” I tease him. Because he's not much of a reader, my father. He has tried to blame it on being an immigrant. All he reads are professional journals and
The Oregonian.
While my mother would vanish into a book for days, emerging only to teach her Spanish classes at the high school or to go to the library for more books.

“Me and books,” he says without hesitation. “Bugs.”

“Books?”

He starts swatting at his head. “Bugs. Bugs in here.”

“There are no bugs here.”

Trailing tubes and wires, his hands ambush his ears and his neck, like frenzied birds. “Bugs in here …”

“I promise you there are no bugs in here.”

But he's whimpering. “John—”

“All right. Let me get the bugs off you.” I sweep my fingers across his face, his dry skull. Pluck away imaginary bugs. Step on them.

“Bugs…”

“All gone.” I capture his hands in flight. “See? They're all gone.”

“Step back.” He struggles to sit up. “Step—”

“The bugs are all gone now, Dad. I squashed them all.” I try to think of something to distract him. “Hey, you want to hear something funny?”

He frowns. “Funny …” A single bead of sweat sits between his eyebrows.

“You want to hear something funny?”

“Funny … Yes…”

“One night last week, when I came home from installing a security system in Neskowin, I found two messages on my machine. A woman's voice: 'This is Mrs. Lodge from Tiffany's school. She said you were going to pick her up, but since we haven't heard from you, we'll simply put her on the bus.' Click.”

It's the kind of story my father would usually get into, plant his opinions, insist it would be best for Tiffany to live with the dependable Mrs. Lodge from now on.
“Parents who forget their children dont deserve their children” he would say. “And parents who name a child Tiffany dont deserve being parents.” He'd grimace as he'd say “Tiffany.” “I've never met a Tiffany who wasn't a brat. Such a goddamn precious name. Expensive, exclusive, privileged …” He'd speculate about the names of Tiffany's brothers and sisters: “Brittany … Cameron …”

Instead, he lies there silently, hands twitching in mine as he pursues hallucinatory bugs. I miss his odd humor, even though it has brought him trouble. Just a few months before he retired, a forty-four-year-old patient, Vicky Cotter, threatened to sue him for unprofessional conduct. She was referred to him because of pains in her upper back, and while my father was massaging her shoulders, she moaned and told him she already felt much better. My father laughed and said what I'm sure he's said to a hundred other female patients before: “I know it takes a lot to keep you old gals going.” He still calls his receptionist and assistant “the girls.” Teases his patients that they just want to lie there all day and have their backs rubbed. Had he been born into this country thirty years later, he would have automatically picked up the appropriate words. What happened, though, is that the dislocation from his first language was all he could
bear. Once he settled within his second language, he ignored all nuances of change. Though most of his patients enjoy his bantering, others have climbed off his massage table and left. Like Vicky Cotter, who fortunately did not follow up on her threat to sue him.

I stroke the backs of my father's hands, the raised veins, the creased valleys between them. “The same woman's voice was on the next message too, Dad. Very agitated. 'Hello, this is Mrs. Lodge from Tiffany's school again. Hello—'”

“Hello,” my father echoes. “Hello …”

“'Hello, are you there? We reconsidered and decided to keep Tiffany here at school until you can pick her up.'”

“Children …”

“Do you think Mrs. Lodge ever realized she had the wrong number?”

He coughs. Winces.

“Daddy?”

His body is shaking with each cough. “Those stitches—”

I slip my palm beneath his neck. “Daddy?” Lift his head off the pillow till he stops coughing. “You want me to get the nurse?”

“No.” He takes a careful breath. Another. As though he were learning to breathe all over again. “Not the nurse. She says I'll die twitching … because of the rabbits. Patients who eat rabbits will die twitching.”

“I can't believe anyone would say that.”

“I only ate rabbits in Austria, John … never in America.”

“If she said that, she didn't mean it.” Cautiously, I guide his head back down. His pillow feels too rough for his brittle skin. “And you're not going to die. You hear me?”

“Children … You should …” His voice trails off.

Music from a car radio comes closer, booms, fades. It's still warm enough to drive around with open windows.

“Listen to that,” my father says. “You and Nick—you tooled around like that. I used to wish I…”

“In Austria—did you tool around in Austria?”

“Something to do for kids in America. We … were men when we were fourteen. Not boys … like you. And we didn't have cars… like here.”

When I was in high school, we'd cruise up and down the few familiar blocks through town every Friday night, take a U-turn, and loop back. Joseph, Oregon, was bordered by the immense Wallowas, which kept us there. The highway, however, suggested a world beyond. As we cruised—the girls three or four to a vehicle, the boys alone—we'd approach and pass each other again and again, glancing around with practiced aloofness as we posed in our souped-up trucks and cars. My cousin, Nick, who was blond and tanned quickly even in winter, painted his truck bright yellow, as if to transmit the colors of his body to the outside. Some vehicles would stop along the side of the street, where we'd sit on the hoods, watching this parade of our own making that we'd been getting ready for all week—the boys in jeans and T-shirts with the name of a rock band; the girls in shorts and tops with spaghetti straps. Uniforms, of sorts.

Since we all went to the same school, we knew exactly how each of us was pegged—popular or not-so-popular—and while those ratings still defined us, there was a chance that they might change on Friday nights: because a popular girl might climb from her friends' car into a boy's vehicle and elevate his rating forever; because a boy might suddenly lean from his truck window
to look into the eyes of a not-so-popular girl and make her desirable from that day forward.

My mother once said our cruising reminded her of a ritual she'd seen as a student teacher in a Mexican village, where the young women would stroll around the fountain in a plaza after dusk, scrutinized by the young men who leaned against the columns of the promenade. Our cruising ritual, she said, was not all that different, except that we could be anonymous, protected by metal and glass, by the speed at which our cars moved, by the blaring music that made it possible to ignore comments we might not want to hear.

“Listen …” my father says again, long after the car radio has faded.

“Yes?”

“I think you should …” He looks immeasurably sad.

I try to cheer him. “Do you think Mrs. Lodge still has Tiffany with her? A week after those phone messages?”

“I think … you should have children, John.” At least he's no longer talking about bugs.

“I'm too young, Dad.”

“It's the most important thing … I've done in … my life.”

Too important
But of course I can't say that aloud.

“I would have called that… Mrs. Lodge.”

“But I didn't know from which school she — “

“I would have found out.”

“I believe you.”

When I was three years old, he started taking me to his office occasionally, where I enjoyed playing on the floor next to the receptionist's desk while he was in a room, working on patients. By the time I was in preschool, he'd reschedule or cancel
appointments to attend conferences with my teacher. The same, later, with grade-school conferences, with high-school plays and concerts. At home he'd quiz me about my classes, check my homework late at night, discuss with me what he allowed me to watch on TV.

The women I dated before Eleanor used to envy me for having him as a father. “He's so supportive of everything you do,” they'd say.

“Too supportive,” I'd answer.

But they'd still go on. “And he's totally devoted to you.”

I'd nod. “Oh, yes, totally.”

What I first loved about Eleanor was that she told me, “Your father holds on to you too much.”

My mother used to sit with me when I did my homework, but the more my father nested himself in my life, the more she receded. Until he had taken so much of me that there was nothing left for her. It was then that she started feeding the deer, luring them close to our house with apples and buds and acorns and twigs. Closer yet with salt blocks for them to lick. At first, they approached cautiously, stiffly; but soon they romped through our garden as if it were their domain.

“Did you know,” my mother said to me, “that deer need at least six pounds of feed a day to last through the winter?”

“Did you know,” my mother said, “that if a pregnant doe gets too thin she'll absorb her unborn?”

“Did you know,” she said, “that she turns it back into being part of herself?”

Up close, my mother's deer were mangy—matted fur;
patches of scabbed hide—and I wished I'd only seen them from a distance, where they'd been lithe and graceful.

My wife says I do better with everyone at a distance, not just deer. “It's where you've placed your father. Your mother too, though not that much. It's what you do with your clients.”

“It's my clients who want the distance,” I remind her. I install security systems for the summer people who built immense houses that encroach on the marshes and ponds of the Oregon coast, on the streams and ocean, endangering the animals that are forced from their habitats. The larger the body of water, the more flagrant the house, and the more exorbitant the system to keep it protected.

“I won't let you place me at that distance,” Eleanor likes to tell me. She is a fierce fighter, my wife. Fights as easily and passionately as she laughs. Even fights me when I refer to her as my wife. Protests that it sounds like one word:
mywife.
To bait her, I sometimes call her that when we make love.
Mywife.
Until she presses her knuckles against my ribs or tickles me.

“What's it worth to you?” she'll ask if I beg her to stop. “What's it worth to you, John?”

“You'll get to climax first next time.”

“The two next times.”

My father is watching the sky get darker, turning purple. The trees are no longer three-dimensional, just black cardboard cutouts. Without depth. All one.

When he forbade my mother to feed the deer—“your goddamn vermin,” he said —she moved into the house of her friend Helen, the art teacher at the high school where my mother
taught. Since my father didn't want to admit that she'd left him, he told our neighbors he was sending her away because she was letting the deer destroy our perennials.

My mother's tears returned to her once she lived in Helen's house by the edge of the forest, where deer came to her readily, and where I stayed with her during the week. The lens of the binoculars flipped. Set her into proportion. She grew taller, wider. Even her voice became fuller.

It was easy to breathe inside her house. But Friday evenings my father would claim me, challenging me to do better, yet undoing my accomplishments by reminding me he was the one who'd urged me to do better: paint the fence in one day; get an A on a science test; swim twenty laps in our pool…. I try not to do that to others—make their accomplishments mine. Or force them to my will. The way my father did with that pool. How I hated that pool. He and I dug it together after my mother left. I was eleven, and he pushed me past blisters, past tears, past tiredness, telling me how those things that were the hardest for us allowed us to live the rest of our lives with ease.

That first night he and I used the pool, the underwater light turned the water a transparent green, tracing the dark shapes of our arms and legs with tiny bubbles. The water felt like velvet, and our movements seemed slower than during the day. And I thought that maybe my father was right, that the easy part of my life was starting.