Life Drawing (10 page)

Time. And calm.

As I painted, not just that day, but throughout that whole period, I thought a lot about the atmosphere of my own childhood home. My mother, of course, had been the lost soul, the dead woman walled off, immured behind my father’s edict that she not be brought up. Brought out. Into the light. I don’t know if he thought of that as smoothing something over, the least unsettling course, but what I realized as I craved calm for these boys was how much hysteria lay behind my father’s extreme approach.

T
hat night, as Owen unloaded the dishwasher, I readied the next load. Always looking for topics to fill the void, I told him about Alison’s strangely impervious feet, and he said, “Good to know. I’ll add it to the list.”

“What list?”

He reached up to shelve a stack of plates. “You really don’t know that you come home every day with little factoids about her?”

I shut the faucet off.

“It’s called getting to know someone, Owen, and I recognize we’re a bit out of practice, but it really isn’t so very strange. Is it?”

“No,” he said. “I guess it’s not. I was just teasing you, Gus. Trying to make some sort of joke.”

“Well, it was hilarious,” I said. “Everything’s rinsed clean, here. Mind if I go do a bit of work?”

“Not at all,” he said, as I left the room. “I’m glad one of us can.”

There was no mistaking the envy, nor the unfair resentment directed my way. I almost turned around to ask if it would help somehow if I gave up, sat shivah with him for both our creative lives. But I pushed down my anger, rehearsing for myself again, again, what misery he must be feeling, how awful that sensation of emptiness; and I went to work.

Usually, when there was a problem with my father, the home would call Jan—a doctor after all, a family doctor who had treated her share of elderly patients. And there really hadn’t been many emergencies. He wasn’t one of the aspiring escapees and his dementia had never included a violent side. But every once in a while he would spike an odd fever, a simple cold blossoming into pneumonia then treated with the sort of medical zeal one might think reserved for a man whose continued existence is undeniably a gift to him. Any ambiguity about the quality of my father’s life was banished with every technical skill available, by all professional valor. And so the drugs and tents and fluids were brought in until the fever was conquered, the lungs cleared, the battle won; the war still raging on in his brain.

There had also been a different sort of incident at the end of that spring, when he had fallen into days of inconsolable tears, a river with no source, no destination point. Flood, flood, flood, unholy, torrential flood. During that time—four full days, as many nights—Jan and I took turns sitting by his side consoling him, or not consoling him at all but trying to. And I had tried too to console the young nurse, Lydia, who believed she had somehow caused this deluge—impossible to imagine from so dried up an old man.
She had asked him about his life, she said. About his wife. He had split open in response, become a lake.

“It could have happened to anyone,” I told her. “It probably didn’t matter what you said.”

She couldn’t have been much more than twenty. I watched the argument taking place in her expression, the desire to be freed of blame pushing against the conviction, the hope, that her words should have meaning.

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It’s none of our fault.”

I
n the third week of August, Jan was up in Nova Scotia with Letty for their annual vacation up north, so the first report of a violent outburst came to me, an early morning call—from a nurse I’d never met whose knowing voice, gravelly, deep, seemed somehow at odds with her optimistic statement that this might well just be a one-time event.

“What happened?” I asked. “Exactly, I mean.”

He had grabbed the shoulders of the nurse helping him button his pajamas. “It’s often something simple like that. Something for which there’s no real explanation. He shook her. Pretty hard. Your father is a very strong man still. Surprisingly so.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said—though I knew an apology wasn’t quite right. Sorry for what? For my father being ravaged by a disease? For his having worked so hard all those years to stay strong and well for his girls? Running those endless laps around the school field every afternoon. Pulling himself up on the bar tensed across the door to the bedroom he and my mother once shared, stopping often at that threshold, on his way to grab his wallet, to change his shoes, and just lift himself once or twice. A devotion, I’d thought unexpectedly, when home from college one time. A little act of remembrance, a piety. What had seemed so peculiar, so irritating
—Hurry up, Dad! Oh for God’s sake, just go in
and find your keys!
—had struck me that day as something beautiful.

“It was almost sexual,” I told Owen, not many years after. “But not in an icky way. Like he was still physically devoting himself to her. And of course it was all about being sure we had at least one healthy parent left. I just think it was also about more than that …”

But of course I had been perpetually desperate for signs that she still mattered to him, that the door he’d slammed after her death had panes through which something still shone through, maybe something of her that I would one day see.

The nurse said, “It’s easier with the ones who have grown physically weak. Though, as I say, this may well have just been a one-time event. We like to report all such incidents right away. Then if we do have to move him into a different level of care, you’ll understand …”

“Yes. Of course.” Something occurred to me. “Which nurse was it?”

“Lydia. She’s fairly new.”

I told her we had met. I rolled my eyes to the inexplicable heavens. Having their cruel little laugh. Poor girl.

“I’ll come check in on things today,” I said. “Maybe a familiar face will help.”

A
t Alison’s door, I was like the girl hanging out by the locker of her latest crush just hoping he’ll ask her out. “And so, that’s why I won’t be around today … or anyway, for the morning.”

She asked if I wanted company. “Or is Owen …?”

“I’m letting Owen work.”

“Well … I could actually use a change of scene,” she said. “Unless it feels too … I don’t mean to intrude.” She knew better though. She would be ready in ten minutes. We would meet back on her side of the hill.

S
he drove. “It will do me good to be behind the wheel,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll never learn my way around this part of the world. I’m hopeless at maps. And anyway, you look like you could use an hour in the passenger seat.”

T
his is us on the road to the finest private hell that money can buy:

We are seated close together, or so it seems to me, used to my van as I am. Two middle-aged women. I am in a jean skirt and black T-shirt; and with my arms inactive on my lap I am aware of the paint that clings to me even when I believe I have scrubbed it off. My hands, my wrists, seem covered in a translucent extra layer of skin, almost reptilian, adhering to the pores and fine lines beneath, pulling the texture of me into view. I feel grubby, overly conscious of this sheath. And Alison is in one of her bright colors again—a teal dress. Her car smells like her. As we pull off the property, out onto the road, I realize there is a scent I now associate with her. Spring flowers. Lime. For a moment, I close my eyes and breathe in, trying as I do to pull apart the strands of scent.

“I knew it,” she says. “You’re tired.”

“Yes.” I open my eyes. “Tired. But I’m not sleepy.”

“That’s good. Because I’m …” She laughs. “I should have warned you. You’re in no danger of dozing off. I’m mildly famous for driving like a …”

“Maniac?” I ask. “Is that how that sentence ends?”

“That sounds about right. I may have heard that word tossed about before. Once or twice.” She takes a curve with a gusto that lands me right against the door. “I’m very good though,” she says. “I just … I just enjoy myself …”

“Okay.” I sit up straighter, braced. “So, what about your parents?”
I ask. It isn’t a subject change—the car is full of our mission, of my concern.

“My parents?” she asks, as though I have inquired about a pair of unicorns. “Oh, they’re just fine. Young. Mid-seventies. Fit. They require no care and … and that’s probably just as well, as I can’t imagine myself back there. My sense of filial duty is …” She slams us to a stop. “My sense of filial duty is not all that it could be. And impossible as this now seems, I fell so madly in love with Paul there was no chance I’d stay over there. He was a student in London, that’s how we met. Now of course there’s also Nora. It’s unimaginable being that far from her, especially with her father …”

She lets the thought go unfinished. It’s often unclear how much she wants this subject pursued, so for some time I say nothing, just sit, holding on, thinking how strange it is that this road I have driven dozens of times, so sorrowfully bland, is now mined with near misses and jolts.

“I’m sorry,” she says at a particularly sharp swerve. “But you were warned.”

If she were Owen, I would answer, “Well, I was warned when it was too late—which technically isn’t a warning at all,” but I don’t quite feel the closeness yet for that. And so instead I say, “It’s not bad having a little excitement in my life,” and she says, “No indeed. It’s not bad at all.”

Her cell phone chirps. “Not while you’re driving,” I say, and she tells me to extract it from her bag. On the screen there’s a text:
“Labor Day weekend’s good. Heather can drive.”

I read it to Alison, whose demeanor suddenly shifts. What I’d thought was enjoyment, even happiness, was nothing compared to what she looks like now.

“Nora,” she says, unnecessarily.

The mention of one young woman has brought another to my mind. Laine. To whose email I have yet to reply. “Well, here we are,” I say, as Alison slides into a space marked
Family
.

A
s a child, I had been only vaguely aware that my father had served in World War II, just at the tail end, stationed in England—doing what? I never asked. My mother’s death, barely mentioned though it was, seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone—not necessarily sudden deaths, but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.

That was what I thought about as I sat in my father’s room, having introduced him to Alison, whose British accent had spurred him to say, “Oh, I remember you. You’re that girl my buddy had the big crush on. Kenny. He cried on the boat all the way home. Did you know?”

Maybe we do move from one era of our own lives to another, the way we change residences. Doors shut, no key left in the mailbox, only the uncanny slippage of my father’s mind allowing him to sneak back in.

I could imagine, as I listened to them “reminisce” about the war, that the death of his thirty-one-year-old wife might so have redefined him that even memories of war had felt out of reach. Another life. But how had I failed to be aware of that whole era of his history? How had his role in World War II not entered my consciousness? All the work in which I’d been immersed, Jackie Mayhew, Oliver Farley, others, and it had never struck me that my father too had been an American boy sent over to Europe to fight?

It was stunning how successfully he had cut us off from his past.

His face showed no more sign of the struggles of the night before than of the great conflict of sixty-five years earlier. I had been cautioned not to mention the incident. To the extent that he was shifting into a phase in which agitation might spur on violence,
it was counterproductive to confront him, I had been told. And so I just sat there, relieved that for once I could visit and allow someone else to carry the conversational water. And Alison, for her part, turned out to be remarkably good at following the odd turns of his thoughts. She was perfectly content, it seemed, to play the part of a girl, resurrected, the long-lost love of a long-lost friend from a long-lost time.

As they chatted, it crossed my mind to ask him the questions I never had.
What was it like going to war? What was it like being a Jew in Europe then? What was it like fearing death? Losing friends? Being so far away from home?
But I couldn’t bear the prospect of discovering that the memories had all fallen through the holes in his brain.

“Betty!” A coughing fit followed my father’s proclamation. “That’s your name,” he said, his fist still up to his mouth, catching more sputters. “You’re Millie’s friend. Kenny’s girl. Betty.”

“I knew you’d remember!” Alison said. “You were always good like that. So clever!”

I had imagined they might find common ground as high school teachers. I had thought that was to be the surprise of the day: that she would be able to draw him out on those years when he taught, help me locate the father I could remember though he could not. I had thought briefly too that he might cast her as my mother; though the fantasy made me feel a flash of childlike shame. But no, she was to be Betty. Betty the British girl. Not some figure from my life with him, but flesh-and-blood evidence of a story that had nothing to do with me.