My Father's Footprints (5 page)

I am drawn to two. One he sent me in an attempt to patch up a very painful stretch of bitterness between us. It is carefully
worded. Admits no real fault. But it eagerly seeks peace. Another is to his agent, who, perplexingly, became a rabbi late
in life. The letter brags about me. I am going to give a commencement speech at the private school from which I graduated,
it says. Who, it wonders, would have dreamed of such a thing?

With apologies to Thurber, I awaken at 4:00
A.M.
to hear, distinctly, a seal barking.

A hunt turns up no seals, just a sick little boy whose virus has turned into something else.

“Sounds like it might be croup,” says the doctor on the phone to my wife. “Does he make a sound like a seal barking?”

My dog and father are already sick. My mother is a survivor of recent cancer surgery. My wife has frequent, incapacitating
headaches. This, I think in a moment of abject self-pity, is what my life has become. Seal barks and whale songs.

Joey, who is a trouper and notoriously brave about illness, burns in my arms and weakly wheezes out the question intrinsic
to every disease.

“Is this going to go away?”

The doctor tells my wife we should take him outside.
Something about the cold doing something to the inflamed and swollen something.

I wrap him in blankets and stagger outdoors with him.

It is January 1998. As an anxious nation holds its breath, Marvin Runyon announces he is quitting as postmaster general to
return to the private sector. There is also something going on that has to do with the president and a woman named Lewinsky.
I stand outside with a hot child in my arms and tilt my body back so that I can look at the stars sparkling in the cold, black
sky. How are we going to get along without Marvin Runyon?

Gazing at the sky, I have a vision of myself, the last healthy person in the world, running from station to station with a
bedpan, while the music they used to play for the guy with the plates and the sticks booms out of the clouds. I am in the
night sky, a constellation, Sandwichomeda.

When I visit the nursing home, my father is padding around in the halls, moving his wheelchair with waggling shuffles of his
feet. In this context he is peculiarly downscaled. He was The Big Show when we cared for him at home. Now he seems like one
of several kinds of persons one sees in the halls of nursing homes. The final trick of age and disease has been to make him
pretty much like everybody else.

“Can you get me out of here?” he asks.

“No. It doesn’t make sense for you to be anywhere else.”

He tells me he has been assured I can get him out of there. He also tells me I am, to the best of his knowledge, his father.

My wife succumbs to the Venusian croup-flu. I am now officially the plate-and-stick guy.

Everybody is sick. On a Saturday night I’m leaving alone, to go see
Washington Square,
mainly because I love Jennifer Jason Leigh and never miss her movies.

I’m heading out the door to watch two hours of Henry
James making sure nobody gets anything they really want. Joey asks if I’m coming straight home.

“Where else would I go?” I ask.

“Go out. Get drunk,” he suggests.

“And then what?”

“Buy a gun,” he adds helpfully.

“Sounds like a great Saturday night. I’m on my way.”

“Who wrote the plays
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
?”

My father thinks a bit. He is sitting in his wheelchair at the nursing home, a place I am starting to like, with its goofy
faux-everything, cheery retro-fifties decor. We are in the Bamboo Room, my favorite of the several public spaces, with its
poseur Asian motif but no actual bamboo that I can see.

“I don’t know,” he finally admits. I don’t think the whole Francis Bacon controversy is what’s slowing him down here.

Maybe multiple choice would be better.

“Who wrote
The Glass Menagerie
? Was it

a. William Shakespeare

b. Tennessee Williams

c. Arthur Miller?”

“
The Glass Menagerie
would be Tennessee Williams,” he says very slowly.

I am pleased, and begin again.

“A closed system will nonetheless gradually lose energy. I am describing entropy, which is the second law of

a. Thermodynamics

b. Quantum mechanics

c. Motion.”

“That would be motion.”

I am sad. He was the one who taught me about the second law of thermodynamics.

“Do you want to keep doing this? I mean, are you enjoying it?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Which of the following Revolutionary War generals tried to betray West Point to the British?

a. Israel Putnam

b. Benedict Arnold

c. Horatio Gates?”

A pause.

And then, from somewhere behind me:

“Benedict Arnold!”

Another guy in a wheelchair. He wants to play, too. So we let him. He’s pretty clueless about the math stuff.

We move into one of the other public rooms. My mother shows up.

“Who danced with Ginger Rogers?” I ask.

“That guy,” my dad says.

“I know ‘that guy.’ What is his name?” I sing a few bars of “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.”

Now a whole bunch of people in wheelchairs are beaming at me. They like this game. “That guy!” I could get used to this. Magister
Ludi of the demented.

I sing some more. Everybody beams. Everybody is happy. How can we not be? There may be trouble ahead, but how can we not be
happy while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance? Life, in this frozen moment, is paralyzed with goodness.

“Who wrote
David Copperfield
?”

“David Copperfield.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that David Copperfield wrote
David Copperfield.
”

“That is incorrect. I’ll give you three choices.

a. Victor Hugo.

b. Charles Dickens

c. James Polk.”

“Why don’t we make it Charles Polk?”

“Why don’t we?”

My father has a fever.

I start getting calls in the afternoon during my daily radio show. He’s bad, he’s worse. Should I come now? Not yet, but maybe
soon.

Suddenly, the producer gets on the studio monitor and says, “They think you should come now.”

I rip the headphones off my head, run to the garage, kick the tires, and light the fires. I’m there in minutes. And he’s slipping.

If you’ve read this, you know I’m involved. You know I’ve been a good son, pushing the wheelchair, taking care. But I suddenly
realize I never said the basic, rock-bottom stuff. My mom leaves the room for a few minutes and I hunch forward and chatter.
He is rolling in the sleep of near-death.

“You were a great dad. I was always proud to be your son.” Can I really be saying these things for the first time? “You taught
me so much, about how to be kind and funny and how to write. I love you. You’re a great dad.”

He rolls and turns. I think he’s hearing. Oh, God, let him be hearing.

My mom comes back in. I sing a few songs, just to have my voice in his ears. We tell him that rest and peace are coming. I
tell him he can let go. And when it comes, it comes as a mere slowing down into nothing. No rattle. No spirit flying out.

If he were here, he would know what to say. He would say something funny.

“Death is overrated.” Maybe that.

We walk outside. It’s night, and the sky is full of stars and a slivered moon. Is this where I’m supposed to look for him
now?

The Silver Whistle
is about a con man who restores youth to people in a nursing home.

“When you were a child you responded to the wind. To the flight of a scarlet bird at sundown. To the first rays of light across
a sea at dawn,” the con man tells a woman. “Look up at the stars. Look up at the night. Let the feel of the earth go through
you.”

At night, I suddenly want somebody in the God business to come to my house and say something wise to me. I almost don’t care
what. But no one does. If you don’t go to the practices, you can’t suit up for the games, apparently.

Alone in my car, I sing the Johnny Mercer song I wanted to sing to him as he died. But I couldn’t. My voice would never have
held, just as it doesn’t hold now. It’s the one about the two drifters, off to see the world. Suddenly I’m a little kid in
the car with my dad, two drifters, off to the zoo or the railroad tracks to watch trains, or to find out what’s waiting ’round
the bend. Suddenly I’m a middle-aged man crying very hard in a ’95 Honda, stopped at a red light on a Friday night in the
winter.