“Why do you think he’d want to do that?”
“I honestly don’t know. I mean he had such a fabulous career, himself. Wasn’t that enough for him? Couldn’t she succeed, too?”
“We can speculate,” Dr. Stern said, “but only your father really could have answered that.”
“And now he never will.” I felt rudely shut out of knowledge, excluded, as if the grown-ups were talking over my head. After a moment, I said, “The last of those crazy thoughts I had at the dinner party—about my father’s locked office door—that was more of an image, really.”
“Something from memory?” she asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know. It could have just been a dream, couldn’t it?” Whatever it was, the picture was fixed inside my head: the solid oak door with its embossed brass knob; his name above, spelled out in gold.
“Was the door usually locked when you were there?”
“Well, closed at least, anyway, if there was a patient inside. And I was taught to knock.”
“So this was from when you were a child,” she said.
“I guess so. Yes. I knocked, and when he didn’t answer, I jiggled the doorknob and it was locked.” I looked around uneasily. Was the door behind me now, the one to the waiting room, locked?
“What are you thinking?” Dr. Stern asked.
“Do you lock that door?”
“No. Are you concerned that someone might interrupt us?”
“Not really,” I said. But I
was
concerned, even though I knew there was no one out there, and that she would have to buzz the next patient in. The trouble was, I didn’t want her to have a next patient. What I wanted then was to be an only child again.
19
My father was lying in bed in the middle of the afternoon, something he had never permitted me to do when I lived under his roof, except when I was sick enough to run a fever. And whenever he’d succumbed to a nap in this place, it was in his wheelchair. He would refuse to get into bed, insisting that he hadn’t been sleeping at all; he had merely shut his eyes for a minute.
He certainly wasn’t sleeping now; his head swiveled toward me like a sentry’s as soon as I entered his room. “Daddy,” I said, “what’s going on? Don’t you feel well?” He didn’t answer, but he looked all right, only a little disheveled, and no one had called me to report a problem. I pulled a chair up to his bedside. “What are you doing in bed at this hour?” I asked, taking his hand in mine. As if time really mattered here.
“Thank God,” he said, gripping my hand so hard it hurt. “You’ve come.”
“What is it?” I asked. I wriggled free of his grasp and put my hand firmly on top of his. It made me think of that game Violet and I used to play, one of our hands quickly topping the other’s in a struggle for dominance, until we were weakly slapping at the air, yelling with laughter. “Is something wrong?”
“They were here again,” he said.
“Who? Who was here?”
“The police, of course. Who did you think?”
I relaxed; it was only the dementia, banal and familiar now. In the beginning, I’d argue with him, try to point him in the direction of reason and sanity.
But Mother died, don’t you remember? No, there are no patients waiting for you. It’s all right, you don’t need your keys.
All the grief those uttered truths brought on. And his grieving was justified—it’s an abysmal thing to suffer such losses, to no longer need keys to anything. “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’ll take care of it.” This had become my stock answer to every paranoid delusion he could dream up, and it worked more often than not.
I’d mostly given up trying to conduct ordinary conversations with him, so he was spared the terrible news of the larger world, and deprived of personal news, like Suzy’s engagement, which would have made him very happy if he could have comprehended it. When I tried to tell him about her and George, he merely looked quizzical. And I think he would have been sorry to learn about Ev and me, after all these years. There was so much that I was keeping to myself—experiences, feelings, ideas— especially now that Ev wasn’t home anymore.
My infrequent telephone exchanges with Ev were fairly formal and safe, about everyone’s health or something that had come in the mail for him. I didn’t tell him that I’d called Jeremy one day, and that Celia had answered the phone, sounding tearful. Yet she assured me things were better between them. They’d had a petty argument the night of the dinner party, and now she was just being emotional. Then she cried, “Why does it always have to be such a power struggle?” I might have said something about Jeremy being a middle child, and how he’d had to fight sometimes, against the battling bookends of his brother and sister, for attention and justice. But I didn’t really think that was the answer. I didn’t have any answer at all.
I went out to the nurses’ station to ask why my father was in bed, and was told that he’d become especially agitated at lunch, and that the doctor had prescribed additional sedation. He’d been sleeping on and off since then, and he seemed much calmer.
“Did anything happen to set him off?” I asked.
The nurse smiled. “Well, in his own mind, maybe,” she said, not unkindly, and I knew she’d had some version of this conversation many times before. I was in typical denial, still trying to make sense of my father’s insensibility. But his loss was mine, too, because he was my only link now to certain aspects of the past. True memories often require collaboration, or at least confirmation by another witness, preferably one in his right mind.
I went back to his room and this time he was asleep, his hands open at his sides. I studied him in that undefended posture, searching for his old, irretrievable self, the one who would never have let himself be looked at this way, like a specimen under the lens of a microscope. Some molecules of that person were still intact, though, because his eyes swung open, as if he had felt my impudent gaze.
“You dozed off,” I said consolingly. “It’s that kind of day.” In fact, it wasn’t that kind of drowsy day at all. It was a crisply beautiful and sunny autumn afternoon. There were gently swaying treetops outside his window and I looked toward them as symbols of my own thrilling freedom, my ability to simply walk out of there into their lovely, dappled shade. “Do you want to get up now?” I asked him, pulling his wheelchair closer to the bed.
He was weaker, I noticed, and very unsteady, though that could have been just a side effect of the sedatives, but he was still able to cooperate, to move himself from bed to chair with my assistance. When he was settled, I murmured, “Oh, that’s much better, Daddy, isn’t it?” and accepted his angry glare as just. To make up for my condescension, I said, “Would you like to get out of here for a while?” and he nodded his assent.
I’d taken him outside on other occasions, just for a change of scenery, and to put him back into the traffic of life, in touch again with the weather and the seasons. As usual, there were other people—relatives and aides— pushing other wheelchairs on the grounds of the home. I remembered pushing a stroller down a busy street with one of my children inside, and how my toddler would stare with avid interest at the mirror image of another toddler going by in her stroller. Suzy used to even reach out her hand, in greeting, maybe, or just to grab the other kid’s toy. But most of these adults, borne along in their oversized prams, strapped and tucked in like toddlers, shrank from one another’s glances, as if to avoid being recognized as someone reduced to this, someone so completely stripped of autonomy.
I took my father to a secluded area close to the high, black, wrought-iron fence that surrounded the property, where ordinary pedestrians and cars passed once in a while, just to remind him that the moving world hadn’t stopped in his absence. I sat down on a bench, arranging his chair to face me. He looked around him in an alert manner, and then up at the parasol of trees above us, with their pale, feathery leaves. “Acacia,” he pronounced, and I felt inordinately pleased, as if my child had said his first precocious word.
“Yes,” I said, eagerly. “Do you remember that we had a pair of them in the garden at home? They would get yellow flowers every spring.”
Do you
remember?
would be my theme, my refrain for the entire afternoon.
“Helen liked them,” he said. Past tense, I noted, and he seemed reflective but not terribly sad.
“She did,” I agreed. After a moment, I said, “Daddy, I’ve been thinking a lot about the old days lately.” He returned my gaze, but he didn’t answer, so I went on. “I’ve been thinking about those trips into the city that Mother and I took when I was little. Do you remember—we would come to your office to meet you? And those wonderful dinners we had.”
“Barbetta,” he said promptly. His favorite theater district restaurant, where everyone knew him by name, and the maître d’ always kissed my mother’s hand and then mine. “The Russian Tea Room,” my father continued, squinting into the past. We were favored guests there, too, who never had to sit upstairs in what was disparagingly referred to as “Siberia.” And the waiter would bring a plate of pierogi to our table before we’d even looked at the menus. I saw myself in a dress of jewel-colored velvet, ruby or amethyst, and patent-leather shoes that reflected the omnipresent Christmas ornaments.
“And everywhere we went, your patients came out of the woodwork to adore you,” I said. He couldn’t keep himself from smiling at that. He was still in there. “You were a very good doctor,” I added, trying out the past tense, leavened by praise, in direct reference to him, to his self-image. He didn’t seem offended or dismayed, so I went on. “You saved so many lives.” And of course he only sniffed haughtily at that; he didn’t need verification of his bona fides from me. A laboratory at Mount Sinai had been named in his honor, and I still have the letters I rescued from his discarded files, sent by some of the men and women whose days on earth he’d extended— oh, just a few more moments of happiness! Sunlight winked at us between the moving fronds of the acacia. In the distance a woman’s voice called, “Tony! Tony!” over and over again, as if to summon someone back from the dead.
The first person you saw when you entered the reception room to my father’s medical suite was his secretary, Miss Snow. My mother called her “the dragon lady,” because she was so fiercely protective of my father’s privacy and his time, although she was soft-spoken and pretty. Miss Snow reminded me of those secretaries in the movies, after they’d removed their spectacles and unpinned their hair. If I could have looked like anybody, besides my mother, I would have picked Miss Snow. She was usually seated at her desk when we arrived, but sometimes she was in my father’s consultation room, taking dictation. Parksie’s smaller office was right next door to his, and the examining rooms were on either side of a long corridor off to the left.
There were plaster models of various human organs in the consultation room that opened on hinges to show the intricate network of their interiors, the arteries and veins depicted in soothing nursery colors of pink and beige and blue. My father used the models to explain surgical procedures to his patients, and after extracting my promise to be careful, he’d let me handle them when I visited. This was probably done more to trigger my interest in science than to entertain his bored child. But I
was
entertained, and horrified at once. He would put my hands on my own body, on the places that held those hidden parts—the kidneys like twin toilets discreetly flushing waste, the vulgar-looking liver, the amazing, hectic heart— and I only half believed I housed such unlikely machinery.
“I loved coming to your office,” I said, and I thoroughly meant it, although so much of that pleasure was inextricable from the attendant rewards, bracketed by that first sight of my mother waiting for me at school and the ride home hours later in the iridescent darkness.
“My appointments,” he said. His voice was a little higher-pitched now and growing irritable.
“It was the end of the day,” I reminded him. “Your appointments were over.” I wanted to keep him on course—we were getting somewhere—but it was like trying to steer a large, unfamiliar vehicle through tricky traffic.
“Parksie,” he said. He could have been summoning her, not just saying her name, and I found myself glancing around, as if I expected her to step soundlessly right out of the air to answer his command.
“She was always there when Mother and I came. I used to sit at her desk, drawing or working on the puzzles in
Highlights.
” Her hand rested lightly on my head as I bent over the page. The colored pencils, newly sharpened, had a harsh, woody fragrance. The intercom near my writing hand muttered static. “You spoke to me over the intercom. You called me Miss Brill, and I pretended that I was your secretary, instead of Miss Snow. Do you remember?” I aspired to be a secretary then, or a waitress or a salesgirl, someone both officious and submissive, and with a pencil and a pad—so much for those inspirational models of the liver and the heart.
My father looked at me and put his fingers to his chin—an old, contemplative pose, the same one he’d struck for his official Bachrach portrait. “Take a letter, Miss Brill,” he said, and I felt like whooping for joy.
“Dear Sir,” I prompted, and found I had to swallow. “Dear, dear sir . . .” I leaned toward him in ardent conspiracy, but he was looking up into the foliage of the trees again. “Daddy,” I said.
Wait a minute, don’t go.
He didn’t answer, though; the trees had him in their green, leafy embrace. I stood up and released the brake on his chair. “Why don’t we move,” I suggested. “Let’s get out into the sun.” And I began wheeling him briskly in the direction we’d come from, away from the shadows where our reminiscences had stalled. But at the other end of the path, two familiar, bent figures were lurching toward us. One of them waved, fluttering a handkerchief or a scarf, and I veered abruptly onto the grass and kept on going.
My father grunted as the chair swerved, its wheels catching in the turf, tearing up blades of grass like a lawn mower. The seat belt must have grabbed him in the gut. “Sorry,” I said, “so sorry,” but I didn’t slow down, even when I heard Marjorie Steinhorn’s urgent soprano. “Alice! Yoo-hoo, Alice dear! Wait for us!” Instead I began running with the chair, bumping it over the uneven terrain, and my father’s thin, fair hair flew up into a rooster’s crest. “Hold on now,” I told him, unnecessarily; his body was already stiffly braced and he was clutching the armrests.
A couple of minutes later, we were on another path, this one leading to the wide-open wings of the west gates, and I went forward at a steady but slower pace until we were through them and out onto the street. Only then did I stop long enough to look behind us. Marjorie and Leo were nowhere in sight. “We lost them,” I said excitedly, like a criminal who’d cleverly eluded the police in a car chase. The police! I had entered my father’s delusion. And it occurred to me then that I
was
a criminal, of sorts, that I had just kidnapped my father, springing him from the prison to which I’d also condemned him.
Except for his cataract surgery, he had only been away from the premises of the home once since he’d entered it, almost a year ago. Ev and I had picked him up by car one day in early March, when he still had frequent spells of lucidity. It was his birthday, and we took him to our apartment for lunch, where we served some of his favorite foods—smoked salmon and Brie and country pâté—at our family table, without the mess-hall racket of the home’s dining room. Ev put a CD of Mozart on the stereo, and it played softly, lyrically all around us. It was a good day, an accomplishment, really. My father was alert and genial most of the time, and he ate with a genuine appetite, remarking on the silky sweetness of the salmon, the rough perfection of the pâté.