Then I called Mrs. Hernandez back, trying to ready myself for anything she might have to tell me. On other occasions, she had called to report that my father’s hearing aid was missing again or that he was developing a cold, but this was Friday the thirteenth, after all. It took a while to reach her, she wasn’t at her desk, and when she picked up the phone at last, I blurted, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, everything’s fine,” she said. I could hear assorted screams in the background that seemed to contradict her. “Your father asked me to call you.”
“He
did
?” Although he’d claimed at times that he had been trying to reach me, that always proved to be delusional before this, some sort of ESP he imagined we shared. “What about?” I asked anxiously.
“He wanted you to bring him something when you visit. Let’s see,” she continued, rustling some papers. “I wrote this down someplace. Ah, here it is. Dr. Brill would like some decent notepaper. I offered him one of my pads, but he turned me down flat! That’s the way he put it, by the way—
‘decent’
notepaper.” She chuckled, like a doting grandmother.
I was pleased and mystified. That sounded like his old authoritative self, but I couldn’t imagine who he’d want to write to. “Are you sure it was my father?”
“Oh, it was
him,
all right, honey. You’d think he was in the operating room, asking for a sponge. Demanding it, I mean.”
“Well, thanks, Mrs. Hernandez, thanks very much. And please tell him I’ll bring him some stationery tomorrow.”
It had been a day of letters, if not exactly a red-letter day. I went back to the computer to check my e-mail. There were two messages; both of them had come in while I slept. The first one was from Michael. “Dear Alice, Re: Caitlin’s nickname, I was thinking of ‘Cake,’ because Joe couldn’t say her name when he was a baby. Yours forever, Michael.”
The other message was longer and more like a genuine letter. “Dear Alice Brill, You have given an old man a truly lovely surprise. I’m so glad you’re writing about your mother, a dear friend and a fine poet, and I will think long and hard (a necessity these days, I’m afraid!) about your request for specific remembrances of her. In the meantime, thanks for your order of all those back issues of
Leaves.
It’s always good to have a new reader. Sincerely yours, Tom Roman. P.S. I’ll flag the copies with Helen’s poems for you.”
9
Ev said that my father probably wouldn’t even remember asking for it, but the next morning I went shopping for what he might consider “decent” notepaper, with the proper weight and texture and color—white, of course, but the right
cast
of white. His request delighted me because it was specific and because it sounded so rational, although I still had no idea whom he intended to write to, if anyone at all.
When I was a child, my mother always helped me to choose birthday or Christmas gifts for my father. Left on my own, I would have selected some novelty-store item, a giant golf-ball pencil holder or a tie that lit up when you pressed its knot, but she steered me firmly toward more conventional and conservative alternatives at Saks or Brooks Brothers, like cashmere socks and rep-striped ties that didn’t dare do anything unexpected.
Whenever my father received one of these gifts, he’d make the standard fuss, for which I was a pathetic foil. “My, my, what can this be?” he would begin. What could
possibly
have been in that flat little box besides a tie? But I’d go along with the game by making him guess. And he would wink at my mother and say, “An umbrella? A pair of skis?” to which I’d say that he was getting either warmer or colder, or just dutifully shake my head and giggle. Then, uncovering the tie, he’d exclaim, “Aha! Well, this is very handsome, indeed. Thank you, Alice.” And my mother and I would exchange satisfied smiles, although I’d imagine for a wistful moment what he might have said about the one that sparked and flickered like a swarm of fireflies.
I found the perfect notepaper at a small place on Madison Avenue, and I bought fifty sheets and twenty-five matching envelopes. It was very elegant and very expensive, which gave me a moment of perverse pleasure. He’s
demented,
I reminded myself, even as I told the salesclerk that the paper was a present for my father, a retired surgeon, who lived in the country now. And I pictured what she must have been picturing: a dignified, tweedy gentleman, as curved as a comma but able and sound, tending his vegetable garden, or sitting in a book-lined den reading Trollope. I didn’t know why I’d invented that more palatable image of my father for a casual stranger, or why I’d lied to Tom Roman in my e-mail, about writing a memoir of my mother. Maybe it was just convenient, or comforting. And it seemed like a harmless enough habit, not unlike writing fiction.
When I got to the nursing home, my father had other company. Violet’s parents were sitting with him in the solarium, looking ancient and spiffy: Leo in his crested blazer, Marjorie dressed for the cocktail hour. I had been thinking of calling Marjorie, ever since I’d gone through my mother’s folder, to see if she knew something significant that I didn’t know about the poems or about my mother’s private life. I still couldn’t shake the sense that she was connected in some way I didn’t yet understand to that bad feeling in my chest.
As soon as I walked into the solarium, Marjorie and Leo hauled themselves out of their seats, as if I were there to relieve them of guard duty and had arrived late. Leo even looked at his watch. “Hello and goodbye,” he said.
They didn’t leave right away, though, as I had hoped they would. “Alice, dear,” Marjorie said in her confidential whisper, “don’t you look lovely.” She brushed my hair off my forehead, stared critically at me, and then let it drop back.
Hopeless,
her expression implied. “You’re wearing it longer,” she observed before turning her attention to my father in his chair. “And doesn’t Dad look well?” The question was like a poke in the ribs; no wonder I’d put off calling her. And no wonder Violet needed all those years on the couch.
My father was wearing an unfamiliar and unlikely yellow plaid flannel shirt, with a conspicuous brown stain under the pocket; he could easily have been mistaken for a retired lumberjack. Someone had mixed up the laundry again. I noticed that his ears had sprouted fur, and there were sticky crumbs of sleep in the corners of his eyes. “Yes,” I said, bending to kiss his cheek, “you look great,” and certainly no one was hurt by this latest lie, least of all him.
Leo cleared his throat. “Let’s get this show on the road,” he told Marjorie, clasping her shoulder with one hand and patting my father on the back with the other. “Take care of yourself, sir,” he boomed. “We’ll see you in a couple of weeks, God willing.”
“Goodbye, Sam darling, goodbye, Alice dear!” Marjorie called, blowing kisses to us as they walked toward the elevators, like a passenger on a cruise ship pulling out of the harbor. An old woman in a wheelchair a few feet away blew kisses back to her. My father hadn’t made a sound.
I’d wanted the Steinhorns to leave, but once they were gone I felt strangely forsaken. And it was hard to distinguish between the usual anxiety this place brought on and that special misery I lugged everywhere lately. I took the package of stationery from my tote bag. “Daddy, I brought the notepaper you asked for.” When he didn’t respond, I tore the foolishly lavish wrapping paper off myself and opened the box. “Look,” I said brightly. “Is this the kind you wanted?”
Everyone seems to have one parent whose approval we crave our entire lives and never fully receive. I remember how I longed for and dreaded his gaze upon me, that fierce searchlight of attention when I was being clever or annoying. Once again, I had that desperate impulse to please, as his eyes skittered across my face to the offering I held out and then to the room at large. He was like a child with ADD, wanting to escape the tedious demands of school. “Sam!” I said sharply, and he looked directly into my eyes for the first time. “Here is your notepaper. Do you want to write to someone?”
“Yes,” he said, his rusty voice rising from the unused plumbing of his throat. It gave me a thrill, as if I’d taught an animal to speak.
“Who to?” I asked.
In the old days, he would have promptly corrected me. “It’s
to whom,
Alice,” he’d say, even after
whom
fell out of common usage, but this time he simply ignored my impertinent question. Resorting to sign language, he mimed holding a pen and writing in the air.
I dug a ballpoint out of my tote and arranged a sheet of the beautiful notepaper on top of the box. “Here,” I said, handing him the pen and putting the rest on his lap. I realized that I was holding my breath and I let it out slowly as he sat there, frowning at those suspect implements of communication.
Just then the elevator doors slid open and Parksie came through them toward us, carrying a cake box by its string. She was in her mid-seventies now, plumped up in places, collapsed in others. Her eyes were still lined with smudged kohl, her hair that improbable shade of apricot. I jumped up to meet her and we hugged. She smelled of Jean Nate and baby powder, her bosom against mine as smothering and restful as a scented pillow.
“Alice, how are you? And how is your dear family?” she asked, speaking softly and with genuine interest. I was happy to see her, but fearful that she would break my father’s fragile thread of concentration.
I needn’t have worried. Years ago, I’d seen Parksie come to the threshold of his consultation room on her silent white shoes, and wait with remarkable patience while he finished examining a backlit X-ray or whatever he was reading at his desk, before she announced herself and the business that had brought her there. And he never acknowledged her solid, expectant presence in any way until he was good and ready. Now she stood a few feet from him in that same attitude, dangling the cake box from one pudgy finger.
Hers not to question why.
Dr. Brill was engaged and could not be disturbed.
We both waited, as if at a performance (the theater of the absurd, I couldn’t help thinking), for the action to begin, and we were rewarded a minute or two later when my father began to write. He gripped the pen hard and wrote rapidly and with a characteristic flourish, line after line after line. He might have been trying to get it all down before he forgot what he wanted to say. His whole head trembled with the effort, but his hand was surprisingly steady.
Soon, he’d covered both sides of the paper, and I was about to offer him a fresh sheet when he retracted the ballpoint with a decisive click and held the pen out to me. He was done. I took the pen and the box with the filled page floating on top of it, and he put up no resistance. In fact, I felt dismissed, because he turned his attention to Parksie then, beckoning with one crooked finger—her old cue—and she approached him. They were in the blurry background of my vision, Parksie crouching at his wheelchair, my father pulling at the string on the cake box, as I stepped off to the side and stared at the piece of paper.
What he’d written with such furious intention was the word “Darling,” in a surprisingly clear and graceful script, followed by streams of erratic peaks and declivities, like the electrocardiogram of a heart in crisis. The pen had bitten through the paper in several places, as if he’d meant to emphasize some indecipherable lines more than the others. There were no other recognizable words or symbols on either side of the page.
“Parksie,” I said. “Could I speak to my father alone for a minute?”
She tilted her head inquiringly, but she didn’t say anything as I helped her up. She just walked across the room to a sofa near the murmuring television set and sat down among strangers.
Hers but to do or die.
I sat down, too, right next to my father. “Daddy,” I said, and he deigned to look at me while his fingers caressed the cake box in his lap. I held the sheet of paper inches from his face. “Is this for me?” I asked, realizing as I said it that I used to ask my children that precise question whenever they’d finished another piece of refrigerator art. But then the question was merely rhetorical—all of their drawings were for me. Addressing a child’s first creative efforts was a delicate process every young parent quickly learned. You never asked what a drawing represented; instead, like a canny, nondirective therapist, you said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
I knew that I would have to approach my father the same way in his hideous new childhood. “Is this for me?” I asked again, waving the paper at him, and he snatched it from my hand and said, “No!” How had this monosyllabic statue of my father ever conveyed his wish for notepaper to Mrs. Hernandez? Maybe I was the only one he wasn’t talking to.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” I said, and my tears rose up and spilled over. He didn’t seem to notice, and he didn’t answer. His expression wasn’t blank, though; it was bold, almost rebellious.
“Is it for Mother?” I persisted. “Sam, is it for Helen? My heart was banging to get out, while he held those hieroglyphics hostage in his fist. A surge of anger came on like a speeding car. I wanted to hit him. “Tell me,” I demanded.
“Tell me!”
And I imagined him standing up and shouting,
Alice,
go to your room!
People were glancing at us. I could see Parksie on the other side of the solarium, pretending to watch the game show on the television screen, but her face reflected my shocking impropriety. I was making a scene. I was bullying a helpless, senile old man in front of witnesses.
“Daddy,” I said in a more subdued voice. “Who is the letter for? Don’t you want me to deliver it for you?” They were the magic words, or he’d simply given up the fight, because his hand unclenched and the paper fell soundlessly at my feet. “Thank you,” I said, bending to pick it up. “Now, to
whom
should I give your letter? Won’t you please tell me?”
Again he didn’t answer, and his eyes had become unfocused and as flat as pennies. When I snapped my fingers, he barely blinked, and I slumped in defeat.
Somehow, Parksie knew that it was time to come back across the room. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “We’re fine.” And suddenly I remembered how she’d looked long ago in her pristinely white, starched uniform, like the bride of the god of suffering, with that dove of a hat poised on the back of her head, ready to fly off.
Then the goose ate that feathery thing and flew away.
“Parksie,” I said. “Something is bothering me.”
“What is it?” she asked with concern.
“That’s the problem, I don’t actually know. It’s just that I feel bad, or guilty, about something.”
Her eyes glistened with sympathy. “Everyone feels that way when their parents fail,” she said. “We always think we haven’t done enough.” For the first time I wondered who her parents were, and if she believed she had failed them. Like Faye, she seemed to have come to my family without personal history, without her own needs and desires, as if we’d invented her. Her real name was Eleanor. Had anyone ever called her Ellie? She was the unmarried aunt in the family, the governess in Victorian literature whose story turns out to be at the center of everything.
“It’s not that,” I said, “or at least not only that. Although I think it has something to do with my mother.” I felt as if I were feeling my way blindly along the edge of a cliff.
“Oh, but you never let her down, Alice,” Parksie assured me. “She absolutely adored you. Why, you were her life.”
“But there was Daddy, too,” I said, “and her poetry.”
My jealous sibling,
was my unbidden thought.
“You came first,” she insisted, and a swell of gladness flooded that rough place in my chest. How intuitively kind Parksie was.
“Did she ever talk to you about her work?” I asked.
“Do you mean her poems? No, she never did.”
Of course she hadn’t. And she would never have spoken to Marjorie Steinhorn, either, about her poems or anything else essential to her, or private. They weren’t friends, exactly; they were simply two women who happened to serve on the same committee, a committee dedicated to the success of their husbands’ careers. My mother had nobody like Violet in her life. I went on, anyway. “Did she ever happen to mention anyone she corresponded with about her poetry, anyone called . . . Tom?” I made it sound as if I had just plucked his name from a hat.
“I don’t think so,” Parksie said. “Who is he?”
“No one, really. It’s not important.” I thought fleetingly of asking her about the thickening in my breast. She was a well-trained surgical nurse, and her opinion could be trusted, but I’d remembered someone else I could approach about that. I decided to just leave and let Parksie and my father share the angel food cake or the
babka
she’d brought—why did elderly people have such a craving for sweets? She would probably try to soothe away the turmoil I’d caused him. Then she’d go back to Roosevelt Island, to the high-rise apartment she’d moved into after she retired.