The Last Cadillac

a memoir

NANCY NAU SULLIVAN

Walrus Publishing

Saint Louis, MO 63110

Copyright © 2016 Nancy Nau Sullivan

All rights reserved.

For information, contact:

Walrus Publishing

An imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group

4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116

Publisher's Note: This memoir is a work of imagination and truth.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro

Interior designed by Kristina Blank Makansi

Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935414

ISBN-13: 978-1940442129

Dedicated to
Donald Nicholas “Mike” Nau, and Jim, Mick,
Amos, Miles, and Frances,
without whom, there is no adventure at all

THE LAST CADILLAC

“To thine own self be true…”
– Shakespeare, and my mother, Pat Nau

My father reached for another cigarette, his fingernails scrabbling over the glass-top table. I lit his cigarette and then my own. We both took deep drags as I leaned over and brushed the ashes off the front of his jacket. We sat there on the patio of the condo under the grey Indiana sky. Silent. Smoking.

Time didn't seem to have an edge to it anymore; it just flowed out around me like dark water. I needed to breathe, so I smoked. It was a bad thing, sitting there smoking with my father, but bad felt normal. Everything was different now. My mind raced. My mother is dead. My marriage is dead. What am I going to do, Dad? What are
we
going to do?

My mother had only been gone a week. Her apricot roses withered in vases all over the condo, and I couldn't bring myself to throw them out. I cleaned around them, attacking piles of laundry and bills, getting rid of health-care equipment, pills, and crusty aluminum pans. But it didn't matter. I could not wash it all away. I kept reliving disaster. Along with losing my mother and facing my distraught father, my marriage was kaput. I had become: a divorced woman.

I had to get out of there, go somewhere—maybe back to Florida. Now.

The kids called it “The Adventure,” and they kept after me about it everywhere I went.

“When are we going?” they demanded. “When?”

I told them, “Soon.”

But that was not entirely true. “Soon” was stretching it. I had a to-do list, and Dad was right there at the top.

I lit another cigarette, then got up and flipped the soggy cushion on my chair. I sat back down. I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was sit there. Next to the cool, green golf course, one foot resting on a pot of ivy and petunias. The condo was dark, no one hurrying around, and finally, no more emergencies. The phone had stopped ringing. The front door locked everything out. It was quiet for now, but I didn't want to go back in there. Back inside, where all the memories, painful, again took over.

The chill did not drive us inside. As I remember that misty afternoon, it was like an Irish day, and I welcomed that. We all loved Ireland. The good memories.… I zipped my jacket to the neck and tucked my wet hair back behind my ears. Dad was snug in his khaki jacket and tweed hat decorated with the pins from Dublin and Killarney. The hat I gave him. Sometimes he was confused since the stroke, but never about whose hat it was and where he put it, along with the whereabouts of his coat and shoes. He was always ready to go, and it was usually me who took him there.

I wrapped my fingers around his and squeezed, but he was off in another world. I left him there. It wouldn't do any good to bring him into mine where I began to feel the stirrings of dread. I let go of Dad's hand and slumped in my chair. My siblings were coming over for “a family meeting.” My
brother, Jack, a tennis-playing, leather-wearing young millionaire; my sister, Julia, a meddling, nurse-Poppins who had a pill for everything; my sister, Lucy, a svelte, suit-wearing restaurateur who was five-star at getting the latest boy toy. I couldn't wait to see them and find out what sort of trouble we could get into this time. If there was one thing consistent about our relationship, it's that we disagreed on family matters. Sometimes we laughed. But mostly we disagreed, especially on any business having to do with Dad.

Even so, I was determined to work out some comfortable arrangement for Dad. We should talk calmly and productively, I told myself. Besides, I was the eldest, and I was responsible. They had to listen to me, and I should listen to them, which was like sticking needles in my eyeballs.

I laughed, but it sounded like a cross between hacking and choking.

Dad smiled. “What is it?”

“Nothing, Dad.”

He patted my hand. “Well, it's good to hear you laugh.”

Everything will be all right. No. Nothing will be all right. Nothing is right.

Florida. Yes. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted—and needed—to go back.

To the cottage. I dreamed of getting back to the cottage where we went every winter. The annual trip had always been the most glorious part of growing up, and I never grew out of it. I was like a migrating bird.

But if things didn't work out in Florida—and I could think of a number of reasons why they wouldn't, Dad's situation being number one—we'd be right back in Northwest Indiana. I hoped that wouldn't happen, because I liked sunshine and the beach and the idea of getting away from
the Ex. So, until I found our own place, I'd take the kids to Anna Maria Island. To the family cottage.

For the time being, I was stuck in Indiana, juggling a part-time newswriting job, Dad, and the kids. Between the news assignments and feature stories about Russian baseball players and chili recipes, I took care of the bills and medical forms. The accountant and the lawyer helped, but someone needed to be there all the time with Dad.

I was torn. I should probably stay up north, but the idea was killing me.

The mist shifted to a cool drizzle, reducing the cigarette butts in the ashtray to a pile of dead brown minnows. I poked at them idly with a burnt match.

“What are you thinking, Dad?” I'd grown up on his common sense, and now was as good a time as any to hear some of it.

As soon as the words came out, it struck me that I'd hardly asked him how he felt during all the confusion since Mom got sick. I'd coddled him, and, frightfully, he had teetered along on that cane. But I didn't really talk with him. None of us did. Not during the whole year of misery. For a family that talked so much, we certainly didn't communicate very well.

“Dad.”

“I'm ruminating.” His short, straight eyelashes were wet with rain, or tears. I couldn't tell.

“Tell me, Dad.”

“My Patsy, my Patsy. More than fifty years we had together. I never believed it would kill her.”

“Dad, no one believed it.”

“I had faith in the doctors … that they could cure it. But then she went so fast.”

His shoulders began quaking up and down as he rumbled
along to the end of his sentence. I put my arm around him and rocked him a little. Sometimes I could get him back on track. Like jiggling a reluctant old machine. But it didn't work this time. He kept sobbing.

My father, the Navy commander. He shouldn't be crying.

“It's all right, all right,” I said.

He covered his face with a handkerchief and held on to me. His grip was strong, but I was losing him, too. My parents. I could not hold onto either of them.

I straightened up, then promptly fell back into my chair, hit hard with memories of that day. The day my mother called.

“Gall bladder cancer!” she said.

I'd gripped the phone so hard my fingers cramped while she went on like she was talking about bad weather. “The technician was doing an ultrasound, and, out of the blue, he gasped. I suppose he shouldn't have done that!” Then, of all things, she laughed. “Gall bladder cancer! It sounds so unfashionable!”

I almost dropped the phone. I didn't laugh, but at the same time, I didn't think gall bladder cancer could be all that bad—certainly not terminal. Who needs a gall bladder?

“Mom! This is crazy!”

“I'd say so.”

“Why don't they just take it out?”

“They can't,” she said. “There's nothing they can do. I could go to the moon.”

But we both knew, there was nowhere she could go. Nothing she could do. Nothing anyone could do. She died fourteen months later.

Until she was gone, though, she died little by little, in unexpected steps. One day, or even for a week, she seemed fine. Then she'd take another step down. After she died, I'd
have dreams that the wake was inside a dark mahogany room filled with elaborate flowers and many people, but she just got up and walked out. Like nothing ever happened—like she was leaving a cocktail party at the country club. For a long time, when I was not dreaming, I still expected to see her come around the corner. She couldn't be dead. She was too alive. But then, no one knew what to expect when she came up with gall bladder cancer, least of all the doctors. They'd given her six to eighteen months. They just couldn't be “sure.”

At first, I was so busy watching Mom, I didn't notice Dad's steadily deteriorating condition. It all happened so fast. Jack said Dad needed therapy, and maybe a pill or two. He insisted Dad had “stuck blood,” which meant Dad had to be massaged and coaxed to get up out of his chair. Without physical activity, Jack was afraid we'd have a statue of a dad. Julia agreed with Jack, especially about the pills. The two of them never lost an opportunity to push pills on our parents. Julia shoved horse-size, orange pills on Mom (I still don't know what was in them). Fortunately, Mom couldn't swallow them. Jack even ordered shark cartilage and fruit extracts from Mexico.

Their pill pushing had become a creeping disease of its own. And even though I was alarmed, Julia and Jack wouldn't listen to me. It probably didn't help that I sounded like a cross between a harpy and a shrew.

Lucy, my sister the restaurant manager, on the other hand, didn't weigh in on the pill-taking. Most days, she was on duty at the Ritz, decked out in her suit and heels and pearls—one such day, stealthily watching Mel Gibson and his brother drink beer in the Atrium.

All the while, Mom was dying, Dad was going down hill, and my siblings and I were floundering in disagreement.

Except for one thing. I did agree with Jack about the exercise—one of the few things we all agreed on. Dad needed something, just not another pill.

Certainly no pill could cure Mom, and no pill would cure Dad, who was stricken with sadness at seeing his wife slowly die of cancer. With my father's brain in the condition it was, he needed a miracle, not another pill. Besides, his reaction to the drugs was exactly the opposite of the intended effect, which was to relieve anxiety, enable sleep, and increase appetite—in other words, to find a healthy “normal.” Only, normal didn't exist. I couldn't find normal anywhere, and there was no sense in trying to induce it through pills.