The Last Cadillac (3 page)

But Jack was having none of it. “Dad, why do you want to leave your family and friends and move hundreds of miles away to Florida? Your roots are in the Midwest. You were born here, and your business and family are here. Dad, your wife died and is buried here!”

Scowling, I checked Dad for tears, but instead he appeared to be annoyed.

“My Patsy! Don't bring her into this,” Dad said. “She's in a much better place than Florida.”

Jack clenched his jaw. “Dad, you just can't go to Florida.”

“What the devil are you talking about?” Dad picked up his glass and then clapped it on the table. “Florida's full of people who have come to their senses. They left the cold and the snow up here, didn't they?”

“Well, why not?” I chimed in, as much as for Dad as for myself that Florida was a glorious place to be. “It would be a lot easier on him down there. And, you know he's always loved the cottage and the sunshine.”

“Will you stop?” Jack's face turned the color of his wine-red Brooks Brothers tie.

Julia suddenly re-appeared from a trip to the liquor cabinet where she'd collected herself and calmed down. “Come on. If you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all.” She was holding a Waterford old-fashioned glass, full of ice and vodka, which took me eerily back to Mom and her penchant for liquor as medicine. The awful year washed over me for an instant. We were all our mother's daughters. I took another sip, but it did nothing to calm me down. All it did was turn up my volume.

“Really. Enough!” I yelled. “And Jack, you stop already!”

“Well!” said Julia. “We really should try to be more pleasant.”

Jack stepped back, and Lucy was still leaning over Dad. She looked oblivious; Dad perplexed.

“Julia, you sound like Sister Mary Fides,” I said. “And we are not getting anything settled here.”

Jack pounded away. “I'm just saying. Dad, you can't just
get up and leave after spending your whole life here. You even have the key to the city.”

“Oh spare me,” I muttered.

Jack walked around next to Dad and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Another thing, Jack,” I said. “If he did stay here, who is going to come over here and take care of him? Are you going to cook, watch television with him, drive him to the doctors? You're never in your own house, so I can't expect you'd be over here taking care of Dad.”

“We can get a nice Polish lady to come and clean.” He took his hand off Dad's shoulder.

I'd reached my limit. The pipsqueak. I changed your diapers!

“Polish lady? Are you serious, Jack? Getting a maid while you're in Maui? You don't have any idea. What's a nice Polish lady have that I haven't got?”

“She's here, and you'll be in Florida.”

“One other thing, while we're on the subject of tennis …” I said.

“No, you're on the subject of tennis,” he said.

“Well, I guess I am. How would you like to sit here and stare at this gloom all winter?” I pointed vaguely beyond the dining room through the sunroom to the patio and the nine-hole golf course and tennis courts beyond. In so doing, I spilled the rest of my drink. “He can't get out much anymore. He can hardly walk. He wants to sit in the sun and listen to the seagulls.”

Confusion vanished from Dad's face, and the sun came out again. He smiled; I smiled. He looked at me. We were both thinking about the same thing: the cottage, the beach at Anna Maria, the sound of the waves and birds, the warmth
of that great, old burning ball rising and setting over the Gulf of Mexico.

So, I went for it. My siblings had backed me into a corner, forcing my conviction. Why not? The whole year had been crazy, so why not keep it up? It probably couldn't get any crazier.

“Look,” I said, “this is beginning to make some sense, I think. I can take care of Dad. I'm, sort of, between jobs.” What I meant was that I was between my elderly father and my kids, between my sporadic journalism career with its ups and downs through the years and all those moves during the marriage—and God-knows-what else. I was stuck in a sandwich of sorts, but I could do this. I could give it a go with the Lord Almighty's help.

My siblings turned away from me. Together, like they'd timed it.

Julia plopped herself down next to Dad. “What about Minneapolis?” she said, leaning on his arm. Her voice changed to a light singsong that declared Minneapolis to be a splendiferous destination. She pulled her chair closer to Dad, edging Lucy out, who gave up and went off to the kitchen.

“I'm not going to Minneapolis,” said Dad. “That's that.” Julia looked like she'd been slapped.

“I just meant, Dad, we have lovely retirement facilities for ambulatory clients there.”

“Julia. Do you mean a nursing home? A place for old people who can still walk around? I'm not going to a nursing home in Minneapolis.” He toned his voice down a notch, took her hand, and smiled at her. “I really want to go to Florida. With my Nancy.”

And there it was. The Rub. He preferred to go to Florida
with me, his eldest, his bridge partner, the “matriarch of the family,” as he called me. The accident of my birth order had everything to do with Dad and me being close, and nothing to do with the worth of my siblings as caretakers. But who was thinking about that? The whole thing was one big, old accident.

Dad and I were always close—closer than my mother and I were. I adored my father, and I was definitely Daddy's girl. My mother may have resented it, but maybe she was just tired. There were four of us by the time I was six. Growing up, I had a never-ending assortment of chores that were meted out … to control? To punish me? Who knows. I just had a lot of them, especially dusting and vacuuming, which I saw no purpose in doing, since the mess my family made instantly replaced my daily cleaning efforts. None of my siblings was exactly domestic—Julia left the bathroom uninhabitable, and on a regular basis, Jack nearly burned down the house making a pyre out of the garbage cans. Lucy had an uncanny talent for disappearing at the sight of a dust rag or dirty dishes, which were mostly left to me. I hated it. At the end of the school day (after a cherry coke and fries, and a couple of Kent's on the bus with my friends), I just wanted to be left alone. I ran home to watch American Bandstand. My mother found me there at four o'clock in front of the black-and-white television with Arlene and Ken, and Justine and Bob, my feet propped up on the woodwork, drinking a Diet-Rite (as punishment for the fries). I could tell Mom was fresh from her nap because her eyes were puffy. Why didn't she do the dusting?

“Here,” she said, handing over the Pledge and a list of other chores. It irritated me, and we never settled the slight tug of war between us, which—in part—had to do with
Dad. It was like we were at a department-store sale, waltzing carefully around a rack of clothes we both wanted to buy.

He deferred to me; she did not. I was the child, not my father's confidant, and so she discouraged my involvement in decision making. To be fair, my fiercely independent parents didn't involve any of us much—and that was part of the problem. We could never sit down and work things out together because we had no practice in it.

But, from the beginning, I was my father's daughter. I became a pleaser. I began to take on responsibilities. I babysat from age nine for a quarter an hour; I was often a cleaner, helper, driver, cook. Through the years, Dad and I sort of grew on each other. He depended on me and told me early on “to set an example.” I usually did. Except for a few minor detours when I was in high school and threw a party in my parents' absence, during which about a hundred of my hooligan friends showed up and drank all the booze, wrecked the furniture, and took the car on a joy ride—after which, the police came.

I recovered from sophomore year, got straight A's (“See, I told you you could do it,” Dad said), earned some scholarships and a double major, and then went on to a successful, albeit short, career as an assistant editor for a decorating magazine in New York. The career ended abruptly when I fell for a West Point cadet, and he for me. We got married right after his graduation and flew off to Germany, Georgia, and Alabama, during which time he anesthetized himself at the Officer's Club with his newfound buddies returning from Vietnam. He had not served in the war because of his low class standing—711 out of 749 cadets. He was lucky, but he didn't think so. He tried to forget his lost opportunity by drowning himself in bourbon.

His loss, oddly enough, was an opportunity. We ended up at Fort Benning, Georgia, where I got a job as a feature writer at the
Columbus Enquirer
, and he was happily jumping out of helicopters. While he didn't come home, I stayed up all night with Tolstoy, Godden, Hemingway, Roth, Dreiser, Bellow, McCarthy, Buck, Steinbeck, Updike, Caldwell, Hardy, and London. They were my friends, and I wallowed in my friends, not wanting to leave the comfort of my pillows and covers pulled up to my chin, turning the pages into an eternity of writing. I had a reading slump through high school and college, but now I was thirsty and couldn't put the books down.

My career sputtered with all of our moving around, but then, along with the reading, I started writing more. I would not let it die. I kept notes and wrote away the hours, in notebooks and steno pads and scraps of paper galore. Nothing could stop the flow of words I put into journals, and into my head from the books I read. I was always writing from the time I was in high school, when I had a column in the newspaper called “Nau's Notions,” which mostly touched on prom fashions, or the activities of the football and basketball players. In college, I was a page editor and columnist. I wrote deep, thoughtful editorials about the existential experience—which, to me, was
Waiting for Godot
meets my exceptionally handsome philosophy professor, Mr. Walter Toby.

My father was anything but existential, believing in platonic ideals of love and courage floating out there somewhere in the clouds. He even believed in Richard Nixon because he was a “president,” and, he believed in any Catholic priest or nun, and, of course, the pope, because of “the office” they held. We argued politics often. Except for that, I was my father's daughter. I drew on his strength of conviction and his
loudness, and I loved his humor and magnanimity over and above his politics and religion.

But in those early years, we argued about everything. He didn't know what to do with me, so he yelled a lot. We yelled a lot together. When I hit puberty like a bomb, we had screaming fights.

“No drive-ins, no beach parties, no tattooed men,” he growled.

It ended when I stomped to my room and slammed the door, only to break a succession of mirrors clipped flimsily to the back of the door. I can still remember that slight wobble and rattle before the mirror came crashing down in an exclamation of teenage rage. After I broke the third one, Lucy looked up from her bed where she was sprawled, reading
Seventeen
.

“You can punctuate a sentence better than anyone, Nancy. You sure don't need a course in self-assertion.” Then Lucy pointed out, regularly, “Mom will just replace the mirror again, but think of all the bad luck you're stacking up.”

Lucy could make me stop in my tracks, but she also had a sense about when to back off. Confrontation was not a part of her makeup. She had a way of getting out of fights and confusion, which I admired greatly. I had no practice in the art. Lucy just didn't want to engage in unpleasant talk if she could dance around it. But she found she couldn't always do what she wanted—something she was not entirely happy about. It was evident in the way she ended her marriage. If there was one thing Lucy learned about being married, it wasn't always good to avoid conflict. At least I had conflict well practiced, especially after twenty-three years with Hubby. On the other hand, Lucy had few fights during her eleven years with Adorable Couch Potato. The worst thing
about the end of her marriage, Lucy said, was that they didn't talk about the split. They never even yelled. They simply walked away from each other, leaving edges frayed and issues unresolved.

Lucy taught me a lot by just being Lucy, and about the concept of conflict, which I kept practicing on everyone around me, and continually nurtured in myself. It fed me and pushed me, right on up to the edge until I was nearly, but not quite, ready to fall into a large hole of nothingness. Somehow, I always pulled myself up and got away. I was learning, in part, thanks to Lucy.

Now, Lucy was determined to avoid the fight over Dad. I could read it in her expression, the slow sipping, the nonchalance, the waning of the tapping fingernails. She knew Dad might just go to Florida with me, and she had no intention of spouting off like Julia and Jack. It was not her style. I hoped, with time at least … that maybe, just maybe, I could get some support from her, that we could put our heads together and come up with a suitable situation, whatever happened with Dad.

Lucy sighed and finished off her vodka tonic, while Jack and Julia gathered their resources to carry on the campaign to save Dad from Florida. And from me. They huddled around Dad and appeared to be advancing.

“Stop. All of you,” said Dad. “Look-it. I want to go to Florida. It's cold here, and it's warm there. I want to be warm.” His grip remained firm. “I want to be warm, and I'm going with Nancy.”

“Dad,” said Julia. She folded her arms. “Just look at this lovely little house that Mom put together so nicely for you.”

“I don't like the dollhouse,” he said flatly.

“Come to think of it, he didn't have a thing to do with this place,” I said.

Their eyes, as one, burned into me then for my sacrilegious remark. Mom had poured the last of her strength into decorating the dollhouse—with the help of a pompous decorator who ran between the Chicago Merchandise Mart and my mother with every sample she could carry, huffing and puffing with chintzes and wallpaper. My mother loved the flattery and the shopping and writing checks. But Dad didn't know a
toile
from a teapot. Everybody kept saying what Dad liked and didn't like. Except Dad.