We Only Know So Much (19 page)

forty-three

P
riscilla arrives home after work, finds Mott lying by the back door, his leash still on—that’s messed up—lets the dog inside, yells into the doorway for her mom and dad, gets no response. What the fuck. She goes into Theodore and Vivian’s; Vivian is just waking up from her nap.
Gramma Bibbie, I just found the dog outside. Where is everyone?

Vivian’s still a little out of it, says,
Oh, my!

Priscilla peeks into her grandfather’s room; he’s not there, either.

Where’s Grampa? Did Mom take him somewhere?

No, she just went to the market. Surely he’s in your part of the house.

No, Bibbie.

Oh dear. Oh dear. I hope he hasn’t fallen down again.

I’ll go look again. I’ll be right back.

Priscilla goes into the main house, calls upstairs,
Mom! Dad! Grampa! Otis!
Nobody, nothing. We wish there was a precise phonetic spelling of the exasperated noise Priscilla makes here. Suffice it to say it’s loud and multisyllabled and very effectively conveys how tired she is of the increasing incompetence of her family. Goes back outside, doesn’t see her grandfather by the pond or in the yard, circles the house, finds him asleep on the bench on the front porch. Thank fucking god.
Grampa. Grampa.
Priscilla sits down next to her grandfather, tries to wake him up, starts to realize he’s not budging, not breathing.
Grampa
. Fuck. Priscilla bursts into tears, wipes them away, no time for that right now,
Fuck
, hugs her grandfather, wipes her face again, calls her mom, gets voice mail.
Where the fuck are you?
Calls her dad, gets his secretary, Doris, who tells Priscilla he’s on his way home.

Priscilla goes inside to get a blanket for her grampa, realizes that’s probably weird, that he’s colder than cold, but still feels like she should do something and has no idea what to do next. She sits on the porch with her arm around her grandfather, and her head on his shoulder, until her father gets home.

When Gordon arrives to find no one home before him, he, too, loops around the house, asks Vivian what’s going on. She doesn’t know but
would very much like to
. He finally goes back outside and finds Priscilla and Theodore on the porch.

Oh, there you are. You guys going out for a walk or something?

Priscilla’s blood starts to warm up to a slow boil. Has she ever gone for a walk with her grandfather, since she was, like, eight? Fuck, even her thoughts aren’t going the way she wants them to.

You guys fucked up. You fucked up, Dad. You guys fucked up.

Gordon doesn’t like it when his daughter talks like this. But it doesn’t take him long to see that his father doesn’t look so good, starts to put it together that this isn’t just Priscilla’s typical drama, that something is really wrong with his dad. He tells her to calm down, and as soon as she looks at her father directly in the eye, Gordon realizes what’s happened, that his father’s gone.

Gordon being Gordon, his first reaction is to try to figure out the hows and whys of his father dying on the porch. He asks Priscilla a bunch of questions, but she doesn’t have answers. Priscilla, of course, doesn’t know the details, though she has the important gist of it, that her grandfather was left unattended and he wandered out, and is doing everything she can to keep herself from fully exploding right here on the porch. Her father took this on, and he should have been on top of it.
Are you kidding me right now, Dad? Do you realize how disastrous this could have been? Do you? What if he’d gotten hit by a car? What if he’d fallen down in some alley and no one even found him?

At the moment, Gordon is still more or less simply stunned, though in his mind he can’t help thinking that all he’d done was go to work as usual. But Priscilla, at least, doesn’t see it that way at all. She’s used various forms of the word “disaster” before, rarely about anything worse than a cowlick, has a vague sense that her penchant for exaggeration is hindering her ability to convey the seriousness of the situation to her father, but is thinking that somebody needed to step up, like, five minutes ago. And right now her father is not a great candidate, looking severely blank, like he’s checked himself into some little mental isolation tank. The loss of Gordon’s mother just a few years earlier—well, we should probably provide some backstory on that, but it probably won’t surprise you to know that Gordon’s method for processing that loss wasn’t your typical Kübler-Ross scenario; if we were to try to represent it as a pie chart, we’d make two separate pies, one with nine-tenths denial (one slim tenth devoted to momentary but unwelcome sadness), and another full pie of Wikipedia. That’s not a widely acknowledged stage of grief, the Wikipedia stage, but for folks like Gordon, puzzling it through on the Internet and at the library was all he knew how to do. So Gordon knows a lot about how other people process grief, though it probably goes without saying that his ability to notice that people are processing it is another thing entirely.

Granted, things are a little different now, though Gordon can’t necessarily articulate the hows or whys of that, either. He’s frozen, and though the moment isn’t that long, it’s long enough for various images to pass through his head: middle-aged Trudy, brain-photoshopped into his college dorm, an awkward cut-and-paste; his beautiful wife on their wedding day; his sad, faraway wife today; his father in better days, helping him with his homework, showing him how to ink a wood block, center a photo in the frame, his now-perpetually messy chin, his shaky hands, his still-wide eyes. His daughter is right. He hasn’t been present. He’s been busy trying to solve an unsolvable problem. Still, all these thoughts serve to do right now is to render him all the more immobile. He’s frozen.

Dad. Get it together. Seriously.
Priscilla doesn’t want to yell in front of a dead person, that seems way wrong, but she is mustering the sternest tone of voice available.
Dad. You have to call somebody. Like, right now.
Does she have to say out loud that they can’t leave her grandfather here alone on the porch? She doesn’t, does she? Her dad might be out of it, but he’s not stupid, god knows he’s let them know that often freaking enough. She feels some other things coming in sideways. She’d had a feeling her grandfather had been fibbing when he told her he hadn’t been alone when he took those photos he showed her. Why hadn’t she told someone? Did she have any part in this? Her dad’s just lost his dad. He probably feels bad enough. Right now, though, something needs to happen, no time for that.
Dad!
Priscilla raises her voice slightly, what she hopes is enough, looks at her grampa as though she’s worried about waking him up, though she knows better.

Gordon takes a deep breath,
Okay, okay, okay
, he says out loud, and starts making mental plans for what needs to happen next. He calls Jean, leaves her a message to tell her to come home from wherever she is; calls his father’s doctor; calls a funeral director; doesn’t use the word “died”; tries out
expired
but that’s not quite right; settles on
passed
; will stick with that, tells Priscilla he’ll wait outside with his father until they come. Priscilla eventually stops muttering how fucked up this is, waits outside with her dad and grandfather. She’d rather be anywhere just about now, but leaving her grampa and her dad doesn’t seem like an option given the circumstances. Even if her dad is being a bonehead right now. Gordon tries to fill the silence between calls, but Priscilla is still pissed.
Just don’t talk, Dad. Seriously
.

When Jean arrives, Priscilla lets her mom know that she fucked up, too; Jean knows that her daughter is right. She screws up her mouth, nods, kisses Theodore on the head, whispers to her father-in-law that she’s sorry, kisses her husband on the head as well, and starts to cry.

Dad,
you should probably go tell Gramma Bibbie
, Priscilla says. Jean stays with Theodore and her daughter.
This is so messed up
, Priscilla says.

I know
, Jean says.
I know.

Where is Otis, Mom?

I think he’s at Caterina’s for dinner.

You
think
?
Priscilla thinks she might start spontaneously bleeding from her ears.

No, he is, he is
, Jean says.

Well, what time is he supposed to be back?

They said they’d call when they were on their way.

Well, make sure they come around the back. Just in case.

I will, I will.

Frankly, it’s a wonder Vivian hasn’t already hustled herself out onto the porch to find out what’s going on—it’s nearly dinnertime, she does not like it when dinner is late, though that happens more often than not lately—but she’s got on a TiVo-ed
Nancy Grace
she can’t turn away from. Gordon asks if he can put it on pause; she’s not happy about that, but it gives her a minute to notice the time, that dinner is late.
Goodness, what in the devil is going on, Gordon, where is your wife, where is everyone, it’s ten minutes past dinnertime. This is happening far too often lately.

It’s Dad, Grandma. It’s Dad.
Gordon is hoping hard that he doesn’t have to say any more than that. He doesn’t want to have to tell his grandmother that her son has gone before she has; no one wants to tell any mother that, even if her son was seventy-seven years old.
He’s gone, Grandma.

Well, heavens, where did he go this time? Has he fallen down again?
Vivian asks.

No, he’s on the porch, Grandma, but, that’s not what I meant. I’m trying to say he’s gone. He’s passed. He’s passed.
Gordon still doesn’t want to say the word “died” out loud, not to his grandmother, not any more than he wants to think about it himself. Vivian looks at Gordon blankly, looks at Nancy Grace’s frozen image on the TV, her mouth wide open mid-Nancy-Grace-rant/scream, much the way Vivian might feel right now if she allowed it. All that really is there in her somewhere, but honestly, that level of emotion is unacceptable, it lacks refinement for a woman of her age; she always thought that even Jacqueline Kennedy, a
Democrat
, was a model of poise in this way. Vivian knows that people die, but she has a dignified, proper level of acceptance about that, she’s always believed. This time it just happens to be her son. She straightens her sweater.
I see
is all she says, looking down for a minute. She’s about to say
Well this was not on the calendar
, but stops herself.

forty-four

T
he days following Theodore’s death proceed largely without incident. Theodore is thankfully retrieved from the porch before Otis returns from Caterina’s. Predictably, Otis has a lot of questions about what’s happened to his grandfather. His primary understanding of death at this point (aside from the loss of his turtle) is what he’s extracted about his mother’s lover, James. So when Gordon and Jean sit down with Otis, and Gordon begins to explain death in what he believes to be an age-appropriate fashion, Gordon is not expecting Otis’s first question on the subject.

Did Grampa kill himself?

Gordon, naturally, is more than startled by this inquiry.
Goodness no, Otis, where would you get such an idea?

Well, Mommy said that—

Jean actually has a moment where she realizes that perhaps she had overshared with her young son, and quickly tries to cover.
No, sweetie, Grampa was sick, and he just went to sleep
.
Forever
.

Gordon looks at his wife, studies her for a moment. She allows him to catch her eye, in spite of herself. It is this moment that contains the entirety of what will ever be communicated about Jean’s transgression. Neither of them wants to discuss it, not Jean, and even less Gordon. He’s failed her as much as she’s betrayed him. Nothing more needs to be known or said.

Otis is still on
sleep
and
forever
, thinking these through for a moment, his face betraying a series of worried thoughts about the various times he’d been sick and gone to sleep, and had he narrowly escaped death, how had his mother even let him go to bed, this sort of thing. But neither Jean nor Gordon is really looking at his face. Jean has her arm around him and Gordon is looking at the ceiling, hoping it will provide him with the right thing to say.
He was very old, son, and he lived a good life.
Well, that worked out, he thinks, how about that, short and to the point, but it’s as much the right thing to say to a young boy as it is exactly what he needs to hear himself. Huh. Never mind that the key words “sleep” and “forever” are already out there, and these are the ones that will stick.

Gordon makes most of the arrangements and calls to family and friends. He’s gotten it in his head that he’s doing what the patriarch of the family should do, standing up straight, life goes on, what he remembers his father had done when people died. Theodore had made all the necessary arrangements for his own father’s service, and still had enough presence of mind when Laura had died to handle all that as well, though he had been visibly heartbroken. So Gordon sits down with Jean to make the funeral arrangements, soberly calls everyone who needs to be called, friends, relatives, tries to make himself sound appropriately grave on the phone, to say things he’s picked up from his previous grief research,
Yes, well, he passed peacefully
, as though it were some distant cousin he was talking about, as though he weren’t the one who needed the most consolation.

The service is decidedly low-key. Though the family is not religious and has never attended a church service together, Jean suggests that it seems like a nice thing anyway; she has a slight ulterior motive in that she’s secretly been interested in checking out a particular nondenominational church she’d heard about. Gordon agrees, contacts the church himself; because there’s no official pastor at this church, and because they believe in
speaking as the spirit moves you
, Gordon and Jean decide together that it makes the most sense for Gordon to give the eulogy. Had Theodore died just a few weeks earlier, this might have been an entirely different sort of speech, most likely a much longer one filled with a great deal of material culled from books about what it meant to lose a loved one, but Gordon’s head is in a completely different place now. Priscilla still believes it’s located as firmly up his ass as always, but Gordon feels he’s just setting an example for his family by taking care of the details. He’s only dimly aware that his behavior has changed at all since the incident with Trudy. All he knows for sure is that something has changed since he started the Stop Memory Loss program, and now, if intangibly, it’s changed again. His father has died. So he does what people do when these things happen, and he writes up some brief thoughts to share, but when he stands up planning to share what he’s written, instead, his spirit is moved to some impromptu memories of his father, some from his childhood.

My father was an artist. He made his living as an optometrist, but his humor and his soul belonged to art. He was my inspiration.

When I was a small boy, he taught me to carve wood blocks to make prints. It was as a child that his love of art took root in me. Somewhere along the line that was put aside for practical matters.

He was a beloved husband, son, grandfather, and father to me.

Gordon’s peculiar addition of the phrase “to me” here suggests that he was all these things to Gordon, and the mourners are hard-pressed not to take note.

Anecdotes
. Gordon hasn’t meant to say that word out loud, it was meant to remind him of some of the things he wanted to say, memories of his father in better times. He screws his lips together, trying to recall what else it was he wanted to say. He’s never been failed by words this way.

Recently I was implicated in an occurrence in which I became uncertain of my cerebral facilities of which I had previously been very certain.

Here, Gordon thinks he knows exactly what he’s just said; unfortunately, it’s clear that no one else has.

Imagine, if you can, an encounter whereby everything you think you know is turned on its head in the space of a few minutes.

Gordon waits for the congregation to think of such a thing, then forgets where he was going with the idea, insofar as it had anything to do with his dad.

Oh yes, well, frankly, what it was was that I thought I had lost my mind.

Jean’s eyes widen. This is news to her.

Gordon is pausing between sentences now, long enough to make it clear that this speech has not been planned.

Maybe I did, but maybe it’s not the disaster I had initially believed it to be. Maybe it’s a blessing. Maybe we should all lose our minds and get new ones, now and again.

Gordon nods at his own thought. He likes that one.

I am not one for god, especially, but I think hopefully my father is with my mother, Laura, now, and that his mind rests.

Gordon takes another pause. This doesn’t quite seem like an end note. It kind of does to us, but not to him.

Years ago, my father had a quote he liked to say
:
“The proof of a well-trained mind is that it rejoices in that which is good and grieves at the opposite.”

This might be a good time to note that Gordon hasn’t shed a tear yet and it doesn’t appear he’s going to anytime soon. He takes a long pause, looks down. It seems like he might be about to expand on the relevancy of the quote to the occasion of his father’s death, but he’s given all he’s got today. He looks out at the expectant faces, nods, and walks away from the podium.