The last of his mind, p.16
The Last of His Mind, page 16
In my reports to Al, all winter and spring, I’ve subtly played up everything that has gone awry. How satisfying it is to describe how the heat went out during the blizzard, or how we had to go to the hospital and were kept there for nine hours, or how Dad crapped on the floor again. All this proves I’m indispensable and earning my keep.
When Al and Joe are most appreciative, or when someone praises me for moving in with my father, I shrug off their comments and act like it’s no big deal. But underneath I soak up the approval. “Anything can be endured if all humanity is watching,” writes the novelist James Salter. “We live in the attention of others.”
On one of my Athens nights I had dinner with my old friend Beth Kaufman, whose father’s dementia is more advanced than my dad’s. He lives with his wife of fifty years, but no longer recognizes her. He thinks she’s a woman who comes in to cook his meals. Recently, after a dinner he enjoyed, he asked her, “Do you accept tips?”
Beth and I could laugh at this story with its underlying heartache: at some point what can you do but laugh? But when I returned to my dad’s I wondered again if he sometimes forgets who I am. There’s a cocked, watchful look he gives me when I wake him in the morning, and his responses to me, when I set out his medications or bring him a meal, can seem polite and formulaic. He could be speaking to an aide he barely knows.
And now some cord has been broken, or frayed at least, between me and my father. When I talk to him he nods, sometimes smiles, is polite about all things but has nothing to say. He doesn’t want to leave the house, doesn’t want to sit in the remodeled sunroom, doesn’t perk up at anything. Perhaps the fact that I left has undermined his trust. Or maybe he’s just seeing through me. Because while outwardly I’m still gentle and cheerful, his decrepit state can make me squirm. It gets to me when he lies in his chair with his head back and his mouth gaping like a dead man’s. He suffers from sleep apnea, in which the soft tissues in his throat close down, his breathing stops and he wakes with a honk, several times a minute. He’s unaware of what’s happening, and of course it’s no fault of his own—yet some piece of me hates him for it. When he’s weakest, when he’s stubborn and failing, I have flashes of repugnance. He comes out of the bathroom hunched over his walker, his face gaunt and hair disheveled. He’s now religious about holding his breath as he passes through the kitchen—because not just Jack, but other people have breathed in there. At first this seemed amusing, an “endearing quirk,” as Al puts it. But this morning, when Dad reached the living room and gave a little puff of exhalation, as if he’d completed a dangerous passage, I thought, You pitiful old man.
We sit at the table for dinner, Dad with a bowl of the haddock stew Jack has cooked. I finish my own meal in a couple of minutes. I’ve started a juice diet—one of my tenants in Ohio was thirty days into a diet of only juices, and he looked both thin and buoyant—and after two glasses I’m done. Dad eats so slowly I can’t watch. His spoon rattles against his bowl, then against his teeth. I think I should reach out to him in some way, find something we can talk about. Instead I pick up a magazine and read an article. For thirty minutes I disappear. Later, holding the Azmacort inhaler to his mouth—always an intimate act—I sense the distance between us. I’m awkward as I bring the inhaler close, and there’s a faint hesitation as he puts his lips to it.
At night, alone in my room upstairs, I pull the notes my father wrote to Jane out of their manila envelope. Darling—. Dearest Jane—. You have brightened my life more than I can tell you. You are the most understanding of women. And I love you.
I’m glad my father had three good decades with Jane. I’m glad that love came to him at the end of his life. But Lois asks, “Do you think if he treated your mother the way he did Jane, that she’d have stayed? That she’d still be alive and you’d still have her?”
I lie in my room, with the notes spread out on the bed, and wonder about it. Maybe she’d have wandered anyway—but maybe not, if my father had been more affectionate and playful. Instead, he kept his distance. He folded his arms, he sat upright on the couch or leaned faintly away from her, he never reached over and took a bit of food off her plate. At night he slept in his single bed. I never heard him tell my mother how good she looked or smelled or felt. Maybe late in the evening, when Alan and I were asleep, he was telling her she was the most understanding of women, or the prettiest, or smart and inventive. Maybe he did tell her he loved her. I just don’t have any evidence of that.
Years ago I chose the parent I would save from the burning house. Now I wind up tied to my other parent, my father, the one I’ve struggled not to be like. Yet the rage Lois suggests I should feel about my father doesn’t come to me. Instead, over the last six months I’ve grown closer to him. I don’t know if he feels close to me or not. There aren’t many signs that he does. I have those flashes of aversion, but I take them to be signs of fear, not anger or deception. It’s brutal to watch your father slide into oblivion—and to imagine your own decline to come—but day after day I still want to be here in his house. I lay my hands on him, I listen to everything he says, and every morning I’m glad to see his face.
Leafing through a book from Dad’s shelves, I find a chapter called “Henry Luce Starts a Picture Magazine,” with selections from the diaries of Life’s first managing editor, John Shaw Billings. I read some passages to Dad, and this finally gets him talking. When Billings mentions the layout rooms—where the two-page spreads of text and pictures were pinned to the walls, to be adjusted and refined as each issue took shape—Dad tells me his office was right next door to those rooms. “That way I got my word in on anything that came up.”
“Did you have to maneuver for that office?”
“I did.”
“So is it true what they say, that you were both mulish and ambitious?”
Dad laughs. “I guess I was.”
“And were others resentful that you snagged that office?”
“Oh yes.”
“Like who?”
“Longwell, for one. I was supposed to be working directly for him, you see. I wasn’t, I was working for Billings.”
“But Longwell was your boss for three years.”
“Yes, but I didn’t recognize him as such.”
This comes with a grin. It’s clear that Life was always crowded, as my father once wrote, with “plenty of cooks standing around ready to get in the broth.” And Luce, as he noted, tended to play off his subordinates against one another.
W. A. Swanberg, in his book Luce and His Empire, confirms Henry Luce’s habit of pitting his editors against each other to get more out of them. “Blood was flowing,” he writes. “Promotions of importance were made not only on the basis of past good work, but also after a couple of candidates had fought for the job. Since they knew they were fighting for the job, a kind of jungle savagery sometimes resulted.”
It’s hard for me to imagine my father sharpening his knives, but the fact is that he followed Billings and Longwell into the job of managing editor. Once there, Dad’s style was to rule with a loose hand. He allowed his subordinates, especially Edward Thompson, who became the fourth ME, to run their departments with little interference—which left Dad free to follow some broader, more intellectual interests. As Loudon Wainwright notes in The Great American Magazine, “He was the instigator of a number of substantial articles on contemporary American life (on art, atomic energy and the national character) and was responsible for the first major series Life ever ran, ten long, illustrated articles on the history of Western Man.”
These articles evolved into a book that did well for Life, selling half a million copies. On Dad’s shelves there’s a morocco-clad edition, which I pull down and open on the dining room table in front of him. Dad glances at it, but by now, after his brief flurry of conversation, he’s already sinking. Leaning over his shoulder, trying to keep his attention, I read to him the caption to a two-page illustration of a fresco from the Sistine Chapel, a sentence likely written by my father himself: “The golden sheaves of artistic genius, ripening for three centuries in sunny Italy, were gathered at last into one man: Michelangelo Buonarroti.”
Surprising me, Dad reaches out and closes the book, almost slams it shut, and pushes it away. He’s had enough talk, it seems. Enough of Michelangelo, and perhaps enough of me. After his petulant gesture, I’ve had enough of him. For several minutes we sit at the table, looking down, neither of us speaking or moving. Then the slow rhythm of his bedtime rolls over us, soothing us both. I throw his clothes in the laundry, I set out what he’ll need for tomorrow, I sit on the chair by his bed. It’s daily life. He’s like an undemanding child, and the work calms me.
Dad has finally run Jack off. For me Jack was perfect—easy to get along with, funny, and a great cook. But Dad hated him from the start and told him, the last time he was here, to stay out in the sunroom once he finished cooking. So Jack talked to me. “I can take it,” he said, “it doesn’t offend me. But here’s your dad toward the end of his life and he’s putting up with someone he hates. He shouldn’t have to do that, so I don’t think I should continue.”
I’ll have to look for someone else, because I don’t want to give up tennis. Dad won’t like someone new coming in, but he’ll have to live with it. Damn him, anyway. Right now I don’t care about everything he’s done for me my whole life. I’ve given up plenty to move to his house, and he can’t put up with the easygoing Jack Lane for six hours a week?
I’m cold and efficient as I serve him dinner. This is covert, I know, but I have no history of working things out with my father, of discussing our differences, of engaging in an outright argument. I suppose I could explain how much trouble he’s making for me, and so get it off my chest. But I don’t. I act, in short, pretty much as he would, and just tell him I’m going to find someone else. He might not like the new person, but twice a week I am going to play tennis. I’m calm, but beat him up with the obvious, that he’s making it hard on me. He nods and looks away. He doesn’t retreat, and neither do I.
Dad can still read, but doesn’t. Not books, and rarely a magazine. Tonight as I cook dinner he spends fifteen minutes poring over the latest New Yorker. I watch him as he moves through it backward, examining page after page of text and photos. He goes so slowly and seems so completely absorbed that I’m sure he must be reading something, if only the ads. But when I come in with his plate and set it on the table, I find he’s looking at the magazine upside down.
It makes me wonder about all those home movies I’ve subjected him to. If it doesn’t matter to him if a still photograph is right side up or not, what can he make of my mother diving off a high board, or Alan and Tony playing soccer on motorbikes? To him it could be all just flickering lights.
After dinner the two of us sit in the living room as I read in silence a twenty-page family history that Dad wrote at my urging years ago. “All my ancestors,” it begins, “so far as I know, lived on the North Shore of Massachusetts, from the time when the first of them arrived on this continent.”
He explains how the original John Thorndike came over from England in 1630, possibly with Governor Winthrop on the Arbella. He raised seven children here but returned to England as an old man and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His stone there, my father notes wryly, is now covered up by a souvenir stand.
Dad tells the story of his ancestor George Jacobs, who was hanged in Salem as a wizard.
He tells quirky stories of Thorndikes, Buxtons and Farnhams, stories heard when he was a child. There was my grandmother’s Aunt Mehitabel, who was snatched from her cradle by a bear and carried off into the woods, then rescued by her brothers—surely an apocryphal tale. There was an uncle who took off for the California gold rush, leaving a wife and children who never heard from him again. There was Aunt Lizzie, who married a French baker, a union looked down upon by the rest of the family. “If you look through the family album of daguerreotypes,” my father writes, “you will see that all the other sitters appear in formal, dignified portraits. But François Renou was photographed, most cruelly, at full length, in all his dropsical girth.” My father’s parents married as the century turned, in 1900.
Though they were never well off, they always had a maid in the house, and one of the first automobiles in town, and one of the first telephones (Peabody 79). They were founding members of the country club and the women’s club and my father was a director of all three local banks. In the summer they sometimes rented a cottage on the shore at Marblehead with friends or went to a friend’s camp in New Hampshire. These were much the same places and times and people seen in Winslow Homer’s paintings of the Maine Coast and the White Mountains. It was also the time of the Gibson girl, as can be seen in the pictures of my mother leaning over my cradle.
Dad goes on in his family history to describe his college years and his move to New York. He writes about his wedding to my mother, tells stories about our stay in Europe, and closes the history with this passage about the day we returned from France to our house on Owenoke Road:
We were all glad to get back to Westport in the spring of 1950. The Goit boys and the Monsarrat boys were waiting and so was Debbie Bradley—she and Alan having borne their separation bravely. Our place, then and for the years to come, was Owenoke. John and Alan do not need my help in recalling those years. For John the sun of memory had already risen and for Alan it was just coming up.
Reading that phrase, the sun of memory, I break into silent tears. I sit on my chair in the living room and cry but hold it in, glancing across the room at my father’s bony and exhausted face. I can’t look at him. Memory, for my dad, is a kind of sunlight that plays across our lives. It makes history possible. He was glad to see the onset of memory in his young boys—but it’s devastating now to watch that sun as it sets in him.
Just as I’m getting up in the morning I hear a sharp little cry and a thump over the monitor, and run downstairs to find Dad on the floor beside his bed. He doesn’t look hurt, so I settle down with him and hold his hand and ask him if he’s in pain anywhere. No no, he’s fine, he’s perfectly okay. Except he can’t get up. After ten minutes I pull his arms toward me and raise his torso to a sitting position, but he can’t maintain it on his own. I maneuver behind him, slip my arms under his and dead-lift him onto the bed. Onto me, actually, as I collapse back onto the mattress. He’s completely rigid, but for the first time I have my father in my arms. I rest for a moment, then wriggle out from under him, and as soon as I get him stretched out head-to-foot on the bed he goes to sleep.
I don’t know what I’d do if he fell out in the living room, away from his bed. Drag him into his bedroom, I guess, because I could never stand him up on my own. It makes me consider one of the advantages of a nursing home: that in an emergency there are always plenty of attendants around. But later in the day, when I call Dotty Turner to ask how Oliver’s doing, she tells me she’s unhappier than ever about his care. Recently she went in at eleven in the morning and found him lying in his own diarrhea. She chased down an attendant but was told Oliver would have to wait, everyone was busy. The smell was overwhelming. She complained at the nurses’ station and finally got some reluctant help. But how often did this happen when she wasn’t there? She only goes in for an hour or two a day.
“These places are all short-handed,” she tells me. “They don’t want to move Oliver into his wheelchair, it’s too much work. They never take him outside. They might do something for him right now, but they won’t do it regularly. They’re all too busy. I got them to brush his teeth a few times, but then they stopped. Everyone’s in a hurry. The feeding room is the worst, I hate to go in there. They purée the food and spoon it in too fast. There’s always somebody coughing or choking.”
Her bottom line: “I pray to God I won’t have to go into one of those places.”
And: “If you can possibly stay with your dad, do it.”
Then, only twelve hours after our talk, Oliver dies in his sleep. And now I don’t know if I should tell my father.
I’ve waited a day. I’ve talked to my brothers and my son, to Harriet and Dotty and Lois and Sandy. Some think Dad should be told, others think there’s no reason for him to know. But I feel I have to tell him. I wouldn’t want him to suggest, some weeks from now, that we call Oliver on the phone or go down for a visit. While the news will be a blow, I can’t start deciding which emotions my father is allowed to have.
July
All his life my father has read and studied. He loved the nuances of diction and grammar, and was devoted to words the way some men are devoted to sports. He would watch an occasional movie, but until he was seventy I never saw him sit down in front of a television. He watched standing up, as if at any moment he might have to leave the room. He preferred the written word, loved a good letter and wrote thousands of them.
I’m still going through his papers, and yesterday found another cardboard box filled with letters. There could be a thousand in this box alone, half of them sent to my father from other people, the rest carbons of the letters he mailed out. This batch covers about five years, and includes neither family letters nor memos from work, all of which are in other boxes. Here old friends write from the ranch they’ve moved to in Colorado, or from their home by Lake Champlain. They write him from Tokyo or London or Bronxville, New York. People write to ask for a job at Heritage, or to congratulate him about his latest book, or to ask if he can help get their book published. Letters of recommendation go out for a dozen sons and daughters of friends. A neighbor, Ina Bradley, writes that our young and rambunctious Gordon setter, Homer, has trampled their flower gardens and left excrement on their flagstones. Clipped to her letter is Dad’s reply, in which he promises to do everything “humanly and caninely possible” to curtail Homer’s depredations. He affirms, on a long typed page, that “dogs must be able to leave the house, and it lies in the inherent nature of dogs to roam,” but that he will “initiate a study of Homer’s routines, in the hope of finding a way to alleviate this problem.” He is respectful, considerate and neighborly—but there is a whiff of the bottom line, that Ina might as well buck up, because nothing can be done short of leashing the dog, and that’s not going to happen.
