The Last of His Mind Page 2

  My dad in his late twenties was an ambitious and confident young man who had started at Life straight out of college, and who eventually rose to be managing editor. I, at twenty-seven, dropped out of a PhD program in English and moved with my wife Clarisa to a farm in southern Chile, where we raised chickens and lived a peasant life. My academic career was over and my father’s path left behind. There’s always an element of rejection in such a move, and it couldn’t have been easy on him, yet he wrote me steadily and sent whatever books I asked for, including a 1903 manual on traditional aviculture he found through a rare book search. He didn’t ask how long I was going to stay in Chile.

  On the Cape a surprising storm has dropped fifteen inches of snow on the ground, but Dad’s driveway has been plowed. I help him into the cold house and crank up the furnace. It’s exciting—but what a mess we left in our hurry to get out last week. Mostly it’s the accretion of old newspapers and mail, of cards and magazines and catalogs, and of Dad’s many notes. His three Christmas lists still lie on the dining room table, all in a shattered handwriting: Errands, Presents, and Christmas Cards.

  Dad has made lists and notes for years, for decades, and sees no reason to throw any of them away. He writes on legal pads, in notebooks, and most often on three-by-five cards, which now spill across tables and shelves and his two desks. The cards, many hundreds of them, list telephone numbers, appointments and reminders. Some have quotations as well, though he’s more apt to set those down in a notebook, along with his outlines and research notes. There are notebooks here from when he was writing his last book, The Coast, an exploration of the Atlantic coastline—and others that go back seventy years, from when he worked on the Harvard Crimson, or even further, to high school, with quotes from Gibbon, Toynbee and Virgil. They are the endless, restless work of the mind.

  Last fall, as Dad’s memory started to fail, he began to write daily reminders to himself. He recorded, on an undated three-by-five card that now lies on the dining room table, “Doctor’s appointment tomorrow.” He set down many times what I guess to be the current date, one to a card. He wrote “Harriet came,” and “I’ve had my medications,” and “Blood test tomorrow.” One card says, “I’ve eaten breakfast.”

  My father, once so knowledgeable about the history of Western civilization, is now trying to keep track of what meals he has eaten. I pore over the cards. Half of them I can’t read at all, his handwriting has become so shaky. I had planned, after driving him to the Cape, to head back to Ohio—but his notes dismay me, and I worry about those times over Christmas when he seemed so bewildered. I decide to settle in for a few days, and go to work on the papers strewn over his dining room table and his desks. Slowly, when he’s not watching, I sort through the cards and toss most of them. I inspect the first few hundred, but can’t always tell what I’m throwing away.

  After the cards, I take on the piles of old magazines and catalogs. And his junk mail, diligently saved for months or years: the many requests from the March of Dimes, the Smile Train and the ACLU, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Lighthouse International, the St. Labre Indian School and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, won’t you help? There are easily three hundred of these petitions, and one after another they go into the trash. Dad has told me to save them, but I don’t. Though he can no longer balance his checkbook, I’m afraid he could still write checks.

  I’m aware of my transgressions, of imposing my will on my father’s house and habits. Even though I’m still only visiting, the chaos of the place unnerves me. It’s too clear a reflection of the growing disorder of his mind.

  A couple of days after our return he wants to see the suitcase he took to Vermont. I’ve stored it upstairs but bring it down for him to inspect. It’s empty, as I assured him it would be.

  “I’m missing some things,” he says. “We must have left them at Alan’s.”

  “You mean clothes?”

  “And other things.”

  “What things?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I tell him I’ll look around for them, or I can call Al and he’ll send them down. “What is it that’s missing?”

  The frustration on his face is clear. “They’re . . . those things,” he says. But he can’t name them.

  All his life my father has been good with words. He loves the English language, and for a couple of years was head of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. But now he’s losing his nouns, and he hates it. Of course he’s been losing proper nouns for years, the way we all do. He can forget the street I grew up on, or the name of someone he’s known since college—but now he’s begun to blank out on common nouns as well, words like chimney or swan or couch. After dinner he asks me to replace “the . . . the . . . there, on the table.” He can’t find the word, but points to the lamp until I figure it out: the lightbulb.

  “We’ve got plenty,” I say and go off to find one. How chipper I can sound. But underneath I’m as worried about what’s happening as he is.

  Last summer, when my father started having trouble keeping track of his medications, we hired a retired nurse, Harriet Guyon, to stop in once a day, pour his meds and keep an eye on him. She’s been a godsend, and even my father has adjusted to her. At first he hated the idea of anyone coming into his house, and announced he wanted nothing to do with her. He disliked her, he didn’t need her, he was getting along fine on his own. But soon she won him over. After a week he felt neutral about her, and within a month she’d become indispensable to him.

  Still, the time is going to come when he’ll need more care. If he’s going to stay in his disordered house, someone will have to live with him, and Harriet can’t do that. Neither can my brothers. Al is married and has a small-town law practice. Joe’s job as a tax analyst and historian is more flexible, but he’s also married and has a two-year-old daughter. I remember when my son was two, how absorbed I was in raising him.

  In her last years my grandmother was looked after by a distant cousin, and I think Dad believes that at some point an elderly woman like his great-aunt Eleanor will materialize to take care of him. But there is no busty and cheerful Aunt Eleanor, there’s only me—or only I, as my father would say—and I’m still holding back. I’ve had a good Christmas, but now I’m ready to go home. I don’t want to give up my life any more than my brothers do. I have a hundred friends in Athens, Ohio, a house by a creek, a deer-proof garden with an eight-foot-high fence, and a part-time business renting out the houses I’ve built in the last seven years. I try to balance this against my dad’s needs and my brother’s lives, and there is no balance.

  In spite of the jumble of the house, I love how my father’s history is stored all through it. On bookshelves, in his desk drawers, in oversized file cabinets, in cardboard boxes and old suitcases, anywhere I look I find papers and photographs and notebooks. Dad doesn’t reminisce much about his past—hardly ever—but the record isn’t hidden, and over the years I’ve wandered through it, starting with his youth in Peabody, Mass, north of Boston.

  His ambition and literary bent must have been clear to everyone by the time he graduated from Peabody High. He was valedictorian of his class and an editor of both school magazines, for which he wrote some earnest editorials. In one, he castigated his classmates for bad manners: “Most of us,” he wrote, “do not know Emily Post from Caelano the Harpy.” In another he urged his readers to do more than eat, drink and be merry, because “There is nothing like getting a head start on the other guy.”

  In the fall of 1930, a difficult year for the nation, Joe Thorndike entered Harvard on a partial scholarship. Money was on everyone’s mind, and like the majority of his class he majored in economics. “My goal,” he once told me, “was to make a million dollars before I was twenty-five. If you couldn’t do it when you were still young, it wasn’t worth it.”

  After four straight years of As at Peabody High, his early grades at Harvard were mediocre: C in German, C in Geology, B in History. This was beca
use he was already spending forty hours a week at the Crimson, the university’s daily newspaper. He wrote steadily as a freshman and sophomore, was appointed managing editor his junior year and president his senior. Each year the Depression grew deeper, and his goal of earning a million dollars took a back seat to journalism, a field where he could make some headway.

  In June 1934, the day after his last Harvard final, he moved to New York, skipping his graduation ceremonies so he could start a job. He had wrangled a tryout at Henry Luce’s Time, and after a month Luce hired him. He wrote movie reviews, then People and Education articles. He wrote some financial pieces for Fortune, where he met James Agee and Archibald MacLeish. Dad was something of a protégé of Luce’s, and in 1935 joined a small team under Dan Longwell, who spearheaded Luce’s plan to start a picture magazine. Both Longwell and my father plumbed the mind of an exiled editor, Kurt Korff, who had run a German picture magazine called the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and who knew more about photo choice and layout than anyone in New York. The nature of the new magazine was endlessly debated, and so was its name: Luce originally planned to call it Dime, as it was going to sell for ten cents. By the time Life’s first issue came out in the fall of 1936, Joe Thorndike, at the age of twenty-three, was the magazine’s youngest associate editor.

  He had been at Life for only three years when my mother, Virginia, came to work for the magazine. Dad clearly had his eye on her, because when a visiting documentary photographer asked whom he should use in his film, my father suggested her as “the most attractive girl on the staff.” She was filmed at a desk as she sifted through some photos, and a few days later my parents had their first date, a drink at the fountain at Rockefeller Center.

  They married a year later, in 1940. Dad once wrote a description of their wedding, and included a detail I had heard from her and passed on to him.

  We were married in the chapel of Riverside Church by a Unitarian minister who was wearing golf shoes under his robe and skipped all the stuff about two becoming one, advising us instead to keep our own individuality (Eat of the same food but not off the same plate, etc.). John says his mother was miffed because after the ceremony I suggested we stop for ice cream sticks at a Good Humor stand outside the chapel.

  My father has never been a romantic. He’s not exactly a pragmatist—he’s too fond of ideas, of art and literature—but I can imagine him coming out of the chapel thinking Well, now we’re married, and then, seeing the Good Humor cart, Wouldn’t it be nice to eat some ice cream?

  The way to the top at Life led through Henry Luce, and it helped if he liked you. It helped as well if his wife, the editor and playwright Clare Boothe Luce, liked both you and your wife. A gauge of one’s status at Time Inc. was how often you were invited to the Luce mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. My parents ate there numerous times, but their most notable meal at the long table was on Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, when twenty-two people—including some who thought the U.S. should go to England’s help, and some who thought we should stay out of the war—sat down to a late luncheon. They were eating dessert when a telephone call was answered by the staff. A butler brought a message on a folded slip of paper and gave it to Clare, who read it, then tapped her spoon on a glass.

  “All isolationists and appeasers, please listen. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor.”

  Whenever my mother told this story she loved to point out how the biggest news of the century had been delivered not to the biggest newsman of the century, but to his wife.

  My parents were married for twenty-three years. The marriage came to a bleak close, but the record of their early years looks hopeful. Here in Dad’s house, in his voluminous files, are plenty of contact sheets, snapshots and enlargements showing a young couple at ease with each other. One photo shows them in 1940 during their first summer together, sharing a cottage with friends on the Connecticut shoreline, two years before I was born. My father looks handsome, and my mother slender and vibrant. I would have dated her in a heartbeat.

  Joe and Virginia Thorndike with Bob and Patty Coughlan, at the Westport Country Playhouse, 1940

  In other photos they board a ski train to North Conway, then stand jauntily on the slopes. They play croquet on our Connecticut lawn on the Fourth of July, my mother in shorts, gesturing, caught in midsentence. Oliver Jensen and James Parton ply their wooden mallets, while Fritz Kirkland arms a pipe bomb and his wife Sally lounges in an elegant dress. I’m drawn to my parents’ shining years, their first ten or fifteen, when they and their friends were so young and spirited. Though I later turned my back on that world, now I can’t look at it enough. I love their ease and confidence.

  Last fall, while visiting my dad, I drove him down to Connecticut to see his old pal Oliver Jensen. Oliver and Joe go way back. They met at Life in the forties and later started two hardcover, ad-free magazines, American Heritage and Horizon. I hadn’t seen Oliver in decades, but I remembered him from his many visits to our house when I was young. He was a big guy with a wide smile and an impish look. He liked kids but never had any of his own. He liked jokes, he liked women, he was married five times. He liked railroads and once bought one, a Connecticut spur that still operates nostalgic steam engine trips. But all that had passed by. Now Oliver lived in a nursing home, and as we turned off the interstate my father warned me, “He’s not doing very well.”

  “Can he walk?”

  “I don’t think he can.”

  “And his mind?”

  “Not so good, either.”

  Even after my father’s warning it took me by surprise to find Oliver, that shining presence of a man, belted into a wheelchair. His hair, an inch and a half long, stood straight up from his scalp, just like before, only white. He had the same large head and broad smile.

  “Look who’s here,” he said as we all shook hands. “Where have you two come from today?”

  I think he knew my father, though probably not me. For fifteen minutes he was congenial and alert, as we talked about railroads and the house he lived in before he was brought here. Then his energy drained away. He drifted toward sleep, jerked awake, drifted off again. In midsentence his head bent forward, nodded, and he went silent. Sometimes a little drool gathered on his lower lip, and dropped.

  When this happened my dad and I made conversation, or we waited until Oliver came around. Twice he woke up and asked again, “So, where have you two come from today?”

  At times he made perfect sense. I’d brought along a copy of his first book, found on my father’s shelves: Carrier War, written during his Pacific service in the navy and a bestseller in 1945. Oliver turned the book over in his hands with pleasure, though he didn’t open it. “I had a lot of fun writing that one,” he said. He also claimed to remember the wartime telegram he’d sent to my parents the day after I was born: Congratulations on best production yet, signed Ensign Jensen.

  In the midst of our visit, for a quarter of an hour, a woman in another room screamed and fell silent, screamed and fell silent. She had the right to scream, a nurse told me later. It’s the law. Unless a patient is a physical danger to others she may not be confined or restrained. If she moans she moans, and if she screams she screams. Oliver’s room, like the entire home, was clean and bright, but those cries gave an air of bedlam to the place—even if Oliver didn’t seem to hear them. My father showed no reaction to them either, save to lean in closer to the conversation. We continued our visit as if such howling were a commonplace, but I couldn’t get past the sound. Someone was miserable, and no one could do anything about it.

  After an hour and a half my father and I said good-bye to Oliver and made our way out of the building, past the same long-distance stares of the old women and men we had seen coming in, some solitary on their beds, others parked in wheelchairs at the sides of the corridor. Dad moved slowly. He had refused to bring in his cane, and I worried that he wouldn’t be able to reach his car. I didn’t offer him my arm, because I knew he didn’t want to be helped. He made it
across the asphalt on his own, opened his door, and lowered himself gingerly to the seat. After he pulled his legs inside, I closed the door and he slumped against it. He looked the way I felt, exhausted.

  For ten minutes we drove in silence. Finally I said, “Pretty gruesome in there.”

  “Terrible.”

  “And Oliver’s worse, isn’t he?”

  “He shouldn’t be there.”

  My father hated that Oliver was trapped in that home. Oliver didn’t like it himself, but his stepchildren had sold his house and a lawyer now had power of attorney over him. Only two years ago he’d lived in a large old house like my dad’s, filled with books and magazines and the possessions dear to him. Now he slept in a room with a bed, a chair, two dressers and a television. All his books, even those he had written himself, had been given away or sold at auction.

  After another five miles my father regained his posture. He sat upright on his seat and said, “Don’t ever put me in a place like that.”

  That plea from my father never leaves me, and whenever Al or Joe Jr. talks about a nursing home I remember our visit to Oliver’s. With each day it’s getting harder to imagine leaving Dad alone in his house. Harriet comes over, visits with him in the living room, then joins me on the porch. She’s a talkative, energetic and cheerful woman, but her face falls when I ask her what she thinks. She’s been watching my father now for five months.

  “He’s so much more confused. He’s worse than he was before Christmas.”