The Last of His Mind Read online

  Just talking about him makes Harriet cry. I’m in awe of people, usually women, who cry easily. I wish I could myself, but it rarely happens. Harriet assures me that she can step back in, that she can come over for several hours each day. But she doesn’t think that’s going to be enough. “I worry about him walking around on his own at night. I worry about him falling again. I worry about him cooking. Twice I came over and the oven was still on from the night before.”

  The evidence is building. I know what I should do, and that night, as if to close the deal, Dad shows me again how confused he can get. An hour after putting him to bed, I’m drifting off when I hear a faint call from downstairs. I dress quickly and bolt down the stairs to find him in his bathrobe, standing in the kitchen with his cane.

  “I need some help here.”

  He leads me into the bathroom and tries to explain what’s upsetting him. “I have to get this straightened out. It’s not working at all. You see, I press here, but nothing happens.”

  He presses his cane to a spot on the worn linoleum floor, beside a set of built-in drawers. It seems to be a precise spot he’s looking for, because he keeps adjusting the point of the cane and pressing down on it.

  “What’s supposed to happen, Dad?”

  “The drawer should open.”

  He taps the bottom drawer with his cane, and I kneel down and pull it out. Inside: old place mats, a package of vacuum bags, a bowl with a mounted nutcracker, some broken candles. I start picking things up, but he says, “No, no, that’s not the right stuff. That’s not supposed to be in there. If I can open this, those things will be gone. They don’t belong there.”

  I start with logic. “Dad, I don’t see how tapping with your cane could open a drawer.”

  “I have to press it,” he says. “It has always worked in the past.”

  “You’ve opened this drawer with your cane?”

  “I can’t find the spot on the floor.”

  “Maybe you should be using your four-point cane—it would cover more ground.”

  I’m trying to be funny, but he ignores this. “I just need some help here,” he says.

  I study his face, seeing the trouble in it, the lines, the splotchy skin and furrowed brow. What’s he worried about? What’s wrong with the stuff in the drawers?

  We struggle with it for another five minutes, but don’t solve anything. What’s really going on doesn’t occur to me until I go back upstairs and lie down on my bed in the dark. The drawer is a sideline: what matters is that he has asked for my help. My father never asks for anything, and now he has. No matter that he wants to stay in his house, he would never ask me to move in with him. Instead, he’d doggedly make do on his own until disaster overwhelmed him. But this drawer that won’t open gives him cover. It stands, I think, for all the other help he’ll need if he’s to remain in his house—which is what he wants most in life.

  The next day I call Al, then Joe, and describe Dad’s attempt to open the drawer with his cane. I tell them I’m torn, but I have to stay here. I thought I could put it off until later, until the spring at least, but now the time has come. I tell them that sometimes I lie in bed at night and think about those bedlam cries from the woman at Oliver’s nursing home. I tell them I’m going to drive back to Ohio, pick up my computer and some clothes and tools, find someone to look after my rentals and their inevitable emergencies, and return to Dad’s house. I don’t tell them I feel like I’m stepping off the face of a cliff.

  Both my brothers are enormously relieved, and thank me profusely. “But can you really do this?” Al asks.

  “Sure,” I tell him. I’m aware of sounding like Dad, who never complains about anything.

  “How long? What if he lives for years?”

  “I can’t think about that. I’ll come for now. After that—we’ll see what happens.”

  I don’t want to promise I’ll stay here until the end. I can’t imagine the end. After I get off the phone with Al, I arrange with Harriet to come over while I’m gone, every day, and I line up someone else to stop by in the evenings. Mostly, Dad will be on his own. He tells me not to worry, that he can take care of himself. But that’s the whole point: I don’t think he can.

  On the morning of my drive I wake him at five o’clock. In past years he’s always gotten up for my departures no matter the hour, but this time he remains in bed, looking frail and unsure. He lies back on the pillow wearing the red fleece hat he now sleeps in. I crouch beside him and put a hand on his chest, then take his head between my palms and all but kiss him. These unheard-of acts are coming easier. Fearing there’s a chance I might never see him again, I blurt out, “Dad, you have been the greatest father.”

  “Well,” he says. For half a minute we say nothing more. Then he asks, “When is it again that you’re coming back?”

  “In six days,” I tell him. “Six and a half days. I’ll be back next Monday.”

  “Write that down for me, would you?”

  “I’ve pinned it to the bulletin board,” I tell him, and bring in the sheet of paper so he can look at it. “Harriet can always call me, and I’ll check in every couple of days.” Dad can still talk on the phone, but making long-distance calls is confusing to him, even with the speed dial.

  “And who is it who’s coming today?”

  “Harriet comes around noon, and Bob will stop by after dinner.”

  “And what day was that, when you’ll be back?

  “Next Monday. Less than a week from today.”

  Slowly, his face relaxes. It’s an act of will, I know. He’s still confused but lets it go. “Please drive carefully,” he says.

  Ten minutes after I get into my car it starts to rain. I hate driving in the rain and dark, but eventually the skies lighten, the rain eases to a drizzle, and I’m launched on the fifteen-hour drive I’ve made many times before. Halfway through it, out among the farmlands and ridges of Pennsylvania, my neck and back start to tighten up. The drizzle continues, and the wiper arms are squeaking. I stop to spray them with silicone, but the maddening squeal continues.

  It isn’t true what I said, that Dad has been the greatest father. He’s been good, he’s been great in many ways—yet there’s a coolness to him, a restraint that can drive me crazy. He can’t be emotional or affectionate. This seemed normal when I was growing up: weren’t all fathers the same? But looking back as an adult, I see how much warmth I didn’t get from him, and how much I needed. Not much has changed in all these years. He’ll talk about the rise and fall of nations, about the Spanish Inquisition or the Age of Exploration, about Hamilton’s tariffs or our failure to protect the coastal wetlands. All interesting—but what I most want to hear is how he feels. How he feels about my mother, how he felt about her when they married, how she felt about him and what went wrong in their marriage.

  He won’t talk about my mother, or about his second wife Margery, or about Jane, his companion of twenty-eight years who died last summer. He doesn’t mention their names. If I have him trapped in the car and start asking him questions, he’ll answer politely, as if I were an acquaintance.

  My mother died more than thirty years ago, awash in depression, drugs and alcohol, only a decade after her divorce from my father. There was plenty of anguish all around, but I’ve never been able to talk to Dad about it. Under duress he’ll answer the most basic questions, but he won’t reminisce about the good times or analyze the bad. Almost everything in our family history is off limits. This can make me want to scream, but if I show my exasperation he pulls back into silence.

  If my mother were alive, I think I’d be talking to her about everything. Certainly we’d talk about how hard it was for her to live with someone so reticent, someone who shrank from all emotion. This is a difficult quality in a father, and even more so in a husband.

  I remember that early conundrum: if my house were on fire and I could save only one of my parents, which would I choose? This is a cruel question one child asks another, and when I was a boy there wa
s no answer to it. But later, as an adult, I knew I would choose my mother. We have the same dark skin and hair, the same full lips, the same love of warmth and water. Her sensual nature runs in my blood in equal measure with my father’s restraint—and as a young man restraint didn’t interest me. I had plenty of that and wanted the other. I was like her, I knew. We both wanted to talk, to tell secrets, to dance, to caress someone. In the last thirty years I’ve thought many times that for me, the wrong parent died.

  It’s still raining, and my back is even stiffer. On the long pull through West Virginia I wonder if I’m going to be able to manage my rentals from a distance, and try to figure out how much I should be paid to look after my father. I’m going to be paid, that much is decided. “Either we pay you or we pay someone else,” Al has told me. It will all come out of Dad’s account, over which we now have full control, after he gave in and signed the papers.

  Five hundred a week, I think. There won’t be that much work, but I’ll be on call every day of the month with almost no life of my own. I keep driving through the rain. I drive and drive, until I think five hundred is too little, it should be seven-fifty. The rain beats down, dusk comes, and I finish the trip as I started it, in the dark.

  January

  In Athens I have gravel to haul, a storm door to repair, a dozen other rental details to look after. I offer my house to Billy Renz, and he agrees to move in and keep an eye on the properties while I’m gone. I can’t tell him how long that will be.

  When I call my father he tells me, after I squeeze him a little, that he doesn’t know what day or what time it is. He’s not sure if he ate dinner, and can’t remember if anyone came over.

  I call Harriet, who assures me that both she and Bob have been there, and that my father has had both lunch and dinner. “But he’s really confused. He can’t figure out when you’re coming back, no matter how many times I tell him.”

  I have two more days in Athens. I go out to dinner with friends, spend some cozy hours in my house with the wood stove burning, and pack my car. On my last night I get a call from Lois Gilbert, my old editing and writing pal from Santa Fe. When I tell her the news she says, “John, don’t do it. It’s a brutal job.”

  “I just spent two weeks with him and it wasn’t that hard.”

  “Wait until he starts dying and you’re trapped there.”

  “He’s not dying. He’s just confused and can’t live alone anymore.”

  “He’s going to die, and it’ll be miserable. I cleaned my father’s ass for three weeks while he bled to death out of it. My mother and I cleaned him, and my siblings kept their distance. What about your brothers?”

  “They’re pretty glad I’m stepping in.”

  “I’ll bet they are.”

  “And I’m going to be paid. I think I can name my price.”

  “Well good! What is your price?”

  I tell her I’ve settled on seven hundred and fifty a week.

  “Don’t be a fool, make it a thousand. Take everything you can get. You’ll need it later when the resentment starts. You’ll need it when you’re there every weekend and your brothers are off on vacation. Or even when they’re just going to work and making money, and you’re paying someone to replace light-bulbs for some idiot tenant.”

  “I don’t have any idiot tenants.”

  “You will.”

  While we talk I drift around my living room with the telephone headset on, looking at the photos on the wall: my father sitting at his desk at Life, my son Janir and I on a vacation years ago, wearing big Mexican hats and smiling after a shot of tequila. “Hey Lois, I’ve made up my mind. I’m moving in with my father. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Then I guess it’s too late.” She pauses. “Off you go to be noble.”

  “Lois, you are a cruel friend.”

  She’s not, of course, she’s a great friend. How easygoing, how demure she seemed when I first met her—but it wasn’t long before she began to pry at what I keep hidden, and to laugh at how I maintain my public image. And it’s a deft little stab she has dealt me, because it’s true, I like to be noble. I’ll do the right thing, but I like it when people hear about it. Already I’ve run across friends in the health food store and at C&E Hardware and told them my plans. They nod, they say That’s great, you’ll never regret it and It’s so good you’re doing this. Already I’ve imagined how word will spread around town when I’m gone, how people will say, Thorndike dropped everything to take care of his father. The craving for respect and admiration: some might rise above it, but not me.

  After my phone call with Lois I sit in my house and consider how less noble I’d have proved if my father had gone into a tailspin three or four years ago, when I was living with Nora and her son. I’ll call her Nora, a beautiful and private woman who made me swear I’d never write about her. We had a five-year romance that didn’t work out, but to which we gave our all, and I would not have abandoned our life together to keep my father out of some long-term care facility.

  Following Nora, a bit too closely, I had a fling with the wonderfully perverse and inventive Tasia Bernie. I wouldn’t have wanted to turn my back on her either—and all through that time I was building or remodeling houses, about one a year. I was always in the midst of a project and always in a financial crunch. Now, having worn out my right shoulder, I’m finished with heavy construction.

  Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting too old for romance. I never think of myself as old, and still bound around my farm taking care of the land and the houses I’ve built. I play tennis every week, and have started hitting left-handed in volleyball—but I’ve also felt a creeping malaise about what I’m doing in life. This incipient depression rarely touched me when I was younger and raising Janir, a job I took over when he was three, as his mother’s schizophrenia deepened. For fifteen years parenthood gave me a clear responsibility and focus. Janir and I spent almost all our days together until he left for college, something I’d been looking forward to, but which stunned me. Of course I had left my own parents and gone off into the world—but it is to the next generation that we pour out our love. I’ve long since adjusted to living by myself, and Janir is doing fine. He’s married and working and thirty-four years old, and we often talk or write. But unless I move to Colorado I’m only going to see him a few times a year, and I don’t think I’ve ever completely gotten over how adrift I felt after he left, when I saw that our daily life together had come to an end.

  These days I’ve been writing a novel, which absorbs me—though less in recent weeks, as I struggle with a plot gone awry. Occasionally, pondering my future, I’ve considered my old dreams and the paths I never took: I could move to Porto Seguro in Brazil and learn Portuguese, or to the south of France, where a friend and I could rebuild an old stone warehouse. Instead I have my houses to look after in Ohio, and now my father who needs help on Cape Cod. The call is simple, and having recently brushed up against depression, it’s almost a relief to know that I’ll be busy every day.

  These are the years when our parents are dying. I make the trip back to the Cape in two days, stopping overnight at Sandy Weymouth’s, whose mother died last summer after drifting into extreme senility. At the end she barely spoke and couldn’t walk, because at ninety-four they’d amputated one of her legs.

  “Come on, Mom,” Sandy used to say to me while she was still alive, “isn’t it about time to let go?” There was never enough intimacy between them, Sandy says, never enough connection. Yet their last years together were their best. She softened with old age, and on his visits Sandy often massaged her back and neck, or sometimes they simply stared at each other for ten or fifteen minutes, not a word said, a radiant look on her face.

  “I helped her live, but I was ready for her to die,” he tells me. “And now I’m ready for my father to go.”

  His father’s kidneys are bad and he’s on dialysis, but his mind is clear and he could live for years. Sandy visits him every week, or as often as his father wants.
He takes him the raspberries he loves, and they share a meal and talk about the old days. Sometimes Sandy takes him out shopping, or just for a drive.

  “I’ve done everything to prolong his life and nothing to hasten his death. My brothers have done the same—but what’s the point anymore? He’s ninety-six, he’s alone, he’s over in that expensive home eating up the money. That money would make an enormous difference to me now. He’s had a hell of a long life, and I wish he’d let go of it.”

  It’s an unseemly wish, for one’s parents to die. But one of the reasons I’m friends with Sandy is that he’s so honest with his feelings, especially the unseemly ones. Of course he does some prying about me and my father. “Why doesn’t he just go into a nursing home? He’s expecting a hell of a lot from you.”

  We’re sitting on the platform in Sandy’s house, a raised pair of king-size upholstered mattresses where he eats, sleeps and does Emotional Work—his practice of coaxing feelings to the surface and letting them rip.

  “He hates nursing homes,” I say. I explain how my father doesn’t want anything to do with assisted living, eldercare, Meals on Wheels, any of it. He’d hate to live with a bunch of old people he didn’t know, and he’s not interested in exercise classes or yoga in a chair or trips to the casino. He’s interested in his family and friends and books and ideas. “Your parents wanted to move to that home,” I tell Sandy. “They liked it because they were social and always had been. But my father isn’t like that.”

  I’m apt to launch into a rant around Sandy when I sense he’s going to prod me about how I feel, the grail being some cathartic outburst of emotion: fear or rage or shame. “My father,” I say, “has taken care of me my whole life.”

  “Which makes you feel great about moving into his house.”

  “I didn’t say I was elated about it. But I’m not seething, either.”

  “How do you feel about it right now?”

  “Weymouth! I feel all right about it. I’m a little apprehensive, but I don’t want to start shrieking about the whole thing.”