The Last of His Mind Page 6

  As I sat in the lobby, waiting for the admissions director, I listened in on a couple seated close by. The woman leaned forward, protectively, I thought, toward the man, who sat in a wheelchair. His left foot dragged on the floor, but otherwise he looked alert. I struggled to hear what he was saying but couldn’t, as he was facing partly away from me. The woman was trying to stay calm.

  “Don’t say that. Keep your voice down.”

  Then, “That’s terrible. Stop that, just stop it.”

  “You are, you’re talking too loud. And you don’t mean that. Don’t say that.”

  “No, don’t say that. Don’t talk so loud.”

  All my sympathies lay with the old guy. He’d probably been putting up with this for decades, and now that he was trapped in a wheelchair his wife could treat him like a four-year-old: Behave yourself, don’t talk so loud, be polite around other people.

  But the man did not clam up, as a child might. He went on in his calm and unbowed tone. It was the woman who was agitated. Then I heard her say, “That’s terrible. You’ve never had a prejudiced bone in your body.”

  Oh.

  Several attendants had passed through the lobby, some white, some black, some of them Cape Verdeans speaking Portuguese. In an instant my allegiance switched to the embarrassed woman, and I wanted to shut her husband up. I’ve read how dementia patients with no history of overt prejudice can start talking like racists. Polite and decent old men can shrivel your heart. And I didn’t want the attendants and nurses and doctors to listen to this. I didn’t want some young black nurse, after hearing this wasted old guy spout off about niggers—that’s the word I imagined him using—think the obvious, that the veneer had cracked, and the truth of how he’d felt all along was now spilling out.

  I’ve heard stories of elderly men or women who physically attack the spouses they have loved for decades. We may partially excuse them, because their minds are giving way. Maybe I should excuse this old guy’s racial comments and dismiss them as pure dementia—but I don’t ever want my father to talk like that.

  Katie came out to the lobby, an attractive young woman fifty years the junior of most of her charges. I liked her because she didn’t pitch the place. She gave me a tour, talked about the patients and their needs, and let me judge for myself. The home was cheerful and clean, much like Oliver Jensen’s. There were activity and rehab rooms, and a large carpeted dining room. I found it depressing that there was almost nowhere to walk around outside—but then, how often would they let my father out of the locked dementia wing? Which is where he would go by the time I could no longer look after him at home.

  Katie punched us in. A faint smell of urine hung in the corridors, but perhaps that was because the bedclothes were being collected and changed. There was nothing immediately grim about the rooms, save that everyone had a roommate. My father would hate that—and with a single bathroom serving two rooms, he’d be sharing a bath with three other people.

  I asked Katie how roommates, once overtaken by Alzheimer’s, felt about living so close to someone else.

  “It’s rarely a problem,” she said. “They don’t really seem to notice.”

  I wondered how far gone my father would have to be not to notice something like that. Yet from the faces we’d seen so far, I believed her.

  Most of the patients were gathered in the Bayview dining room, which looked out over the parking lot. (It’s a widely followed rule: if a development is named Quail Run there will be no quail, and if a wing is named Bayview there will be no bay.) The dining room downstairs, though low-ceilinged, might have been part of a decent hotel, but this dining room looked more like a school cafeteria: tile floor, blank walls, some utilitarian tables and chairs. A burly attendant stood unmoving between two of the patients, as if posted there to keep them out of trouble, and a nurse or aide moved steadily among the others, answering requests. All the residents were old, a few were in wheelchairs, almost no one spoke. There were about twenty of them. A few glanced at a newspaper or magazine—though I guessed that, like my father, they weren’t actually reading. Others stared at me and Katie, or out the window, or at nothing at all, and almost everyone’s face looked blank and depressed. I found it devastating.

  In spite of what I’d seen, before I left I asked Katie about the possibility of leaving my father there for a week or so, in case I had to go back to Ohio to take care of business.

  “It’s done all the time,” she said. “We have an excellent respite care program.”

  But even as she answered, I knew it was impossible. I wasn’t going to leave my father in a nursing home and assure him I’d be back in a week. Having lost track of what a week is, he’d think he’d been left for good. Besides, Katie confirmed what I’d already read, that people often plummet when first moved into a home. I wasn’t so desperate that I was going to leave Dad in a place like that, even for a day. If I dropped him off he’d be one of the better-functioning clients in the Bayview wing—but how long would it take before he looked like everyone else?

  I flossed some of my dad’s teeth last night, after he got a bit of food stuck between them. Horrible stained old teeth, but still they gripped the floss. I kept at the job for over a minute before I found the irritant. All the while I was trying to get used to sticking my fingers in my father’s mouth—and he must have felt awkward about it himself. Day by day I move closer to his decrepit old body.

  Most of my father’s money is wrapped up in his house, which he has now agreed to sell to Alan and Ellen. They’ve already taken out a mortgage and set up a closing date for later this month, but Dad, after many explanations, remains confused and worried about the transaction. He’s seen what happened to Oliver after he signed over his rights, and wants a guarantee that he can remain at home. I describe the life tenancy Al has written into the contract, but Dad is still apprehensive.

  When I take him over to sign the sales agreement, the lawyer asks him, “Are you doing this of your own free will, Joe? No one’s making you do this, are they?”

  Dad turns to me and says with a trace of both confusion and humor, “I don’t know. Are you making me do this?”

  “Not me,” I say.

  But in a way, I am. Both Al and I have prepped him for this signing, and we’ve hurried it along, fearing that dementia could undermine his legal right to make such a sale. I’ve reassured him many times that he can rely on Al and Joe Jr. and me to look after him—but in fact no legal document can guarantee that he’ll be able to stay in his house as long as he wants. If we decide he has to go to a nursing home, off he goes. Neither a lease nor ownership can determine that. It depends on how long I can stick it out.

  He signs, and I’m relieved when it’s done. The house will remain in the family, and there will be money to pay for his care.

  Dad gets up, I warm the bathroom, he showers and shaves. Through the half-open door I check to make sure he’s putting on fresh underwear rather than slipping back into his wet incontinence underpants from last night. He dresses, he takes his medications, and soon after that he’s on the couch, dozing off for most of the day. In many ways it’s an infant’s life, full of staring and sleeping.

  The phone rings and I pick it up.

  “Are you going crazy yet?”

  “Lois Gilbert!”

  “Well, you still sound cheerful. How’s the drive to Australia going?”

  Lois wants to know if I’ve had any days off, and I tell her that most weekdays I get out of the house and go to the library to write. “That’s what I really need,” I tell her, “a couple of hours a day over there to work on the novel.”

  Lois is a writer herself, with three published novels and another in the works, and she knows how much time I can spend “polishing that gravel,” code for rewriting flawed material. “Are you getting anywhere?” she asks.

  “I’ve worked on a couple of chapters. But I can’t seem to take the characters back to my dad’s house and let them percolate. It’s like they’re off on a cr
uise or something.”

  “Let ’em go. You should write something about your father.”

  By now I’m pacing around upstairs, using my headset. This is where I come when I want to talk in private. I tell Lois I’ve been keeping a journal, and she urges me to set everything down, record what my father says and everything he does. She asks if he gets under my skin.

  “He’s a great guy,” I tell her. “But yes, sometimes.”

  She laughs. “You and your dad are the perfect pair of martyrs.”

  “Weren’t you glad you looked after your father?”

  “Sure, but I only did it for three weeks. You might be at this for years.”

  This hits me like a plank. For years.

  In one breath she tells me I’m doing the right thing and my father is lucky to have me—and in the next that I’m nuts and I’ll wear myself out. She’s never been hobbled by consistency. “Are you meeting any women?” she asks.

  “I don’t meet anybody. And what would I do if I met someone?”

  “Invite her over. You might look very attractive to a woman, taking care of your father like that.”

  “And then we could sneak into the kitchen and have a cup of tea.”

  “You could sneak upstairs. Anything could happen. There must be women at that library.”

  Though Lois never quite believes me, I’ve told her that after my last two painful breakups I feel removed from mating and breeding. All I want to do now is write every day and play some tennis. I’m going to join a club, I tell her.

  “Is your father paying?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Excellent. You just keep listening to me.”

  Soon after my conversation with Lois I give up on the novel. It’s dead, I can’t deal with it. I have to believe in a story to write it, and I’ve lost touch with that book. Better, as Lois suggests, to record the turmoil that’s right in front of me, the collapse of my father’s mind.

  A few days ago I went to visit the dementia unit in a second nursing home. I thought Fran, the woman who ran the place, was great—but for me there was no escaping the inert bodies and unresponsive faces of most of the residents. A walk through those corridors, or even through my father’s living room, raises the inevitable question: What’s the point of such a life?

  I imagine that to a Christian or Muslim believer the point must be the afterlife that follows. Such faith would be a consolation, but I’ve never had any. To me it’s this life or nothing. And as bad as it gets, I’ll probably cling to it when I’m in Dad’s condition or worse. Just like my father, I’ll want to live, and I won’t be thinking about the point of it.

  When my son was growing up I read to him almost every night. We lay down together with the weight of his head against my chest, his hair damp and his attention sharp. If I started at the wrong place, Janir leapt on my mistake: You read that already. If I read by rote, thinking about something else, he knew and pulled me back: Dad, read the story. Year after year we continued. I was still reading to him at thirteen, at fourteen. At fifteen I lay on his bed beside him and read my own book while he read his. At sixteen we read in our own rooms, not far apart. When the first of us turned out his light and sang out “Hug in bed!” the other had to get up and give the hug.

  When he was ten, after years of Tolkien and the Narnia tales, all of which had intrigued him and bored me, I picked up a book I’d loved as a teenager, C. S. Forester’s Lieutenant Hornblower. It was an immediate success, the first book to please us equally—and now I’ve found a copy on my dad’s bookshelves. It’s a mass market paperback with tiny print and the pages turning brown, but I have such a history with the book I love just holding it. I show Dad the cover, with lanky young Hornblower in his tricorne hat, standing in the waist of the Renown. “Oh yes,” my father says, “a very good book.”

  We don’t lie down on his bed with it, but sit across from each other in the living room, each in a pool of light. We like the book from the first paragraph, in which Horatio Hornblower wears a uniform that looked “like it had been put on in the dark and not readjusted since.” The crazy captain shows up on page two, and the plot immediately unfolds.

  Through much of the day I don’t know what to do with my father. He’s rarely able to keep up a conversation anymore, and often just sits and stares. This is so unlike him it unnerves me. Sometimes I make forays into topics I think might interest him—history or economics or language—but I have to keep most of it aloft myself. Reading to him works out better. For £ thirty minutes at a time we are plunged into Forester’s timeless world and seem to enjoy it equally. Of course I could be wrong about that. There is so much I can only guess at.

  Later I think back on my own childhood. Did my father ever read to me in bed? Perhaps in the living room, before I went upstairs—but I can’t remember that. He didn’t get into bed with me or lie around with me or hold me. Didn’t he want to?

  In a folder full of old photos I find one of my mother, about fifteen, standing with a boyfriend in the backyard of her house on High Street in Columbus, Ohio, wearing a sleeveless cotton dress. Virginia, with a slender neck and one long bare arm, looks straight at the camera. She has circled the boy’s high waist with her other arm, but leans slightly away from him. The boy, with his dorky haircut and glasses, radiates innocence. My mother radiates sex—and I know that within a year or two she’ll be sleeping with someone much older. She had boyfriends, then lovers, and at nineteen married her first husband.

  Virginia Thorndike with an early boyfriend, about 1930

  My father, in contrast, seems to have emerged from a sexual and romantic void. I’ve never heard him mention a girlfriend from high school or college, or even from his first years in New York. I have a gossipy nature, a novelist’s interest in the affairs of the heart—but it’s hard for me to imagine Dad sitting on a porch swing with some girl, or in the backseat of his family’s Model A. I’d like to hear reports like that about him, but there are none. He has never told them, and there are no photos of him with his arm around a girlfriend—or around my mother. Still, I’m on the lookout, and his files are thick. I’ve just started going through them.

  Al comes down for three days, and his arrival lifts a weight from my chest. In the last few weeks I’ve noticed how eagerly I look forward to his e-mails. It’s almost like getting mail from a lover. His is the name I look for in my Inbox, and when I see it I’m happy. I have backup, I have support, we’re in this together. I can complain to Al at any time and send him accounts of Dad’s mad behavior.

  After our first dinner together Al washes the dishes, then sits down with his computer to work on an array of legal and financial documents. At one point he takes a break, gets out an oversized yellow pad, and writes out one of his Action Punch Lists, itemizing improvements to be made to the house. Al is organized to the core.

  The three of us are sitting around after dinner when Joe Boyd calls. After a brief hello I pass the headset to my dad, who’s sitting in the Monstrosity with his feet raised. The telephone rucks up his hair and confuses him, but he’s clearly pleased to hear from his oldest friend.

  Joe Boyd and Joe Thorndike. They met at the Harvard Crimson and have known each other for more than seventy years. For much of that time Joe Boyd has devoted himself to setting up a kind of alternate currency—the Boyd System—and my father has consulted with him about it and edited some of his writing. I wonder how long it will take Joe to figure out that my father’s memory is going.

  Quite a while, apparently, because after ten minutes he’s still doing all the talking. My dad responds with an occasional Yes and Sure, and eventually he asks me to write down a couple of numbers. I pick up the other phone and write them down as reported: they’re the numbers of two bills before Congress relating to some trade policy, and Joe has plenty to say about them. He talks and talks. After a while I hang up my phone, and Dad goes on repeating his monosyllables. He laughs a couple of times as well, but I don’t think Joe ever asks him anything
that would require a real answer. Dad can still come out with “Yes, yes, that’s what we want,” and “We’re getting it all down,” but his eyes are closed and his face tight. He gives a little moan, but the call continues.

  “Well,” he says, “thank you.”

  And, “Yes, we’ve got it all down.”

  And, “You what?”

  And, “Oh, okay.”

  Then a long silence in which Dad says nothing at all for three or four minutes. I glance at Al, who mouths back, Is he asleep? I can’t tell. Dad’s head is twisted so far to one side he looks like he’s been shot. Finally I get up to check the other phone—and Joe Boyd is still talking! Dad slumps forward, then arches his back and sits upright again.

  “Okay,” he murmurs.

  Still it continues, for another five minutes. By now Dad’s expression is softening, and he no longer moves at all. He’s asleep, and when I pick up the other phone, there’s only a dial tone.

  After Al leaves I’m blue. He won’t be back until April, and I’m alone with my silent father.

  I’ve always claimed a happy childhood, at least through the age of ten or eleven. I did well in school, I had friends, my family was stable. Then something went awry. It was touch, I think: not enough of it. The early photos show that I was held as a young boy, but later I stand aside, a little like my grandfather. Where did this come from?

  When I was seven or eight I was still getting buzzed every night. This was a game in which my father carried me around the living room with my arms outstretched like an airplane, as I strafed anything live in the room: my mother, my brother, Nana, Bourbon the dog and Panther the cat. If Dad was playful enough we swept past my mother’s bronze bust on the desk, past the origami mobile, past the flowers on the mantelpiece as I made my best dive-bomber noises. Al, of course, had an equal turn.