The Last of His Mind Page 7

  I’ve long assumed it was my father who pulled back from this physical contact, but in one of his old notebooks I find this line from the year I was ten: “Alan still loves to be buzzed, but John is not as interested as before.” Could I have already entered my decade of physical isolation? Could I have chosen this myself?

  Dad stopped buzzing me and never took me in his arms again. My mother would come up to say good night, but I don’t remember either of my parents climbing into bed with me. Maybe when I was younger, because I’m sure they read me stories. I also had Nana, and my brother to wrestle, and our big beautiful Irish setter. All that sustained me until I left Saugatuck Elementary and was sheep-dipped into Bedford Junior High with its hoods and bullies. I was a small kid and didn’t do well there or on the bus, where I was teased hard.

  I needed someone to talk to, and I needed to be held. At least that’s what I think now. I was headed for a teenage desert in which I never touched anyone. Sex was coming into my body and mind, but that only made me shyer. Off I went to boarding school, and almost four years would pass before I kissed a girl, or put a hand on one, or felt her hand on me.

  The school was Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts. I honor Deerfield for how it allowed me, a tiny kid, to play competitive sports on lower-level teams. The fall of my freshman year there were nine soccer teams—Varsity, JV, JV Reserve, Leagues, Seniors, Juniors A, B, C and D—and I played on Junior D. But like every other team we had both practice and game uniforms, a full schedule of home and away games, and a coach who reported at the nightly meeting on how we’d fared. All that was great for someone who loved to play sports but was not very skilled.

  All the same, I was hazed and humiliated at Deerfield during my first two years, forced into “mouse fights” by classmates as large as grown men. In those fights, some other small kid and I would be goaded—our ears tweaked, our scalps nuggied, our arms twisted hard—until we exploded into a pair of desperate headlocks, each trying to squeeze the other into submission, trying not to be the worst weenie in the school.

  Apart from those fights, or when banging up against kids on the soccer field, we lived in a world of unspoken but strict prohibitions against contact. You didn’t touch another guy: not his arm, not his shoulder, God forbid not the back of his neck. Not his foot. I watch high school kids today and they’re wonderfully relaxed. It’s not just the girls who throw their arms around each other, guys do it too. They might make a joke of it, but they’re touching, they’re giving their bodies some play. I had a good friend at Deerfield, a classmate I actually talked to about girls, about our families, about how we felt. I believe this was remarkable for the time. But we never hung onto each other or touched in any way. At the end of the school year, and the start of the next, we shook hands.

  What were my parents thinking, to send me to a school where every sensuous response to life was pounded out of me? I understand that not everything was the school’s fault, or my parents’. In part it was the age—and ten years later the sixties would sweep in and rescue my ass with its exuberance, its sex, its endorsement of the body. But I was only thirteen when my parents sent me off to an alien world.

  Years ago I asked my father, “Whose idea was it for me to go away to school, yours or mine?”

  “Actually, it was your mother’s idea.”

  That knocked me flat. It was my mother. And the reason, I think now, is that she was looking ahead to her freedom. If I went away to boarding school, so would my brother, and we’d both be out of the house four years earlier. For a time after I heard that, I wanted to throttle her. At least my father believed in such places. He thought I’d do well at Deerfield, and of course he never heard about my humiliations in Chapin Hall at the hands of Dary Dunham and Mac Walker—because I never told him. I never told any adult. No squealing is the first rule of the weak, disguised as a kind of honor.

  When I went home on vacations my parents should have seen that something was wrong. I can see it instantly, in a series of photos I find in one of my dad’s file cabinets. I’m sitting on the couch with my arms folded, sullen in my crewneck sweater. I’m almost grown, and resist my mother as she leans toward me, clearly reaching out in some way. I’m not going to let her in. It’s too late for that, because by now I’ve ingrained a culture whose backbone is self-reliance and detachment. I’ve made a little soldier of myself, armored top to bottom.

  Home for Christmas from boarding school, 1959

  This, at least, is what I see in these photos as an adult. At seventeen, I probably had no idea what was going on.

  I still blame my mother for being selfish—but as a parent I understand something of the battle she fought, having struggled to balance my own need for freedom with my son’s need for attention. There were times I didn’t give him enough, or not all he wanted: times when I was too wrapped up in some romance or project. I think for most parents the conflict is unavoidable, because if all you do is devote yourself to your kids, you won’t have a life they can emulate. Children need attention, but they also need to see parents who are making their way through the world. It’s an uncrackable nut, and I give my mother some leeway because of it. I felt deceived when I learned it had been her idea to ship me off—but by then I understood how like her I was, how the demands of parenthood could wear at me. Still, I never thought of sending Janir away to school. We were having way too much fun for that.

  My mother must have been busy through my youth, but I don’t remember her that way. She was calm and relaxed, and apparently sailed through college, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard when I was eleven, then moving on to med school at NYU. Medical textbooks lined her bookshelves at home, but I have no memories of her holing up with them over long weekends, or even reading them in the living room at night. Maybe after I went to bed.

  In all her years of internship, residency and practice, she never took me to visit any of the hospitals where she spent so much time. She did tell an occasional galvanizing story about life in the operating room: the time a surgeon “put his thumb through the patient’s heart,” covering doctors and nurses with a spray of pulsing blood until the tear was sewn up. And there was the night she came home looking weary and confessed to us after dinner, “I lost a patient today.” Perhaps the surgeon had done something wrong, or she had, or maybe it was only bad luck, but an old woman had died on the table when she might not have, and my mother took it hard.

  As an anesthesiologist she worked every day with lungs, and I can still remember the bright color photos in a magazine she once brought home, of the dissected lungs of smokers and nonsmokers, the latter pink and the former a hard-to-believe charcoal color. It was a straightforward ploy to stop me from smoking, and it worked. To this day I sometimes cringe at the image that jumps to mind, when I’m standing close to an inhaling smoker, of the black inside of their lungs.

  My mother went off to work every day the way fathers did on television. She disappeared, usually before anyone else in the house got up, and reappeared in the evening. Both my parents had jobs. I saw them come and go and didn’t worry about it. I was that kid on a bike, that kid in a rowboat, wrapped up in my own adventures. But I did like telling people, “My mother is a doctor.” To this day I like to explain that my mother worked, that she went back to school when I was eight, that she was an anesthesiologist.

  Dad never throws anything out, but behind his back I’ve started tossing some of the clutter that fills his house: cracked old plates and plastic cups, an old hand plane hopelessly rusted, wood putty hard as marble, a dozen scabrous toothbrushes, a hundred ballpoint pens that don’t work, a pack of cards with a note under a rubber band saying 50, a tide table from 1989, a box of ancient keys carefully labeled Unknown. An old briefcase without a handle or clasp, two dozen light cotton plaid shirts all worn through at the collar, six torn lampshades and catalogs to sink a dinghy. A telephone answering machine that’s been replaced, and the manual for that machine, and the manuals for the two previous machines.
Two old editing machines for 8 mm film, and a projector I struggled with for an hour. I briefly got it running, and was rewarded with the velvety slow-motion dives of my mother into a blue Vero Beach swimming pool in 1954, pikes and layouts from the one- and three-meter boards. My mother was the 1932 junior diving champion of Ohio. Unfortunately, the projector broke down halfway through the first reel, and the many other reels, though carefully saved by my father, remain inaccessible.

  Sundowning is the depressed state that often overwhelms the memory-impaired around dusk, and most days my father sinks into it around four or five in the afternoon. He lies on his bed with a vacant stare, unhappy and distant, never a glance my way. This afternoon, when I suggested we go down to Red River Beach, he said “Not now,” even his politeness drained out of him.

  But I didn’t give up. I came back a second and third time, urging him, telling him he’d like it—and finally he agreed to go.

  Just getting out of the house into the open air made a difference, and by the time we parked in front of the beach, with its gulls and ducks and piles of empty whelk shells, he was in much better spirits. Helping things out, the gray sky lifted in the west, and toward Monomoy the waters turned aquamarine, looking more like the Caribbean than Cape Cod in February. We sat in the car with the heater running, and talk came easy. I’ve been reading more about World War II, and asked Dad again about his work as a Life correspondent. He told me about some nights he slept in a foxhole on the beach at Anzio, under shells that blew past like freight trains. I’d never heard this from him before, and wondered if he was mixing up several stories. I didn’t care. I was glad to see him in a livelier mood, and glad I’d pressured him to come.

  Gerry Elovitz, back when we talked after his second interview with Dad, had no doubts about what my father needed. He needed socialization on a regular basis, and Gerry urged me to take him to the Community Center whether he wanted to go or not. “Once he starts going, he’ll like it.”

  I argued against this. I explained that my father didn’t want to play cards or bingo, or talk to other seniors. Whether that would be good for him or not, he wasn’t interested.

  “Don’t ask him,” Dr. Elovitz insisted. “Just take him over there.”

  I’m sure he didn’t just toss off that advice. He’s dealt with thousands of people with dementia, and believed I should twist my father’s arm because I knew what was best for him. In fact, that’s exactly how it worked out today when I took him to the beach. I prevailed upon Dad to leave the house, and now I’m glad I did.

  When I was a child my father almost never pressured me to do anything, and the dedication of my second novel reads, “For JJT, who always let us choose.” So now, when I can either coax my father or let him be, I’m slow to tell him what he should do with his life. It’s true that his mind is going, but who’s to say how he should spend his days? Who’s to say he shouldn’t sit in a chair and do nothing? Who’s to say, even, that he ought to do things that will make him happy?

  Coercion is the topic that fascinates me, the one I never resolve. Sometimes I consult with Sandy Weymouth about it—even if I already know what he’s going to say.

  “Weymouth, what am I going to do? My father’s falling apart. Here’s a guy who’s never been bored in his life, and all he wants to do is sit in his chair. Is this what your father does?”

  “Sure. Hours a day.”

  “Do you worry about it?”

  “Not really. It’s his life, and I try to give him exactly what he wants. But I don’t do it until he asks for it.”

  “But your dad can ask, his mind isn’t going.”

  “Are you telling me your father doesn’t know what he wants?”

  “He knows,” I say. “He wants to be left alone.”

  “Okay, leave him alone. What could be simpler?”

  “It’s never simple. Because sometimes I can persuade him to do things that make him feel better.” I tell Sandy the story of our trip to Red River Beach.

  “If it were me I’d leave him alone. I wouldn’t give him any food, I wouldn’t give him any water, I wouldn’t dress him, I wouldn’t do anything until he asked. Then, I’d do everything.”

  “He never asks for food and never asks for water.”

  “How long have you waited?”

  “Not very long. Sometimes he asks for a cup of black coffee.”

  “Do you give it to him?”

  “Decaf,” I admit. “Which isn’t what he wants, but he’s not supposed to have caffeine.”

  “Says who?”

  “The doctors. The pamphlets, the Internet.”

  “Your father asks for a goddamn cup of coffee, give it to him. What are you protecting him from?”

  “What about his medications?” I’m pacing around on the snow-covered lawn outside, my headset on under a wool hat, my boots crunching loudly. “You’re not suggesting I wait until he asks for those?”

  “Does he want to take them?”

  “I put them in front of him with a glass of water, and he takes them. Before his memory went he took them on his own. He tried not to miss a dose.”

  “That’s persuasive,” Sandy says. “But he hasn’t forgotten the ocean. If he wants to go there he could tell you.”

  “I don’t think he would.”

  “Why not give it a try? Give it a week and see what he asks for. Let him get hungry, I bet he’s going to ask for food. Keep giving him his medications, but stop forcing everything else on him. We do this to old people the same way we do it to kids. Quit making him do what you want him to do, and let him decide.”

  “You make it sound easy, Weymouth. But it wouldn’t be that easy. He’d sit around and be miserable, and then I’d be miserable. And after a couple of days of that—I’d think you’re an asshole.”

  Sandy laughs. “That’s fair. I’ll live with that.”

  I love Weymouth for the vehemence of his convictions, and I’m half persuaded by what he says. I’ll probably give his ideas a try—but I doubt if it’ll be long before I go back to putting the subtle thumbscrews to Dad to try to liven him up. Who wants a spaced-out, disconsolate parent?

  Out of the blue Dad calls me over to the couch to explain how he has always bought gas at the Chatham Mobil station, how he has them fill his tank when he goes, how he often steps inside and talks to the girl there. “I think it’s good,” he says, “because I’ve been going there so long. All these years, I always go there. I talk to them, so I have a relationship there and that helps.”

  I’m just noting how coherent he sounds, and how he has used that up-to-date word relationship, when he comes to his point: “I think it helps with my throat. With my coughing.”

  Increasingly he gets his body mixed up with the rest of the world. This morning, because I’m going to the library and he’ll be here alone, I go over the use of the new walkie-talkies. Talking back and forth has proved too complex for him, but each unit has a call button that sets off a ring at the other end, and since the library is only three hundred yards away, I could make it back in five minutes. We practiced this a couple of days ago, and now I set his unit on the table in front of him.

  “So Dad, let’s try this again. Let’s say you need me and Harriet isn’t here. No one is here, and you want me to come back from the library. What do you do?”

  For a moment he looks puzzled. It’s another test, and he has failed so many. Eventually he lifts his forefinger—and touches it to a spot under his nose. He’s tentative about it, but that’s his answer: “I have to press here.”

  I come close to laughing, but hold back. His look is so hopeful, like a child taking a wild guess. And when I put the walkie-talkie in his hands he immediately finds the right button.

  At bedtime we go over his usual concerns. What’s that? he wants to know. Just the VCR, I assure him. He peers vaguely at the bookshelf that covers the entire wall at the far end of the room. “Isn’t there something we have to do about . . . that?”

  I pick out some books, in
spect them and set them back in place. There’s not much I can say when he starts worrying. Finally he settles back against his pillow, and I stand beside him with my hand on his shoulder. I say what I say every night, “I’ll see you in the morga-dorga”—lingo from the years my son was in junior high—and go out into the living room. But only a minute later he calls me back. There’s something else he wants to ask.

  “Isn’t someone else here? Isn’t someone waiting in the kitchen?”

  “I don’t think so, Dad.”

  “Yes,” he says, “it’s Mitt Romney. I think he’s here. He’s very helpful.”

  Mitt is the dapper governor of Massachusetts. My dad is serious, but I have some fun with it and say, “I imagine he’s pretty busy these days. Not much time for house calls.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. And the guy is a Republican.”

  “Yes, I know, but he’s good. I think he’s here.”

  “I could look, but I really don’t think so.”

  “I thought we might have him in the refrigerator.”

  At this I burst out laughing. “Dad, what can I say? Definitely not in the refrigerator.”

  He thinks it over. He looks puzzled and unsure. As the animation fades from his face he takes his cover and twitches it up to his chin with his delicate hands. “Somewhere out there,” he says, without the least hint of reprimand.

  Talking to the woman who runs the local Alzheimer’s Services, one sentence from her brings me up sharp: It’s just beginning for you.

  Dad wants to go outdoors. He can’t quite put it in words, but there’s something he wants to look at, something having to do with a corner of his property that the town officials have neglected in some way. So I get him dressed and we head outside, Dad behind his walker. Once off the ramp he heads straight for his car, so apparently we’re headed somewhere. I help him get in, put the walker in the backseat, sit down behind the wheel, and ask him where we’re going.