Big Fish (6 page)

My Father's Death:
Take 2

I
t happens like this. Old Dr. Bennett, our family doctor, comes out of the guest room and gently shuts the door behind him. Older than old, he looks like the core of an apple left out in the sun. He was there when I was born, and he was old even then. My mother and I are sitting in the living room waiting for his word. Removing the stethoscope from his ears, he looks hopelessly at us.

He says, “There's nothing I can do. I'm sorry. If you have any peace to make with Edward, anything to say at all, now might be . . . ” and he trails off into a murmuring silence.

This is something we'd been expecting, this final observation. My mother and I sigh. There's both sadness and relief in the way the tension leaves our bodies, and we look at each other, sharing that look, that once-in-a-lifetime look. I'm a little surprised that the day has finally come, for even though Dr. Bennett had given him a year to live about a year ago, he has been dying so long that in a way I just expect him to keep on dying forever.

“Maybe I should go in first,” she says. She looks battered, war-weary, her smile lifeless and somehow serene. “Unless you want to.”

“No,” I say. “You go and then—”

“If anything—”

“Fine,” I say. “Just let me know.”

She takes a breath, stands, walks like a somnambulist into his room, leaving the door open behind her. Dr. Bennett, slightly hunched as though his bones have melted in his old age, stands at vacant attention in the middle of the living room, in dark amazement at the powers of life and death. After a few minutes my mother returns, wipes a tear from her cheek, and gives Dr. Bennett a hug. He has known her longer than I have, I think. She is old, too, but next to him she seems forever young. She seems a young woman about to become a widow.

“William,” she says.

And so I go in. The room is dim, the grayness of an afternoon nap, though beyond the curtains you can see the outside light bursting to come in. This is the guest room. This is where some of my friends stayed when they used to spend the night, before high school was over and all that, and now it's the room where my father is dying, nearly dead. When I come in he smiles. Dying, he has that look dying people get in their eyes sometimes, happy and sad, tired and spiritually blessed, all at the same time. I've seen it on tele­vision. When the main character dies he stays buoyant until the end, dispensing advice to loved ones in his weakening voice, being falsely optimistic about his terminal prognosis, and generally making people cry because he's taking things so well. But it's different with my father. He isn't buoyant or falsely hopeful at all. In fact he's fond of saying, “
Why
am I
still
alive? I
feel
like I should have died a long time ago.”

He looks like it, too. His barely over-middle-age body looks as if it has been dug up out of the ground and resuscitated for another go at it, and though he has never had much hair in the first place—he was an old pro at the comb- over—what little hair he did have is gone, and his skin color is a weird shade of true white, so that when I look at him the word that comes to mind is
curdled.

My dad has curdled.

“You know,” he says to me that day. “You know what I'd like?”

“What's that, Dad?”

“A glass of water,” he says. “A glass of water would really hit the spot about now.”

“Done,” I say, and I bring him a glass of water, which he takes shakily to his lips, dribbling some down his chin, and looking up to me with those eyes as if to say he could have lived a long life—or a longer life, anyway, than he is going to live—without me having to see him dribble water down his chin.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Don't worry about it,” I say. “You didn't spill that much.”

“Not about that,” he says, and he shoots me a painful gaze.

“Well, apology accepted,” I say. “But you know,
you've been a real trooper through this whole thing. Mom and I are real proud of you.”

To which he doesn't say anything, because even though he is dying he is still my father, and he doesn't appreciate being spoken to like a schoolboy. In the past year we have switched places; I have become the father, and he the sickly son, whose comportment under these extreme circumstances I value.

“Oh, boy,” he says wearily, as if he has been knocked in the head. “What were we just talking about?”

“Water,” I say, and he nods, remembering, and takes another sip.

Then he smiles.

“What's so funny?” I say.

“I was just thinking,” he says, “that I'll be getting out of this guest room just in time for guests.”

He laughs, or does what passes for a laugh these days, what amounts to an exerted wheeze. It had been his decision to move to the guest room some time ago. Although he'd wanted to die at home, with us, he hadn't wanted to die in the bedroom he and Mom had shared for the last few decades, inasmuch as he felt it might ruin things for her in the future. Dying and moving out of the guest room just in time for an out-of-town relative attending his funeral to use it is a witticism he has repeated a dozen times in the last few weeks, each time as if it has just come to him. Which it has, I suppose. He tells it with the same freshness every time and I can't help but smile at the effort.

And so we're stuck here, smiles on our faces like a couple of idiots. What is it you say now, what peace is there to be made in the last minutes of the last day that will mark the before and after of your life until then, the day that will change everything for both of you, the living and the dead? It's three-ten in the afternoon. Outside, it's summer. This morning I'd made plans to go to a movie later in the evening with a friend home from college. My mother is making an eggplant casserole for dinner. She's already laid out the ingredients on the kitchen counter. Before Dr. Bennett came out with his news, I'd decided to go out back and jump in the pool, which, until recently, my father has practically lived in, swimming being the only exercise he was capable of. The swimming pool is right outside the guest room window. Mother thinks my swimming keeps him awake sometimes, but he likes to hear me swimming. The splashing, he says, makes him feel a little wet himself.

Slowly we lose our idiot smiles and just look at each other, plainly.

“Hey,” my father says. “I'll miss you.”

“And me you.”

“Really?” he says.

“Of course, Dad. I'm the one—”

“Still here,” he says. “So it figures that you'd be the one doing the missing.”

“Do you,” I say, as if the words are being willed by a force inside of me, “do you believe—”

I stop myself. There's an unspoken rule in my family that it's best not to talk religion or politics with my father. When the subject is religion he won't talk at all, and when it's politics he won't stop talking. The truth is, most things are hard to talk about with him. By that I mean the
essence
of things, the important things, the things that matter. Somehow it's just too hard for him, and maybe a bit dicey, a chore for this very intelligent man who has forgotten more facts about geography and math and history than I've ever learned (he knew the capitals of all fifty states, and where you'd end up if you flew due east from New York). So I edit my thoughts as much as I can. But sometimes a few indelicate words escape.

“Believe what?” he asks me, fixing me with those eyes, those small blue eyes, trapping me there. So I say it.

“In Heaven,” I say.

“Do I believe in Heaven?”

“And God and all that stuff,” I say, because I don't know. I don't know if he believes in God or life after death or the possibility that we all come back as someone or something else. I don't know if he believes in Hell, either, or angels, or the Elysian Fields, or the Loch Ness Monster. We never talked about these things when he was healthy, and since he's gotten sick all we've talked about is medication and the sports teams he can no longer follow because he falls asleep the second someone turns the TV on, and ways of getting through the pain. And I expect him to ignore it now. But suddenly his eyes widen and seem to clear, as if he were seized by the prospect of what awaited him after his death—other than an empty guest room. As if this is the first time the thought has occurred to him.

“What a question,” he says, his voice rising full. “I don't know if I can really say, one way or the other. But that reminds me—and stop me if you've heard this one—of the day Jesus was watching the gates for St. Peter. Anyway, Jesus is giving him a hand one day when a man walks shuffling up the path to Heaven.

“‘What have you done to enter the kingdom of Heaven?'
Jesus asks him.

“And the man says, ‘Well, not much really. I'm just a poor carpenter who led a quiet life. The only remarkable thing about my life was my son.'

“‘Your son?' Jesus asks, getting interested.

“‘Yes, he was a quite a son,' the man says. ‘He went through a most unusual birth and later a great transformation. He also became quite well known throughout the world and is still loved by many today.'

“Christ looks at the man, embraces him tightly, and says ‘Father, father!'

“And the old man hugs him back and says, ‘Pinocchio?'”

He wheezes, I smile, shaking my head.

“Heard it,” I say.

“You were supposed to stop me,” he says, clearly exhausted after the telling. “How many
breaths
do I have left? You don't want me to waste them on twice-told jokes, do you?”

“It's not like you've learned any new ones lately,” I say. “Anyway, this is sort of a best-of thing. A compilation. Edward Bloom's Collected Jokes. They're funny, Dad, don't worry. But you didn't answer my question.”

“What question?”

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. He's lived his whole life like a turtle, within an emotional carapace that makes for the perfect defense: there's absolutely no way in.
My hope is that in these last moments he'll show me the
vulnerable and tender underbelly of his self, but this isn't happening, yet, and I'm a fool to think that it will. This is the way it has gone from the beginning: every time we get close to something meaningful, serious, or delicate, he tells a joke.
There is a never a yes or no, what do
you
think, here, accord
ing to me, is the meaning of life.

“Why do you think that is?” I say out loud, as though he can hear me thinking.

And somehow, he can.

“Never felt comfortable addressing these things head-on,” he says, moving uncomfortably beneath his sheets. “Who really knows for certain? Proof is unavailable. So one day I think yes, the next no. Other days, I'm on the fence. Is there a God? Some days I really believe there is, others, I'm not so sure. Under these less than ideal conditions, a good joke somehow seems more appropriate. At least you can laugh.”

“But a joke,” I say. “It's funny for a minute or two and that's it. You're left with nothing. Even if you changed your mind every other day I'd rather—I wished you'd shared some of these things with me. Even your doubts would have been better than a constant stream of jokes.”

“You're right,” he says, leaning back hard into his pillow and looking toward the ceiling, as though he can't believe that I have chosen now, of all times, to give him this assignment. It's a burden, and I see it weighing on him, pressing the life right out, and I truly can't believe I did it, said it the way I have.

“Still,” he says, “if I shared my doubts with you, about God and love and life and death, that's all you'd have: a bunch of doubts. But now, see, you've got all these great jokes.”

“They're not all so great,” I say.

The central air hums on, billowing the shades open at the bottom. Light streams in past the blinds, dust motes swimming. The room has a faint stench to it, which I thought
I'd gotten used to, but haven't. It always makes me sick to my
stomach and I feel it coming on strong now. It's either that or the shock to my system of having learned more about my father in the last few seconds than I have in the lifetime that preceded them.

His eyes close and I'm scared, my heart jumps, and I feel as though I should get Mother, but as I begin to move away he grips my hand lightly in his own.

“I was a good dad,” he says.

A statement of not unassailable fact he leaves hanging there, as if for my appraisal. I look at him, at it.

“You
are
a good dad,” I say.

“Thanks,” he says, and his eyelids flutter a bit, as if he's heard what he's come to hear. This is what is meant by last words: they are keys to unlock the afterlife. They're not last words but passwords, and as soon as they're spoken you can go.

“So. What is it today, Dad?”

“What is what?” he says dreamily.

“God and Heaven and all that. What do you think: yes or no? Maybe tomorrow you'll feel differently, I understand that. But now, right now, what are you feeling? I really want to know, Dad. Dad?” I say, for he seems to be drifting away from me into the deepest sleep. “
Dad
?
” I say.

And he opens his eyes and looks at me with his pale baby blues suddenly full of an urgency and he says, he says to me, he says to his son sitting beside his bed waiting for him to die, he says, “
Pinocchio
?
”

His First Great Love

I
t was my father's great joy and misfortune to fall in love with the most beau­tiful woman in the town of Auburn, and possibly in the entire state of Alabama, Miss Sandra Kay Templeton.

Why misfortune? Because he was not the only man in Auburn, and possibly not the only man in the rest of the entire state of Alabama, to be in love with her. He took a number and headed to the end of the line.

Her beauty had already been celebrated in song by one talented admirer:

Sandy, Sandy, Sandy

You're a pretty girl

Hop into my car

And I'll take you for a whirl . . .

And so on.

There had also been duels, car races, drinking bouts, bare-fisted fights dedicated to her affection, and there was at least one dog named after her, and there might have been more.

Sandra didn't intend to be as beautiful as she was. It wasn't her desire to be loved by so many men—one would do fine. But she couldn't help being pretty, or the kind of pretty that was so widely admired, and as soon as she discouraged one suitor another popped up to take his place, with flowers, songs, ready to fight. So she just minded her own business, and let everybody else mind theirs, and a line formed behind her, a veritable club, a kind of fraternity of wishful thinking and broken hearts.

Edward didn't write any songs. For a long time he didn't
do anything. He looked at her, of course. He didn't mind looking at her when she passed; looking brought its own special excitement with it. It was as if she brought her own light with her, because wherever she went, she glowed. Who could explain that?

Edward liked to catch that glow once and a while.