Closing Time (49 page)

“You can’t go back to Seventh Street, Dad,” I explained. “You’ll die there. The smell alone will kill you.”

“The two nice fellows who run the candy store downstairs said they’d let me stay rent-free if I painted the hallway . . .” he volunteered.

“You don’t know how to paint, Dad. You never did. Neither do I. And people who run flophouses aren’t nice fellows.”

“I won’t be able to get an apartment, Joe,” he confessed. “I bolted out on the last one and beat the landlord out of a month’s rent, and I never paid the gas and electric . . .”

“This whole town is filled with people who haven’t paid their gas and electric bills, Dad. We’ll take care of it.”

“I bolted on the apartment before that . . .”

“We’ll take care of that, too.”

I told my father that I was willing to pay his electric bills and his gas bills, but that he must find himself a decent apartment in a sensible neighborhood where the rest of us wouldn’t have to worry about him getting knifed in the back by crackheads. The flophouse was a glorified holding tank, with primitive, almost aleatory heating. If he went back there, he would die alone, and no one would know he was dead for weeks. I had a strong personal interest in avoiding this sort of Grand Guignol finale. If he was going to die, let him die respectably. Let him die the way other people died.

Eventually, he agreed to do as I asked. He would patch things up with the utility companies. He would straighten things out with his landlord. I wrote him a check for $500. Why I thought he would have a bank account or an I.D. or any mechanism for cashing a check that size is beyond me; I had long since lost track of the idiosyncrasies of the underclass. I walked to an ATM and returned with a few hundred dollars in cash. Now the look I knew only too well surged onto his face.

“I don’t deserve this,” he said, making a clumsy effort to clasp me in his arms. “You kids are so good to me, and I’ve never done anything to deserve it.”

I stiffened, as I always stiffened when he essayed one of his clumsy embraces. These gestures were parodies of normal expressions of affection; in the field of emotion, we were both rank amateurs. Viewed from a distance, we must have looked like feuding capos engaging in ceremonial rites of feigned amity, gestures alien to men who had never mastered the techniques needed to make their feelings visually intelligible.

“This isn’t going to be the Walton Family Christmas, Dad,” I said, lacerating him with the offhanded malice that had by this point become my livelihood. The hugging abruptly ceased.

A few weeks later, we visited him in his new apartment. Philadelphia had lost a third of its population over the previous twenty years, so finding inexpensive lodgings in a relatively safe neighborhood presented no major problem. The one-bedroom unit was furnished in the Lacedaemonian fashion he favored: a folding table in the kitchen, a bed, a cot, some plastic lawn chairs. There was also a cheap clock radio but no TV. As usual, he had a good supply of books on hand: mysteries, religious tracts, a well-thumbed copy of
A Tale of Two Cities.

To let him know we were coming, we had to send a postcard, as he had no phone. We did not tell my mother or sisters about this flying visit, because they would worry that he would be inspired to reinsinuate himself into their lives as well. The night we arrived, he had set up a folding table in the kitchen on which were arrayed what he always referred to as “nice” lunch meats and kaiser rolls and Tastykakes for the children. From time immemorial, the word “nice” had constituted the highest praise he could offer, signifying that the lunch meats were “fresh” rather than “prepackaged” and consisted of mouthwatering slices of turkey and roast beef rather than generic baloney or pressed ham. We ate with him that day and chatted amiably. We reminisced. We tried to remember who played Sydney Carton in the film version of
A Tale of Two Cities
. The children, eleven and eight, amused themselves with the stuffed animals he had bought for them. They tried their best to be affectionate, though, frankly, they must have found the whole thing baffling. If this was their grandfather, why didn’t anyone want to see him? Why didn’t he ever come visit us? Why didn’t he have a television? And who was Madame Defarge?

We stayed for perhaps an hour. Then it was time to go. It was obvious from the look on my father’s face that he was crushed by this information.

“I thought you could stay longer,” he said, all the air gone out of the balloon. “Maybe have another sandwich.”

We could not stay any longer. Visiting time was over. We knew that if we stayed long enough, he would exhume the same old arguments and start the same old fights. To avoid this, we trotted out an assortment of pretexts for leaving. We’d promised to take the kids to the movies. I-95 was murder after sundown. A storm was brewing. What more did he expect? Our pilgrimage to his doorstep was an act of charity, not an obligation. He had no claim on our generosity or friendship, much less our time. We were prepared to come, but we were not prepared to stay.

On the table sat a plastic respirator he was supposed to use several times a day in order to strengthen his lungs. Right next to it sat a carton of off-brand cigarettes, the dirt-cheap, generic version of the filterless Pall Malls he had been puffing on since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. My wife chided him for continuing to smoke, gently pointing out that it was counterproductive for a seventy-year-old cancer survivor to do rigorous breathing exercises every two hours if he was only going to crack open a fresh pack of coffin nails. But my father had always been a perverse and self-destructive man, and we both knew that the endgame was at hand.

Chapter 12.

One balmy evening in December 1997, I received an unexpected phone call from my father’s downstairs neighbor. My father was desperately ill and had been rushed to a nearby hospital. A month earlier, he had begun complaining about severe back pain. John, who lived in the unit below him, had been coping with spinal problems for years and had volunteered to share his powerful painkillers. This buddy-system self-medicating program had been going on for about six weeks. By this point, my father’s torment had become excruciating. As it became clear that his affliction was more than garden-variety back pain, John begged for permission to call the family. My father said he would never speak to him again if he did. He did not want to inconvenience anyone; he had inconvenienced us enough.

John, who finally broke down and phoned the emergency medical service, was the last in a long series of confederates, admirers, and minions who had fallen under my father’s potent spell over the years. In the final twelve months of his life, he had been living in a bland four-unit apartment building in a reputable working-class district of northeast Philadelphia. It was his second tour of duty there. One of his neighbors was a divorced young woman with two small children whom he often babysat when she needed to go out shopping. The children adored him. There was also a likable, well-preserved widow roughly my mother’s age living directly across the path. She, too, found him to be good company. John, his closest friend in the building, was a divorced man the same age as me. He had a droll sense of humor, a huge collection of baseball cards that proved endlessly fascinating to my son, a copious supply of painkillers, and enormous affection for my father. Thus, it became clear that Dad had created a parallel universe populated by a substitute family, with a stand-in wife, an alternate son and daughter, and a matching set of surrogate grandkids, all of whom thought he was a prince among men. This masterpiece of vicarious parenting showcased my father at his most extravagantly ironic: He who saved other families, his own he could not save.

The fondness his neighbors felt toward my father was profound, genuine, and evident to the naked eye; they could not imagine why he had been cast out into the darkness by his wife and children. They may have seen him a wee bit tipsy on those few occasions when he fell off the wagon, but it is unlikely that they ever saw him reeling drunk. They certainly never witnessed one of his frothing rages, when he would start threatening people and smashing windows and demanding that the Warren Commission reconvene. They dreaded the moment this most engaging of men would disappear from their lives, as he had on a previous occasion, because once he was gone, his special brand of magic would disappear, and this magic could not be replaced.

After John called, I had a brutally straightforward conversation with a doctor at the hospital where my father was being treated. The physician, who knew my identity via a common friend, did not mince words: The patient was dying. He had cancer of the spine, the throat, the lungs, assorted other organs. Whatever the oncologists—dissemblers of the first order—might tell me over the next few days during our consultations about how long my father had to live, the verdict was already in. It might be months; it might be weeks; but this was the last roundup.

When informed that my father would soon be no more, I did not react with the reflexive horror one normally associates with such a disclosure. Instead, I experienced an odd mixture of curiosity and relief. Curiosity because I knew that my father, so long dead to me in my heart, would now be dead to me as a medical fact, making me wonder what it would feel like when he had officially left the stage. Relief because his being hustled off to a hospital from which he would never reemerge was probably the only way he could avoid a sordid demise on Skid Row. For years, I had expected the middle-of-the-night phone call telling me that he had been found with his throat slit ear to ear, long one of the most plausible scenarios for his departure from this vale of tears. Death by cancer was better than death by misadventure. We had reached the end of a long, hard road, but if he shuffled off this mortal coil now, while under professional supervision in a clean, well-lighted place, he would at least die in a state of grace: reconciled to his Church, partially reconciled to his son and one daughter, relatively clean, relatively sober. If he continued to live, he would almost certainly go AWOL and perish in a gin mill, a drunk tank, a flophouse, or a gutter. A proper demise was infinitely preferable; once he was gone, we could all stop worrying about him and, even better, stop thinking about him. For forty years, he had taken up all the emotional space in our lives; it was time for a fresh leading man. From the logistical point of view, it also made my life much easier: Death, I would sometimes remark afterward, was the only way I could keep an eye on him. It was a callous thing to say, but it was true. This was not love; this was surveillance.

When I learned that my father was on the way out, I dropped everything I was working on and headed down to Philadelphia. He had chosen a convenient moment to die: That winter was a placid time in my life, as I had literally just finished writing a book and had no pressing obligations weighing on me. Unlike my sisters, two of whom lived in Philadelphia, the third 120 miles west in Harrisburg, I did not have a job I needed to go to every day, so I was the one best positioned to chaperone our father off the planet, to make the proper arrangements, to sign the relevant documents. For the next few weeks, I tried to spend as much time at the hospital as possible, often remaining on-site for twelve hours at a time. The first few days, as I had been warned the night I learned of my father’s illness, the medical staff went through the customary charade of sugarcoating the gravity of his illness. It was boilerplate oncological etiquette: The doctors, males, made sure I was never present when they dropped by for a visit; the nurses, females all, were angels of mercy. Though it was obvious that there was no chance of his surviving the myriad strains of cancer shredding his organs, it was impossible to persuade any of the specialists to provide even a ballpark estimate of how long he had to live. Six months was a possibility. Three months seemed more likely. He could last as long as a year; he could be gone in a matter of weeks. It was impossible to say, they assured me, even though he already had cancer in his throat, lungs, spine, and liver. But I recognized these people for the seasoned liars they were. The truth was, a few weeks were all he had left. The scent of death was already in the room.

The earth moves when a parent dies. But it starts to move earlier. A strange type of shock descends upon us when we realize that those who brought us into the world have reached the end of the line, making it impossible for us to think straight. One day I would run out and buy him thirteen paperback mysteries, enough reading material to last for weeks. But the very same day I would call my sisters to say that he was sinking fast, and if they had any desire to see him before he went, they should make it quick. There was, perhaps, a part of me that wanted to believe that as long as I still felt comfortable enough to wander off hospital grounds and scarf down a cheesesteak or take in a movie, he was not in any imminent danger of dying. Or perhaps by behaving in such cavalier fashion, I was encouraging him to believe that he was not nearly as sick as he was. Be that as it may, I made that call to my sisters.

My father and I did a great deal of talking in the next eight days, always avoiding serious topics. We chatted about why he hated professional football (he thought it was rigged) and professional basketball (the players were all bums). We talked about the legendary 0-0 tie that Notre Dame and Army had played at Yankee Stadium in 1946. We talked about Billy Conn’s heroic but disastrous decision to go for the knockout against Joe Louis in their famous title fight; way ahead on points, Conn merely needed to stay out of harm’s way the final three rounds and the heavyweight crown would be his. Instead he went for the kill, and Louis knocked him out.

“Why couldn’t you let me have the title for six months?” Conn supposedly asked Louis many years later.

“You couldn’t hold the title for three rounds,” came the reply. “What makes you think you could have held it for six months?”