Flight of Passage: A True Story (44 page)

And those phantoms were monsters by now—hard, extended attacks that throttled him into deliriousness at the height of the pain and afterward left him listless for days. Several times during high school, and even after I left for college in 1969, I drove him alone to the hospital for his shots. He needed increasingly large doses of Demerol now—dangerous amounts, as it turned out—and when that didn’t work the doctors sent him home with bags full of methadone pills, as “chasers.” The medical men had more or less thrown up their hands. There wasn’t much to be done for phantoms anyway, and my father was bringing on attacks by overwork.

Those rides with my father were awful. I wouldn’t fully understand what was happening until years later, when I finally read some literature on phantom pains. In severe cases, like my father’s, phantom-pain attacks trigger deeply buried and even forgotten details of the original accident or trauma, as the patient literally hallucinates the event that caused their loss of limb. Slumped over in the backseat, pallid and sweating, my father mumbled a lot deliriously and then started shouting. Month after month, he was reliving his 1946 crash.

“My God! Get him out of there! He’s dying! Get the man in the plane damnit! God, God, God, oh my Lord, he’s burning to death.”

As I said, it was awful, the most awful part being I didn’t know what to do. Many nights, when we got back, my father still couldn’t walk very well, and Kern wasn’t around to help me lift him up the stairs, so my mother and I made him as comfortable as possible on his library couch, lit a fire, and let him sleep there.

The next morning, my father was curt about what had happened. Either because he really didn’t remember too well, or because he was embarrassed, he didn’t want to talk about his hallucinations and what he had shouted out the night before. I started facing the truth. My father’s big crash, which I’d always believed he handled stoically, was in fact emotionally crippling, haunting him in his premature old age. But we couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about it. It’s a hard thing to admit, but sickness like that in someone you love does drive you away.

In the spring of 1969, during my senior year in high school, my father collapsed from heart failure while delivering a speech at the University of Arizona. Facing the inevitable, he finally retired, though he remained active in politics and various causes as long as he could. My parents sold our place in New Jersey, packing up the possessions and memories of their fruitful, dense-packed marriage, and moved up to Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania, where the five younger children finished school. The old Cub, 71-Hotel, had already been sold, in 1968. The engine needed an overhaul but we had to spend the money to pay my father’s hospital bills instead.

During college, and after I graduated and started working as a newspaper reporter in western Massachusetts, I tried to get down to Pennsylvania to see my father every few months. When I arrived, I usually found him up on the second floor of the barn, in the capacious, book-lined study that he had built for himself as soon as he moved up from New Jersey. My father’s old flying pictures and mementos from political campaigns lined the walls, and the framed aeronautical chart of the country, with our 1966 coast to coast route marked in red, still hung in its favored place, over his typewriter. Our old Franklin stove from New Jersey was installed on an immense slab of gray slate. In the cold weather we lit a fire, sat on rockers, and talked all afternoon while the shadows from the trees outside grew long on the walls.

My father was quite thin now, his barrel chest concave. One winter he grew a long, snowy-white beard, which actually made him look younger, or at least livelier, the way the older Walt Whitman looked more animated than the younger, shaven man. Conversation with my father was still mostly a business of listening, and I sat as patiently as I could, taking in his long, familiar monologues. Sometimes he talked about his childhood during the Depression, or his barnstorming days, and if there was something in the news—the Watergate hearings were on the radio every day—he launched into politics. He kept forgetting that he had told me during my last visit about the novel he was planning on writing. It would be a
roman noire
with a World War II aviation motif. The Spitfire pilot takes off from England. The Messerschmitt pilot ascends from Germany. They meet over the English Channel and simultaneously open their guns, killing each other instantly and falling together to the water. The mutual sacrifice, my father said, would symbolize the futility of war. I wasn’t sure that he was ever going to write this book, or get it published, but I knew what it meant. He was a good old Stearman man, and now he was thinking about dying a lot.

Sometimes, my father dozed off in the middle of his own story. I sat quietly in my rocker as he snored, drinking coffee, and smoking my pipe, staring into the flames. My mind naturally wandered, and that old black Franklin in front of me seemed to anchor our past. Here, by the flames of this stove, I had sat as a boy and heard my father’s wonderful barnstorming blarney. Later, the stove was moved into our barn, and Kern and I had sat in front of it every night, racing through my homework before we went to work on 71-Hotel. What I did for my father now seemed passive, even mournful. While he snored in his chair, I stared at the flames in our old stove and remembered.

The ride back to New England, up through the dairy country of New York State, was moody. I was very aware of the need to prepare myself for my father’s death. I felt terribly guilty about that, guilty that I wasn’t trying to do more for him. But I had my own life to lead and my father, most of all, had always encouraged me to be ambitious. With each passing year it became easier and easier to stretch out the months between visits.

During the first week of April 1975, when my mother called from the hospital in Washington, D.C., and reached me in the newsroom, I could tell the news from the tone of her voice. The reporter who sat in the cubicle next to mine was incredulous over my reaction. While my mother talked I rolled a piece of copy paper into my typewriter and began taking down all the information. I knew that I would be busy organizing a lot of family, and I wanted to get everything down right. My father was dead and I was taking dictation just as if I were writing up another story.

The last two years of my father’s life had been a medical odyssey. He and my mother, sometimes with the younger children along, had traveled to hospitals and pain clinics up and down the east coast in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to cure his phantoms. Recently, they had found a program in Washington that provided some temporary relief through acupuncture treatments. They were resting in their hotel room in Washington before my father reported the next morning for treatments, and had just ordered dinner. In the middle of a severe phantom pain, my father collapsed onto the floor. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

The Karen Anne Quinlan case was the big national story that week, and suddenly nobody wanted to let people die naturally in hospitals anymore. Although it had taken an ambulance crew more then fifteen minutes to reach my father’s hotel, and their efforts at reviving him were unsuccessful, the hospital in Washington made Herculean efforts to bring him back. All the known procedures, from mechanical respiration to chemical heart stimulants, were administered, and a prominent heart surgeon was even called out of a Kennedy Center concert to implant a pacemaker. It was enough to make anybody a Lazarus. Once more my father’s chest heaved with induced breath, but a brain scan the next day turned up no signs of mental life. We all knew that the situation was hopeless, but the hospital was refusing to shut off the machines.

Kern was working in Washington then as a congressional aide, and my first panicked thoughts were for him.

“Mother, where’s Kern? What’s Kern doing?”

“He’s right here, Rinker. And don’t worry. He’s fine and he knows what to do.”

Kern did know what to do. Two days of chasing doctors down on golf courses and threatening legal action finally convinced the hospital to adopt a policy of common sense. They agreed to turn off the vast apparatus of life-support machines attached to my father.

When the doctors and nurses came in to shut everything off, my mother and Kern stood together in the room, holding hands.

“Oh Kerny, don’t be sad,” my mother said. “Daddy’s suffering will finally be over.”

And it was. With one last heave of that barrel chest, he exhaled sharply and gave up. He was fifty-nine years old. In the twenty-nine years since his big crash in ’46, he had fathered and raised eleven children, joined AA and founded an alcoholics hospital, saved a half-dozen major magazines, helped elect a president, been swept up by the sixties, and he had kicked our butts all the way to California and back too. It was a whale of a record for a man who hadn’t even graduated from high school.

We had a nice funeral up in Pennsylvania, with lots of Buck family mayhem and reunions with old friends. Dozens of relatives from both sides of the family, and all of my father’s friends from the antiwar movement, descended on the town. One of my uncles got flat-ass drunk and collapsed on the porch, and a bunch of my sisters’ former boyfriends carried him upstairs to bed. Philip Berrigan came and entertained us with delightful stories about my father visiting him in prison. Practically everybody was smoking pot by then, even one of my cousins, who was a cop. The night before the funeral, after all of the older aunts and uncles had been escorted back to their motels, we all sat around upstairs in the barn until late talking over old times and Tom Buck. My father had wished to be cremated and his ashes had been sent up from Washington in a ceramic urn. Somebody brought the urn up and put it in the middle of my father’s library, and we lounged on the carpet and the chairs with all the old flying photos and mementos of my father’s career surrounding us, and passed the bong pipe around. It was a nice time, the way to do it. Everyone had great stories to tell and their own version of events, but we all agreed that this ornery, driven, unforgettable, crazyass man had inspired us a lot and he was impossible not to love.

At the church service, I promised myself that I wouldn’t cry. I thought that was what my mother wanted. Besides, I wanted to make myself available in the coming months to the two youngest children, Adrian and Ferriss, who would need me now. Maybe if I cried, they would consider me weak. But then they started crying, and all their friends in the choir started crying, then a lot of people I didn’t know, and finally the whole church was wailing away. It was too big a river to turn back and I really was disconsolate for several minutes, devastated that this man was gone.

Later in the spring, over the long Memorial Day weekend, all of the boys in the family met up in Pennsylvania to help my mother clear my father’s effects out of the house and the barn. A couple of university libraries wanted his papers, and an antiquarian book dealer had already driven off with his best books. We divided up his antiques and the pictures from his library. Still, there was an incredible amount of stuff left—old wagon wheels and hand-cranked organs, immense crucifixes and peace symbols crafted out of barn beams, several broken or twisted airplane propellers and a lot of Texan parts. What we couldn’t unload at the dump or the scrap dealer’s we decided to burn. Stacking it all on the lower lawn, we threw on some kerosene and lit a match, and then we all sat around drinking Cokes and leaning on our elbows, watching the flames lick up the detritus of my father’s life.

My brother Nicky turned for the house, to clear out my father’s closet. It was astonishing what he had stashed up there—enough outfits and props for a whole movie set. We each got at least one Irish sweater and tweed jacket and tried them on, and still Nicky came down to the lawn laden with more loot. There were bowler hats and fedoras, more than a dozen canes and walking sticks, a dog muzzle and a driving harness for a pony—there was even an old parachute buried in the corner, which Kern took.

On the dusty bottom of the closet, Nicky finally got to the artificial legs. There was a huge pile of them up there. My father bought a new one every couple of years but he never wanted to throw the old ones away. The older ones, from the 1950s, were made of ash and painted the color of flesh, then tin and aluminum came in, and finally the newer, high-tech jobs made out of fiberglass and carbon-epoxy fibers.

Nicky threw open the window above us and yelled out.

“Kern! Rinky! Brian! Heads up! Here come the legs. Daddy
hated
these things. I promised him I’d burn them as soon as he died. Throw them on!”

Artificial limbs away. Nicky heaved the wooden legs out the window in pods of two or three, so they came down practically on top of us, flailing away at crazy angles, with the waist-harnesses snapping and bouncing in mid-air. Some of the legs still had shoes on them, and when they landed the heels and toes kicked up divots of grass. It was a macabre way to handle the situation, admittedly, but Nicky was still tossing down more legs and maybe we all needed this, I thought.