So Much for That (34 page)

For the biggest tipoff that she was not in as much denial as she feigned was that Glynis had no interest in the future. That left everyone pretty much stumped. When you weren’t interested in the future you weren’t interested in the present, either. Which left the past, and she really wasn’t interested in that. (The sole exception to this overarching apathy was anything regarding their ongoing case against Forge Craft. The suit always stirred a look in her eyes that Shep recognized from nature shows—when, jaws open and gaze fixed, a panther is poised to pounce on live prey. But Shep avoided raising the subject. His wife’s driving motivator made him queasy: vengeance, and of the most indiscriminate sort.)

Lastly, to be fair—Shep did not feel like being fair, but seeing things from other people’s perspective was a lifelong habit—Glynis was difficult. A variety of subjects was no-go. One subject in particular was circumscribed by heavy red lines, with Do Not Enter signs bristling at every approach. The problem was that under the circumstances this was a big subject, arguably the main subject or even the only subject. As he’d noted at the end of that somewhere between plain failed and outright awful dinner with Carol and Jackson, whenever there was something you weren’t talking about, you couldn’t talk about anything else, either. Thus these visits seemed to skate along on artifice; they did not seem real; they had a pandering quality, a patronizing quality, and, well, a lying quality that was all Glynis’s fault.

But that was as far as his sympathy could extend. Once it stretched this distance it always bungee-corded back to the bleak impression that the duration of his wife’s illness had simply exceeded their compatriots’ famously short attention spans. Mesothelioma having lost its novelty value, she had become one big enough-already. Just as most of them couldn’t run two circuits around a football field without collapsing to the bleachers, their friends and family alike had poor emotional endurance.

Shep was born to a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate—with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with
plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter—the kind that can’t help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last—his countrymen were inept. It was as if no one had ever sickened before. Ever languished before, ever confronted you-know-what. As if mortality were one of those silly superstitions, like the conviction that one must always drink eight glasses of water a day, that had now been summarily debunked in the Health section of Tuesday’s
Science Times.

Because there was
no protocol
. The bravest face he could put on this baffling social attrition was that these people had never been taught how to behave in relation to a whole side of life—the far side—that had been staring them in the face since they had a face. Maybe their mothers had taught them not to eat with their elbows on the table or never to chew with their mouths open. But no parent had ever sat them down to explain that this is what you do and say when someone you at least claim to care about is deathly ill. It wasn’t in the curriculum. Grim solace, many of these shabby specimens of the species would confront the same oops-just-remembered-there’s-somewhere-I-gotta-be when they got sick. But by then they would feel too wretched themselves to spare feeling badly in retrospect about having turned their backs on Glynis Knacker in 2005.

With an acrid taste in his mouth, Shep sometimes recalled the ful-some offers of assistance with which friends and family had met the initial bad news. The Eigers had encouraged him to let them know
anything
they could do to lighten his load, but had never made an unsolicited gesture of any kind; surely they realized that he would never
ask
them to escort Glynis to her chemotherapy, to sit with her by the padded armchair for hours. Eileen Vinzano had gone on at length about how she could help Shep keep the house clean. Nothing would be too lowly, she swore, not even toilets or kitchen floors. But that was before the Vinzanos went “out of the country.” Meantime, he’d been obliged to hire a Hispanic girl to come in once a week to do the cleaning he couldn’t keep up with, and Eileen had yet to break a nail on a toilet
brush. A former neighbor in Brooklyn, Barbara Richmond, had proposed a regular regime of dropping by whole prepared dinners that had only to be popped into the microwave, a virtually full-time catering service that had reduced in the end to one pie. Glynis’s first cousin Lavinia had declared that she’d be glad to move in for weeks at a time! Just so they had someone on hand to run errands and keep Glynis company. Naturally she had never ensconced herself in Amelia’s room, and she’d been MIA since April. Did these people remember having made those extravagant offers in the first flush of rash compassion? If they did remember, did they imagine that Shep himself had forgotten? He was not by nature a grudge bearer, but he had not forgotten.

O
f course, as letdowns went,
Beryl
was in a class by herself.

An additional $8,300 per month for their father’s nursing home was accelerating the ravagement of Shep’s resources. Even assuming that he was hardhearted enough to contemplate such a prospect, the Merrill Lynch account was now much too depleted to finance a solo retirement to Pemba or anywhere else. The issue was now covering the co-pays, co-insurance, and prescription charges for Glynis’s treatment, period. So on the phone with Beryl in early November he hazarded the notion that they might have to start thinking about transferring their father from Twilight Glens to a public home. He might as well have suggested sending the man to Auschwitz.

“Those public homes are cesspools!” Beryl shrieked. “They let you lie for days in your own shit, and then you get bedsores. Public homes are always understaffed, and the nurses are sadistic. The food is awful, if you’re lucky enough to get any, since some of these biddies are so neglected that they starve to death. You can forget any facilities like at Twilight—no rec rooms, no physical therapy machines. They don’t have any events—no classes, no sing-alongs. Maybe a few magazines, and that’s about it.”

“Well, besides a steady supply of detective novels, about all Dad really requires is a stack of newspapers and a pair of scissors.”

“But these public places are like Dumpsters for the elderly! Old ladies in wheelchairs slumped in hallways with their mouths open, drooling on their nighties and mumbling about how tonight They’re going to the prom with Danny because They think it’s still 1943. You’d do that to your own father? He’d never forgive you, and neither would I.”

Personally Shep suspected that the difference between public and private care was exaggerated. He’d seen plenty of dementia at Twilight, and plenty of drool there, too. Unless he was leading the congregation in a rendition of the Doxology, Gabriel Knacker would never participate in any “sing-along” in the most palatial of institutions. Nevertheless, Beryl’s grim image had popular currency. So he’d not have minded that she conjured the stereotype had it truly been fear for their father’s misery that had brought the picture to life. Nor would he have minded her insisting so strenuously on continuing private care if Beryl were helping to pay for it.

He did mind that her righteous defense of their father’s comfort hailed from somewhere else. The sole purpose of the transfer he’d suggested was to shift the fiscal burden to the public purse. It was his own fault that she knew the sequence of events that would accomplish this modern financial miracle, because he’d told her himself in July. To qualify Dad for Medicaid, first and foremost they’d have to sell the house. Or, as she surely alluded to the structure out of his hearing,
her
house. (Maybe Jackson’s idea was technically feasible: simply refusing to pay Twilight and letting the cogs of bureaucracy creak along until the government seized the property. After all, to his quiet amazement, Shep and Beryl had no legal obligation to care for their father or to pay his bills. Yet that wasn’t the way Shep Knacker had ever conducted his affairs. Walking out on his obligations and expecting someone else to clean up the mess seemed sloppy, disrespectful, negligent, and irresponsible. He was, Shep thought wryly, who he was.) The proceeds of the property sale would go to nursing home fees until their father was officially indigent. Bye-bye free digs, bye-bye inheritance—and
that
was the source of the outrage piping through the telephone.

Still, Shep lacked the resolve to fight her. He had his own misgivings about public nursing homes, and a strong sense of filial duty. Twilight was
probably nicer. Dad might not have liked it there much, but he was at least getting used to it. Besides, were Shep to keep hemorrhaging $99,600 per annum a juncture would rapidly arrive at which he would not pay for Twilight not because he was a bad son but because he did not have the money. Obviously, it was wasteful to spend down his own last remaining dime before ending up in the exact same place: shifting Dad out of Twilight, liquidating the pension fund, selling the house. Yet in its simplicity, perfect helplessness might prove a blessing. Jackson was surely right, that in a country that confiscated up to half of your earnings, and that demanded an additional backhander every time you did anything from buy a screwdriver to go fishing, you were not truly free. But in that case, there was a genuine liberty to be found in going broke.

Meanwhile, Shep tried to talk to his father roughly twice a week. The broken femur seemed to be mending, slowly. But for the first half of November the phone at his father’s bedside rang unanswered. Rather than talk directly to Twilight staff, he made the mistake of getting the medical lowdown from Beryl. All she said was that he seemed to be losing weight. Or that’s what the staff must have said, since that was the same phone call in which Beryl had announced that she was “on strike.”

“You can’t expect me to keep visiting him all the time. It’s not fair. Just because I’m nearby I shouldn’t have to take on that whole burden. Really, Shep, I’m starting to feel used. I can’t take it. Visiting is too depressing. I have a film to edit, and I have to protect my, you know, chi.”

“How often do you regard as ‘visiting all the time’?”

“I’m just not into it, Shepardo. All I hear about when I do go is why I haven’t been to see him in so long, when it seems like I just saw him, like, that morning. If you think it’s so important for him to enjoy the constant attentions of family, you’re going to have to come up here once in a while yourself.”

Shep sighed. “Do you have any idea what I’m dealing with here?”

“We’re both dealing with stuff. And he’s your father, too.”

He reluctantly promised to try to make it back up to New Hampshire soon. As they wrapped up the call, Beryl raised, “Before I forget,
what’s the deal with the heating? I just got some, I don’t know, eviction notice type thing from the gas company.”

“I transferred the bill to your name. I’m sure I mentioned that.”

“Well, to my
name
, fine, but you don’t expect me to pay it?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes, I do.”

“Do you know how much it costs to heat this place during the winter?”

“Of course I do. I’ve been paying the fuel bills for years.”

“Look, I’m doing the house-sitting. House-sitters aren’t expected to cover utilities. Sometimes they’re even
paid
to take care of places.”

“You want me to put you on salary?” Shep asked incredulously. Beryl had nimbly inverted her co-optation of the family home into a big favor. It was just the kind of ingenuity in his sister that had always wowed him.

“I don’t have the money for the gas bill, period. So unless you want me sitting here with icicles in my nose while I burn the furniture to keep from perishing, you’re going to have to send them a check.”

Beryl had discovered the giddy liberation of penury years ago. He was envious.

S
hep headed up to Berlin Thanksgiving weekend, planning only one Saturday overnight. The traffic coming home would be horrific, but at least an evening visit and another Sunday morning during a season of traditional family get-togethers might temporarily alleviate his father’s sense of abandonment.

Twilight Glens was no country club, but it looked clean; perhaps the slight fecal whiff penetrating the astringent disinfectant was inevitable in any facility caring for the old and sick. For that matter, like the blackened Victorian hospital of his childhood, the institution might have benefitted from a few streaks of grime, which would have provided the plain square building a little character. As it was, Twilight had been given an architectural lobotomy. In fact, Shep was impressed. Surely such a perfect dearth of identity constituted as much
of an achievement in the physical world as it would have in the social sphere, were an individual to succeed in generating no personality whatsoever. The lobby and hallways were decorated with potted plants and anodyne prints. The linoleum was bright and beige. Private rooms were trimmed in blond polished maple. The effect was dreamscape. After all, some nights your mind simply wasn’t up to contriving one more backdrop with satisfying symbolism, and Twilight was the kind of non-place where your brain sets forgettable, second-rate adventures: those aimless confabulations with poor logic, distortions of passing acquaintances who don’t matter to you, and frustrated searches for a bathroom.

At least when Shep spotted his father from the hallway, the old man wasn’t catatonic or burbling about his upcoming high school prom, but was propped in bed wearing his reading glasses, intently underscoring a passage in
The New York Times
. Terrific: business as usual. But when Shep went in and kissed his father’s cheek, he was unnerved. The weight loss was more dramatic than he’d been prepared for. Shep had had enough of living in the fattest country in the world while watching the people he most cared about evaporate.