The Bill from My Father (31 page)

The tape was almost over and the sun was coming up. Light stretched across the carpet, defined the walls. The house slowly resolved around me, becoming, as it had every morning for seven years, a place I remembered from the night before. I could hear Brian, up for the day, brushing his teeth in the bathroom. He passed by the door, surprised to see me up so early.

“I'm watching a documentary about hell,” I told him, nodding toward the TV.

“Oh,” he yawned, “I wondered what you were up to.” Then he staggered off to make coffee.

When I looked back at the TV, Dr. Rawlings had changed from his suit into a white coat. A stethoscope hung from his neck. “Once you're dead,” he said, “there's not a thing you can do about it. But God has given us the power to restart the heart and get the lungs working before clinical death sets in.” He made a distinction between resuscitation and resurrection, and as he did so, the camera pulled back to reveal a female mannequin that lay atop a gurney and stared insensibly toward heaven. The mannequin wore a red, white, and blue jogging suit, her ample blond hair shining like gossamer.

“We said we'd show you how to start somebody's heart up again, and you do it with your bare hands.” Dr. Rawlings looked at the mannequin and managed an expression of halfhearted alarm. “So, immediately, you see if she's all right.” He cleared his throat and shouted, “Hey, lady! Did you faint?” Then into the camera, “Maybe she's intoxicated and she'll talk to you. Or she just bumped her
head.” He walked toward the gurney without a hint of urgency. So calmly, in fact, I thought he'd walk right past it. He instructed the viewer to listen, look, and feel if her chest was moving.

“If we can catch people before they die,” he said, “we give them the option of accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior. If they die like this”—he nodded toward the woman—“we don't have to question where they went. But those that die on the street, where did they go?”

At least hell's got a fire to make the place homey. If you don't believe in the afterlife, you can't light a match, a candle, nothing!
Or so my father—May he rest in peace—would have answered back.

Dr. Rawlings pinched the mannequin's nose between his thumb and forefinger and pried open the retractable jaw, exposing the scarlet cavity of the mouth. For all his medical training, he seemed a little squeamish about placing his lips over a strange woman's mouth, even for educational purposes, even if she was inanimate. But once the doctor set his personal feelings aside, he bent over, inhaled mightily, and blew a gale of air into the patient. The chances of reviving a mannequin are slim, of course, however skillful the mouth-to-mouth, yet the utter futility of the task made it all the more heroic. Our host shifted his head this way and that until he and his subject were tightly sealed together, sharing an airway. The exhalation was a superhuman feat; Dr. Rawlings was like one of those opera singers who can hold a note for so long you start to wonder if their diaphragms are connected to an air hose. When his breath finally gave out, he pressed his fingers to the mannequin's neck, said “Boom, boom, boom,” and leaped back into action. He pumped the chest with a vigor just shy of violence, the heels of his hands sinking into the springy sternum again and again. The mannequin's running shoes jumped with every thrust.

I figured I might as well use this opportunity to learn CPR. I sat up and followed along with Dr. Rawlings. In with the good air, out with the bad. Count the seconds. Compress the chest. And if the victim doesn't respond, if the heart ceases beating or the lungs collapse, if the body resists resuscitation and the soul refuses to be redeemed, take another breath and try again.

Before the new owner took possession of the trailer, Betty phoned to ask if I wanted my father's bed. “I wouldn't feel right taking it with me when I move, and I thought you might like to have it as a keepsake.”

“It's kind of big for a keepsake,” I said, “but thanks anyway.” I told her Brian and I already had a bed that was, to quote Goldilocks, just right. What I didn't tell her was that I could never rest in a bed where my father spent so many hours of his life. A bed in which he'd had sex. From which he'd been banished. Where he'd possibly been assaulted in his sleep. Where he'd read
TV Guide
and listened to scripture. A bed where he tossed and turned past midnight, weaving his clients' misfortunes into a story that, like many on my syllabus, laid bare the course of a failing marriage.

In Cheever's “Reunion,” the son says of his father, “I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him. I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations.” I'd pretty much resigned myself to this relay race of fate, but there were certain campaigns I was determined to wage on a fresh, untrammeled mattress of my own. Namely: sex, reading, and sleep. Each was my idea of heaven, especially in that order.

“We could always get a new mattress for it,” said Brian. He didn't want the bed either; he was playing devil's advocate.

“It's not just the mattress. My father is embodied in the whole bed. His likeness might as well be carved into the headboard.”

“That's …”

“I know,” I said. “It's primitive. It's superstitious. But I hid in that bed when I was frightened of the dark as a kid. My mother chain-smoked in that bed, blaming herself when her sons were sick and her husband was seeing other women. I was born in that bed!”

Brian looked doubtful.

“Well, according to lore.” My father probably meant to say that I was conceived in the bed, not born in it. Still, as a son to whom little history was handed, I grabbed at even the misremembered bits.

“When you went back to Canada for your father's funeral,” I asked, “did you sleep in his bed?”

“He'd been dead less than a day!” said Brian. Then he grew quiet. “I considered it, then I slept in my old bed. I was worried his sheets might still be warm. Or might have grown cold.”

In what turned out to be my last conversation with Betty—once she'd moved to her new apartment, she seemed eager to start over, and we had little reason to stay in touch—she told me she'd placed my father's bed on consignment at Rags to Riches, an Oxnard antiques shop. California may have been booming with new housing for the elderly, but several retirement villages and nursing homes consisted of single rooms that came with a bed, a chair, and a dresser, like college dormitories. Someone had to buy the furniture the elderly were leaving behind. It was highly unlikely, but not impossible, that a few belongings auctioned off in estate sales or sold at secondhand stores would miraculously gravitate back to the houses from which they came. To give my father's life more resolution than it actually had, I liked to imagine his bed returning to the house on Ambrose Avenue after the new owners, who just happened to be antiques hunting in Oxnard one day, found the mahogany headboard of their dreams. “Wait till you see it,” they'd tell their friends. “It looks like it was meant to be here.”

The bed had been purchased from a department store on Wilshire Boulevard in 1940. Once the deliverymen drove away, my
parents sat on opposite sides and bounced on the mattress to test its firmness. Then they lay back and stared at the ceiling. They'd lived together for fifteen years. All three sons were still alive, the fourth unborn. They stretched their arms toward each other and found that their fingers barely touched. The bed seemed larger than it had in the store. It sprawled beneath them like a continent.

They'd bought the bed thinking it was just a big soft slab upon which a person either slips into or resists slipping into unconsciousness. But to say a bed is a thing to sleep on is like saying the sea is a drop of salty water. Below the cotton quilting lay a hidden world. Wooden braces keep the mattress from collapsing. Inner springs coil when pressure is applied, twanging each time we shift in our sleep or flail to find the ideal position, searching for the lost aquatic comfort we knew long ago in our mother's womb. However tame or acrobatic, sex takes its toll on the foam padding, lust grinding it down to powder, the grains sifting earthward night after night. Microscopic colonies of mites wait for the falling manna of our skin. Dreams sweep across the surface like seasons. Fevers and night sweats drench the sheets. A bed is a lectern, a pedestal, an altar, a rack, a boxing ring, a cavern of blankets, a spotlit stage, a trampoline, a nest, a grave.

We hit a stretch of the I-5 where Griffith Park's scrub brush and rocky outcroppings gradually thinned into the manicured green hills of Mount Sinai Memorial Park. Brian was only slightly more cautious behind the wheel of a car than my father had been; if counseling clients required him to keep his reactions in check, the road was a blank canvas on which he expressed his every impulse. That day, though, he was solemn and cautious, hands positioned on the steering wheel at ten and two o'clock. He stuck to the speed limit despite the mammoth trucks and SUVs looming up in the rearview mirror and following inches away from our tail. When Brian refused to yield the right of way, they'd veer into another lane and hurtle past us like missiles on wheels.

I glanced at my watch, a not-so-subtle hint for him to step on the gas. I often asked Brian to drive when we were running late; his dependably breakneck pace and disregard for solid objects always made up for lost time. “Relax,” he said, eyes on the road. “This isn't a race.”

Going to visit my father's grave also meant visiting the graves of my mother and three brothers, all buried in a family plot whose last available space was reserved for me. Dad had acquired a total of six plots when he'd made funeral arrangements for my brother Bob, in
1964, though he didn't mention the purchase to anyone in the family for nearly a year.

“I bought plots,” he announced to my mother and me one morning at breakfast, apropos of nothing. I was in my first semester of junior high. Ron and Gary lived in apartments near the Spring Street office.

“Plotz?”
said mother, setting her coffee cup in its saucer. A spoonful of corn flakes was suspended near my lips. My father slathered his toast with jam.

“Plots. Like in a cemetery. Now we each got a plot of our own. Next to Bob,
olev hasholem
. It's all taken care of.”

“You could have let me in on this!” she cried.

My father glared at her. “I told you about it just now! Was I talking to myself?”

“After the fact is not
letting in on
.”

Had my father only left well enough alone, or apologized for not consulting her. Instead, he added that Mount Sinai's funeral director agreed to sell him six graves for the price of five. “Consider the savings!” Recounting his riposte isn't easy, because my parents warned me at a young age that many non-Jews believed we had horns, were cheap, and killed Jesus Christ. (These faults, I assumed, went from least to most egregious. Had
I
arranged the list, horns would have come last. As for Christ, I would have remembered killing someone's savior.) My father wasn't boasting about his clout as a negotiator so much as he was defending his decision to grab the land while the grabbing was good. In some respects, Mount Sinai was similar to the new subdivisions that were being bulldozed into the Hollywood Hills—vacant lots bought for their promise of peace, an investment with long-range benefits.

Still, any father who brings up, at breakfast, the eventual death of his entire family should probably expect everyone seated at the table to ponder, at least fleetingly, their own mortality and the mortality of others. But my father was (a) surprised that his news put a damper on the meal and (b) miffed that my mother wasn't quicker to appreciate his foresight. “You want I should've left the matter up to
chance? I thought you'd be pleased.” Panic tinged his voice, the panic of a man who, beyond haggling with a mortician, signing contracts, and writing a check, had nothing left to say or do. His business was finished. A row of trenches were reserved in the dirt.

He looked so miserable I almost blurted, “Thanks for the grave, Dad,” but merely thinking it made me feel jinxed, and I only got as far as an intake of breath.

Mother said, “I suppose I should be grateful you told me now instead of letting me find out about it when I'm dead. A mother deserves some say in these things. A wife too, in case the word should ring a bell.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

She cinched her bathrobe, rose to her feet, and made a show of clearing the table. Our plates were still full.

“You don't want me to take the initiative? Fine. I'll cancel the contract.
You
go to the graveyard and pick out plots. But do it soon, because we sure as hell can't change our minds once we're in there.”

Mother dumped scrambled eggs into the garbage disposal, a dire act for a woman who, hungry or not, ate scraps from our plates on principal rather than letting food go to waste. She rinsed a fistful of cutlery, then paused to calm down. “Is there a view?” she asked, clutching a bouquet of wet utensils.

“Sinai is a mount, Lil. Of course there's views. You got Burbank and Studio City right at your feet. Everywhere you look is a panorama. Bob is close to the top of the hill, don't you remember?”

“I remember the ground,” she said, drying her hands on a dish towel. “I remember the grass as we walked up the hill. When we got closer, I saw that the walls of the grave were moist and flat, the corners as sharp as they are in this room. I was glad—
glad,
can you imagine?—that it was like a room and not just a hole in the ground. The mound of soil next to the grave? I think they put a tarp over it so you almost believe the grave will never get filled, will always stay open to the air and light. After Kaddish, Rabbi Kaplan lifted a corner of the tarp, and I remember him handing you a shovel, Ed, and when you were done, he gave it to Ron, then Gary, then Bernard.
He had to lay his hand on each of your shoulders and look into your eyes, nodding his head to let you know that God thought it was all right. It wasn't, though, was it?”