The Driver

DECEMBER
1999

It was a gorgeous morning, heaps of snow having escaped the streets' salting in the wake of the previous night's storm, their knee-high peaks not yet capped with soot from passing cars and trucks.

My cell phone rang as I descended the subway station steps at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street, mere seconds before I would have disappeared into the station and out of range for the next half hour.

“Is this Alexander Roy?”

There was only one reason for such a call.

“This is Dr. Johnson at Beth Israel Hospital.”

The world slowed.

“As your father's medical-care proxy, you must give permission for any time-critical procedure during a life-threatening or…Mr. Roy? Mr. Roy, can you hear me?”

The bus rumbling mere feet away, the cacophony of voices echoing off the subway station's tiled walls just ahead, the deep hot rushing roar of air out of the station entrance as a train pulled in—all were muted by the gravity of events to which I could only react, and never control.

“Mr. Roy?”

“I'll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“There's no time. We need your permission to perform an emergency tracheostomy immediately.”

“Or else?”

“Your father will die.”

OCTOBER
1999

My father was very secretive about his past. While I was a child, the notion of my climbing up his leg to ask a question—to scale the seemingly indomitable mountain that was my father—was terrifying.

My father had always described himself as a lion, and so had everyone else. He'd lost everything during the Second World War—his brother, his friends, his childhood home—and fled with his surviving family to New York City. He joined the U.S. Army at seventeen, landed at Normandy, was shot and wounded twice, and rode with the lead units into Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war he started life anew, founded the family business in 1954, met my mother in 1970, had two sons he sent to private school, bought a Cadillac, and earned (and saved) enough for us to live comfortably. Even his enemies—and these were restricted to business competitors—respected him, trading insults over the phone every week for decades. He spoke fluent French and Spanish, and conversational German, Russian, and Polish. All agreed he was a gifted painter, photographer, and pianist. My brother and I knew better than to interrupt his weekday postwork relaxation time, during which he plucked at the precious custom-made flamenco guitar he'd bought in Seville. He loved work, and intended to work until the day he died. Surrender was inconceivable.

I never believed it possible that he could be withered by cancer, his deep radio-commercial-grade voice cracking from multiple surgeries and chemotherapy, lying in a hospital bed 15 minutes from where we'd lived for more than twenty years. I'd always assumed he'd live to see me married with children. That was his greatest wish.

My greatest wish was for him to reveal what he'd
really
done between the war and his meeting my mother, a nearly twenty-five-year gap that had been left largely unexplained. My mother's curiosity went further, as the frequent business trips he'd taken when they first met had continued through the late 1970s, ending abruptly in 1980.

Time was now running out.

Radioactive pellets had been placed in his neck to fight a cancerous tumor, and the resultant swelling made breathing painfully difficult. The doctors recommended, and my father consented to, a tracheostomy—whereby a hole was cut in his neck and a breathing tube inserted down his throat. His body, already greatly weakened by months of treatment, reacted badly to the procedure, and I spent long nights beside his hospital bed watching him sleep under heavy sedation.

The swelling persisted for weeks after the pellets were removed, and in heavy-lidded moments of near wakefulness his feet danced slowly under the sheets, both hands raised like claws.

“I wonder what he's dreaming about,” said the wife of the patient in the neighboring bed.

“Driving,” I said.

 

Once the tube was finally removed, he began daily, mostly unconscious visits to a hyperbaric oxygen chamber intended to accelerate the closure and healing of his throat.

“He won't be able to speak for some time,” one doctor warned as he handed me a pad and paper, “but you can try this.”

My father's eyes darted wildly during his first few days of wakefulness, his hands too shaky for anything but scrawling gashes through the paper. Clarity slowly returned to his gestures, and he resumed looking me in the eyes and nodding as I asked him yes/no questions about the business I knew he missed. He struggled to push words up through his ragged, constricted throat. I stared at his mouth and raced like an auctioneer through phrases I wanted to spare him the pain of attempting to utter.

He pointed at the pad and paper, wrote furiously, then turned the pad toward me.

Throat

Dry

Air

Fire

“I'll get you more water,” I said, bringing the straw to his mouth.

He swiped it aside angrily and wrote again.

Operation

“The tracheostomy?” He nodded. “What about it?”

Never

Again

Pain

“You don't want to have a tracheostomy again?”

Prefer

Die

“C'mon,” I said, false optimism tugging at the corners of my mouth. “That's so unlike you.”

Suddenly and with vicious strength he grabbed my wrist, pulled my face to his, and whispered through quivering lips.

“You…cannot…allow…it.”

“But—” I mouthed in disbelief.

He glowered at me, eyes wide with volcanic anger, and pushed the pad against my chest.

Prefer

Die

DECEMBER
1999

“Mr. Roy!” Dr. Johnson blurted through the phone. “If you can hear me, I need your permission right now if we are to save your father's life.”

“What,” I said, my eyes welling with tears even as I spoke with literally deadly clarity, “are the odds of his survival without the procedure?”

“
Very
low. Every passing minute increases the likelihood of oxygen deprivation and brain damage, if he survives.”

“Do it now,” I said, in tears.

MARCH
2000

My father revealed many fascinating things on his deathbed. One was that he'd faked a heart attack in 1995 in order to trick me into moving home to New York from Paris, where I'd been busy finding myself through bartending, wearing a scarf, and attempting to write a novel set in Japan—a country I'd never been to. Another was that he didn't appear to remember the second tracheostomy, or the ensuing weeks, which was a great relief. Yet another was that he kept a storage room outside the city that had remained unknown to anyone—me, my mother, even Genia, the company bookkeeper of twenty-two years in whom he'd placed sole responsibility for paying the bills he so frequently lost between our mailbox and his office desk.

“What's so important about the storage room?” I said, interrupting his slow, measured monologue. He'd regained the tone but not the pace of his natural speech.

“A box,” he intoned.

“What's in it?”

“Pictures.”

“From the war?”

“No.”

“What,” I said, trying to conceal my excitement, “do you want me to do with it?”

He paused far longer than I expected, as if he hadn't until that very moment decided what to do with this incalculable treasure. He'd already rewritten his will and trust documents innumerable times, having recited from memory every painting, book, and piece of wartime memorabilia he'd amassed, recalling the origin and value of each with scientific precision. His face hardened, and I later came to believe it was then that he'd accepted his impending death, because it was the first time he'd expressed determination not merely to postpone death, but to accomplish one last task before it was too late.

I immediately set off, as per his halting instructions, to retrieve the albums and bring them to my apartment.

“Do
not,
” he'd said in his James Earl Jones voice as I walked out of his hospital room, “open the box until I tell you. And don't tell your mother. Don't tell anyone.”

 

My father still owned the 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham he'd bought upon moving to New York from California. It had been driven a mere thousand miles a year for twenty-three years, and he took great pride in being able to park it unlocked anywhere in Manhattan without fear of theft. He admired the soft (I called it hallucinatory) ride and passenger space for seven. I was embarrassed by the broken window controls, the cracked seat leather, the black felt roof lining that sagged on passengers' heads whenever driving over a bump, and the fact that no self-respecting car thief would steal it even when parked overnight, unlocked, in lower Manhattan. He refused any suggestion that it be replaced, insisting that new cars were too small and uncomfortable at any price. The list of unworthy cars included any new Mercedes, BMW, Cadillac, or Lexus manufactured after 1989. He liked demonstrating the Cadillac's merits by tricking friends into “going for a ride” during which, five blocks from the garage, he'd claim to have forgotten something at home and the “ride” was cut short. His dream car was a Citroën CX, a teardrop-shaped French car considered quite futuristic when first unveiled in 1974. Rarely ever seen in the United States and out of production for years, the CX's alleged onetime primacy guaranteed he would never buy another car.

 

“You have the box?” he said.

“At home.”

“How's the Cadillac?”

“Terrible,” I said, deadpan.

“I don't want to hear it. Did you open it?”

“No.”

“If you had, you'd already be asking me.”

“About what happened after the war?”

“Be quiet and listen.”

I braced myself. I had dozens of theories—prior marriage, bad divorce, bigamy, jail, the OSS or CIA. None seemed far-fetched.

“Cannonball Run,”
he said, “with Burt Reynolds.”

This was when I suspected he'd not fully recovered from the second tracheostomy. The doctors had warned he might never fully recover, and even if he did, there was the possibility of brain damage. It had always been common for him to drop one conversational thread and pick up another (often parallel but occasionally tangential) topic. Although some considered this the mark of genius, he'd recently begun repeating stories, and
this
tangent was—

“All true,” he continued, “there really
was
a Cannonball Run. The nonsense in the movie…most of that happened—” He lurched,
almost
coughing, which I feared might rupture his IV, ending our conversation as it had several times before.

My eyes darted to the door and the nurses' desk just beyond.

“I'm…okay,” he groaned.

We shared a silent moment as he gathered his strength, fighting the drug-induced fatigue with anger and resentment.

“Did you know,” he said with a surge of energy, as if he'd just won a temporary, albeit false, victory over his body's sickly shell, “I had sports cars my whole life?”

“Yes, Dad,” I said. “I knew that.”

“Before you and your brother. A new one every year after I got out of the service. I had everything—Porsches, Ferraris, MGs, Austin-Healeys. Even when the company was doing badly and I slept on your grandparents' couch. Back then you could drive as fast as you wanted, in Europe, in the States. Those were great days. Then I met your mother. I had a blue Porsche 911 Targa. What a terrific car. She hated it. The noise…the clutch. Then we had you. Then there was the first Cannonball. I knew I had to do it.”

“What?”

“Listen!” he rasped.

“But how come—”

“I didn't tell you? Because of your mother. She was so upset when she found out. She caught me talking about it with Sascha Orbach. My poor friend Sascha. I think he died. I lost touch with him. I lost touch with him…”

His eyes lost focus. My mind reeled. I wanted—
needed
—him to proceed.

“Sascha,” he said, “he…tried to get a Citroën CX. Or maybe it was an SM. I can't remember. Wait…do you know…what the Cannonball record is?”

I shook my head.

“Thirty-two hours, fifty-one minutes,” he said. “Nonstop. New York to L.A.”

“Impossible.”

“It's true. In 1979.”

“Wait,” I said. “You did the Cannonball?”

“Sascha and I began planning. But your mother…heard me on the phone. She would have left. You were so little.” He shook his head slightly. “So I told her I was going on a business trip.”

“Hold on—”

“Listen to me! We thought we could win. We had fuel tables, a fuzz-buster. Everything. But the car broke down. Sascha thought it was sabotage. Then your mother found out from Sascha's wife.”

“But…why didn't you tell me before?”

“Think! Your mother would have died if you tried anything like that. You remember when you wanted me to take you to the car show to see the Porsches and Ferraris? We did everything we could to stop you from having a car.”

That
was
true, all through high school and college.

“But,” he said, “there's something else you need to know.”

I shook my head in amazement.

“Listen!” he said sternly, his tone hardening. “Do you know why Brock Yates canceled the Cannonball? It grew too big. Parties and bullshit. There were leaks. The police knew the drivers' names before the start. Tagalongs. Copycats. Everyone thought someone would be killed. But there were serious drivers who wanted to continue. Secret races.”