The decision to go back to America and to see my father was prompted by a sense of duty and a pang of guilt. The need to see him after five years away was magnified by reports from my sisters of his failing health. He had Alzheimer’s disease and the fact that he might not remember me was the one hope I clung to as I traveled the long road home from Athens, Greece.
The big decisions of the last five years on both our parts were interconnected. In a skewed chain reaction, our ordered lives had toppled into a heap of barely touching pieces. I had finally decided to dissolve a twenty-year marriage. My father’s reaction was to dictate a carefully impersonal letter to his attorney disowning me – disavowing my existence. Strangely, after the initial stab of hurt, his letter evoked a flood of relief. I no longer had to try to please this man who had been such a force in my life. My whole purpose had been to gain his approval, his admiration or his praise. I had been a very good girl – but not good enough.
Now I could just be me. I could be allowed to like myself and allowed to hate him – or, at least, ignore him. After all, it was legally allowable never to see him or be seen by him again. A letter from my mother followed assuring me that he did not really mean it – that he was sorry as soon as he had done it. But I did not want to believe that. Even if by some leap of imagination it could be true, I held on to the sincerity and ferocity of the final rejection. It let me off the hook; and besides, my father never regretted decisions. He always knew exactly what he was doing and he was always right.
But now things were different. Now he was befuddled, agitated, confused, and often like a petulant child – a distorted caricature of the precise personality that had ruled our lives. His vitality and hold on reality was slipping away and I needed to make that final visit to put my ghosts to rest and to show some solidarity with my family. Living overseas for the past eight years had allowed me to view them all from afar and to be untouchable.
My father had been a powerful man; he was tall, just over six feet. He had always been fit and strong. His hands were calloused and scarred from maintaining his boats, which had been his passion. The hands could take a wrench and tear down the twin Chrysler engines in his last boat, as easily as they could adjust the wiring in the stereo he had built from a Heath Kit. Those scarred hands presented a strange contrast when he was dressed for work in his hand-sewn suits.
The youngest graduate from Georgetown law school, he had gone on to be a corporate lawyer in Chicago and New York. He was sought out for his knowledge and expertise in tax law. Eventually he left the private sector to be the counsel to the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee. Eventually, Nixon had appointed him to the Federal Tax Circuit and he became “Judge Quealy”, a fitting title, I had thought: he was constantly judging us, and finding us lacking. My sisters reported that now he had begun to lose language: aphasia. This aspect of the disease was particularly cruel in his case. His voice, a deep powerful voice, and his ability to speak his mind and push his point, were formidable. Now he was like a neutered bull: cranky and frustrated.
My mother had already decided that she would take care of him for the duration. He would stay at home, where things were familiar, where he could, I suppose, die in his own bed. She was determined. She had read some of the literature about the disease and heard all the advice for caretakers. Although she was a member and active volunteer of the Women’s League of Voters, she wasn’t much for support groups. She preferred to get on with helping my father stay on his schedule on her own.
My mother picked me up at the Jacksonville airport and we talked around the subject of my father on the forty-minute drive to Amelia Island. All the feelings of exhaustion from the long plane flight and the time zone change were erased by the adrenaline of fear and dread. Guiltily I was hoping: Don’t let him remember me. Don’t let him remember that he has vowed to forget me.
Once past the causeway, the smell of sulphur and saw grass brought me home to this place and the Spanish moss hanging heavy on the trees looked more welcoming than foreboding. I felt myself going back - back to times I had spent here before, always regressing into that child- self that tried to please, tried not to disturb the pattern of their routines. And what were those routines now?
Mom opened the door, “Bill, we have a visitor.” C-SPAN droned from a large television in the living room, a familiar scene of the House of Representatives engaged in a filibuster. Dad was wearing a suit, a white dress shirt and a tie. On the floor next to him was his calf-leather briefcase with the monogram in gold and the little spinning wheels with numbers that would lock it. He looked like he had looked so often, as he prepared to drive up to Capitol Hill from our house in Georgetown, smelling slightly of Vitalis and the carbon tetrachloride that he sometimes used to remove a spot from one of his ties. His hair was still thick and black with only a slight sprinkling of grey near the edges. The cut seemed shorter, back and sides, but thick and luxurious on top and thick on his forehead. His eyes sagged a bit more and seemed duller. He looked over to us and put on a shy smile as if for company.
A bright spark of recognition, only a glimmer that quickly dimmed, and his eyes clouded, the thought had passed. He stood up carefully and the suit looked creased and loose. He faced us and made a step toward me. I walked quickly to him and he seemed startled as I lightly embraced him. He felt frail, vulnerable, as though he would break if I held on too tightly. I realized it was the first time I had ever hugged my father and he seemed to wonder why this strange woman, this visitor, was hugging him. He turned and walked upstairs, distractedly. My mother touched my arm, as if to say, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”
The two weeks passed more quickly and more slowly than I had imagined. The nights were long and still. He slept in one of the guest rooms, which had been made into a permanent bedroom for him. The walk-in closets held his suits and his wing-tipped shoes were lined neatly along the floor. His many lovely silk ties were hung carefully on a tie rack at the end of the closet. My mother explained that he wandered at night and would disturb her, so she slept in what had been their room and she locked the door to keep him from coming in and waking her with long involved nonsensical conversations or tirades that sometimes frightened her. He was a bit frightening – his temperament as unpredictable as it was in his prime, but now he was unpredictable and irrational. My mother suggested I lock the door to my room, too.
During the day my father and I took walks on the golf course and he talked about golf or about his old colleagues. I handily filled in the names of those he remembered but could not quite remember. He repeated the same stories with fewer details, or more, often getting stuck on one incident. He became agitated frequently and his impatience with his own fogginess was expressed in frustrated temper tantrums against his most loyal caretaker – my mother.
Mealtimes were always tricky. They had been when we were growing up, so why should it be any different now? He had always been demanding about the food: the quality and the preparation. He would carefully evaluate the grain of the roast beef or the degree of doneness – he liked it rare on the inside, and browned on the outside. If the food was not prepared just as he liked it, the meal could be unpleasant for all of us, but particularly for my mother who would try to placate him and put everyone at ease.
And so the menu and the food was still an issue; my mother tried to prepare his favorites. He used to cook himself occasionally – Cuban dishes from his childhood in Havana. These meals required plenty of discussion and approval on all sides. Today my mother had made the special dish – arroz con pollo – for him. He sat at the table and looked as if he were concentrating very hard on the cutlery and placemat; it was as if he trying desperately to remember exactly what to do. My mother put the terra cotta dish down in the center. She lifted the heavy lid and the chicken glistened, nestled on the saffron rice and dotted with green olives, pimentos and sausage rings.
He looked aghast. “What is that shit! I can’t eat that shit. I had that shit for breakfast. What are you trying to do to me?” He pushed himself away from the table roughly and the glass of water in front of him teetered dangerously but held steady.
“Bill, this is your favorite: arroz con pollo. Remember? You like this.” My mother’s voice had an almost patronizing edge to it. In this strange new world, and after all these years, she had become the authority on the food and could dictate the tastes of this man.
He stormed away from the table. His reluctance to eat was a constant worry, as it was clear he was losing weight. My mother shrugged resignedly and began dishing up the meal onto all of the plates, thinking, or perhaps knowing, that he would eventually come back and try some. My stomach tightened. The vehemence of his objection had startled me. Of course there was shouting and loud discussions or arguments frequently in the household, but other than the occasional “goddammit, Betty…” for emphasis, no strong language.
Although it was sad and frightening to be around him now, it was funny sometimes, too. The house backed onto the fairway of a golf course and beyond was a marshland that was national parkland full of all sorts of water birds. There were hummingbirds that came to colorful feeders my mother had strung on trees and bird feeders filled with seeds for the many songbirds. The seed lured squirrels by the dozens and they clung precariously to the brick of the house, making acrobatic and often successful leaps onto the birdfeeders engineered to be impervious to just such attempts. With the loss of language, my father had created a new lexicon for communications. It was fascinating the way his mind would draw connections.
“Quick! The fuzzies. They are in the…in the place. They are there. Quick. The fuzzies! Crap!”
The squirrels were fuzzies and it made perfect sense to me. Although my mother really did not mind that the squirrels were feasting on seed that was meant for the birds, she had ordered various complicated bird feeders from the many catalogues that found their way into the mailboxes in this community of bird loving older people. The bird feeders had been advertised to outsmart the cagiest, most agile squirrel, but the fuzzies in this neighborhood were ingenious. She led my father back to the sofa and instantly he forgot the fuzzies and focused on C-SPAN once again.
I tried not to laugh at the situations, but sometimes you would have to laugh not to cry. It wasn’t that we were cruel or mean; it was just that some of the things he did were so odd. One evening, again at the dinner table, my mother had prepared artichokes. I knew that she did this mainly because she knew how I liked them, but had she stopped to think how Dad would figure out exactly what to do with the leaves, the melted butter and the method of scraping the flesh of the leaf along the teeth? I had hardly formed the thought when I looked over to see my father lift the small bowl of melted butter and lemon to his lips and drink it down.
He smacked his lips loudly. “That was great soup. Is there any more?” She came out of the kitchen looking puzzled and immediately realized what had occurred. At times I had a vague sense that maybe my mother was purposely testing him. One day at breakfast she brought out his usual cup of coffee, but it was hot. He drank it down in one gulp. An instant later he looked very uncomfortable and said loudly, “Whew. Hot, Very hot,” and he drank his orange juice quickly.
But my mother would not have hurt him knowingly - I had to believe that. She was dedicating her life to taking care of him, just as she had always dedicated herself to taking care of all of us and she had always put up with his unreasonable and sometimes volatile demands. He was a volcano – he would explode and minutes later it would be over and things back to normal. Mom had never complained. During my visit, Hazel, their housekeeper, told me what I always knew. “Your mother is a saint. A true saint, the way she takes care of that man. But don’t you worry. We say: once a man, twice a child. It is true. He is just going through his second childhood and we taking care of him. She is a saint, you momma.” Hazel was pretty old herself; she was wise and kind and her reassurances helped me accept. I was beginning to feel the pull and guilt of leaving, but I could never have stayed. I was not a saint and didn’t want to be.
I forgave me father over those weeks. I forgave him for what I had done to myself in trying to please him. He never remembered me over the visit, but, oddly, he remembered the names of the other siblings. I exorcised the hold he had over me, but I mourned the relationship we never had. It was a relationship that I yearned for and sought out in other strong and domineering men – seeking the illusive approval.
In the process of going home and seeing my father I found that I could love him. He had denied himself the opportunity of knowing that I loved him and now it was too late. When I returned to Greece I went down to the kiosk to call home. This was a family ritual from my growing up years – after a long journey, call home and check in. Tell them you made it safely. I hoped to talk to my mother, but my father answered the phone with a tentative, childish “hello”. I hesitated for a moment and then I slowly hung up.
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