TWO FATHERS

Sara McAulay

I can't make him nice. Lord knows I wish I could -- it's embarrassing: a grown woman expending such energy hating an eighty-five year old man with a pacemaker, cataracts, replacement knees and hips that work just well enough to keep him out of a wheelchair. Two canes, my enemy walks with. Two! -- and too often I dream of cracking them over his lecherous, manipulative old skull.

But "lecherous, manipulative" isn't how Natalie sees her father. Not "nice" either, exactly --she's not blind to his faults -- but that's how she wants him seen. How, I expect, she wants to be able to remember him when he's gone. Crusty but benevolent, a character. "Write a story about my dad," she says, and I say okay. I want to make her happy: See, I'm wearing your rosy glasses at last. He isn't going to last forever. So I try.

I've been trying for months. Can't make it happen. I write for my living -- adventure stories for kids -- but imagination fails me now. Instead I find myself scribbling snippets about my own father, who died when I was ten. I can't remember much: the way he sang off-tune, the stories he told; the sound of his heart when I pressed my ear to his chest. He's been gone so long I don't trust even these few details. Nor is there anyone for me to ask. Mother, brother, cousins -- gone. We're a short-lived crew it seems. Men he worked with, friends from our old neighborhood, everyone -- gone.

Bill's still here, though, still ticking, twenty minutes away in the nursing home that he's convinced broke his wife's heart and hastened her death.

"Bill and Miriam: a Marriage": Natalie even gave me the title. She first asked for this story the night her mother died, and I said yes. Yes, I said again as we left the crematorium with Miriam's ashes -- the cremation long planned for, written out in the living will but such an unJewish thing that after the fact everyone looked a little green. It had fallen to me -- I'm not Jewish -- to take charge of the box of ashes.

Natalie was driving. I sat beside her with the ash-box in a bag on my lap. Bill, in the back with his other daughter, Susan, scowled out the window. Susan held her father's hand, occasionally sniffling and wiping her eyes. She was the only one who'd raised any objections to the cremation, but Natalie was feeling it too, now, I could tell. I can't say I was all that comfortable either. Ovens. The tall chimney even more ominous in that sunny, park-like setting, all flowers and handsome big trees, robins and sparrows hopping on the grass. Who knew what Bill thought? His wife of more than fifty years had just died, after all. As we came within sight of the nursing home he extricated his hand from Susan's and leaned forward, his mouth close to Natalie's ear as though to whisper a secret. But when he spoke, his voice filled the car. "If you girls hadn't dragged us up here, your mother would be alive today."

I reached over, took Nat's hand and gave it a squeeze. She squeezed back, hard. "You'll write me that story," she said. "Promise?"

I thought what she really wanted at that point was her mother's story, with a little of her father thrown in. "Miriam and Bill: a Marriage." Not so, as I found a few nights later when I showed her what I'd written -- a nice tribute, I thought, to a woman I'd found difficult at times, but had genuinely liked.

"Put more of Dad in," Natalie insisted. She'd just come from visiting Bill at the nursing home. He was pretty depressed, she told me, and losing weight. His pacemaker was acting up. She thought she might lose him too, and the prospect scared her. Nice he was not, but he washer father.

So I tried again. I made a list.

His Good Qualities:

1. Generous to strangers and the more malleable of his employees, even to his daughters when it suits him and there's an audience for his acts of largesse;
2. Loves languages -- speaks five reasonably well, though three of them not quite so well as he thinks;
3. Loves music -- plays violin (well enough for a community orchestra) and accordion (well enough for family sing-alongs);
4. Reads widely;
5. Loves travel; takes an interest in other cultures;
6. Cared devotedly for his wife, Natalie's stepmother;
7. Has a sense of humor (gross, but undeniable); and, scraping away at the barrel-bottom:
8. Puts toilet seat down after peeing.

I started with the story Natalie likes to tell, of riding with him from New York to Los Angeles on the train, age 10, after her mother --real mother-- died. Bill came east to get her. She thinks this was only the second time she'd seen him. He was married to Miriam by then and had a second daughter, three years old.

A stranger or nearly so, he came for her in the Bronx and they boarded the train and rode for four days and three nights, sitting up in the cheap blue-plush seats instead of taking a sleeper because his business was new and he had barely any money. An adventure! She wore her red drum-major hat with the gold braid and yellow feather. They ate crackers and candy bars and watched the landscape change. He taught her the words to a Russian song -- she can sing it yet -- and praised her for learning it so quickly, for having inherited his ear for language.

This is the story I write for Natalie: a kind of fairytale, bittersweet because of the mother's death but redeemed by the reappearance of the lost father and the discovery of this talent shared between them, a bond that would continue for the rest of their lives.

I write that all down and take the dog for a walk and when I come back I add how within a year of her arrival in LA the found lost-father is coming to her room at night. Somehow Natalie has forgiven him, though the phrase "bedtime stories" still gives her the willies, she says. It only happened a few times. It didn't go on for very long. She's dealt with it, she says. Years of therapy, hypnosis, support groups, a shelf full of books. I think he fell in love with me. I think he just forgot I was a child.

"Get over it," she tells me. "You've got your own father issues," and she's right, of course. Who was my father, really? His name was Allen. A civil engineer. Singer of folksongs, teller of tall tales, near-compulsive taker of home movies. Nearsighted enough to be 4F; spent 1943 and most of '44 in the Philippines anyway, overseeing the repair of landing strips and the building of pontoon bridges. These and a few other facts I remember, or my mother told me. But who he was I'll never know, any more than I'll ever know the woman -- any of the women -- I might have become if he had lived.

If I were going to make a list of his Good Qualities, what would they be? What do I know that's real?

He sang to me;

He told me stories;

Carried me on his shoulders;

At the beach, held me tightly when the big waves came.

"He'd have killed anyone who hurt me," I tell Natalie. "Your father...."

"It's been more than forty years," she says, impatiently. "Get over it and move on, for Christsake. I have!" But sometimes when she's sleeping and I reach for her she slaps my hand away. Then bolts awake, her eyes filled with terror and shame. "Such a dream I was having," she says. "Such a dream."

And I want to kill him. Really, I do.

* *

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, my mother used to say. Bad advice. Better: If you can't say something nice, lie. I write a funny travel sketch, "Miriam and Bill on the Great Wall, 1982," raiding the family scrapbook for photos and Miriam's precise, detailed notes. Susan, down from Spokane to visit, likes the story. Even Bill cracks a smile. Natalie smiled too, and kissed me, and I thought that was the end of it. Assignment complete, on to other things. But that night after we had gone to bed, during the commercial break between two "Nightline" segments, she said, "That's the most dishonest thing you ever wrote."

And then, just as Ted Koppel's face filled the screen again, she clicked the TV off. "Dad asked if he could move in downstairs."

By which she meant the in-law apartment, vacant now since the exchange professor returned to Bombay.

Long silence. "You told him no," I said.

Long silence. Wind in the trees, a dog barking in the distance. "You didn't tell him yes." I rolled over to face her. It was a brilliant night, the moon almost full. Bars of cold white light slanted through the blinds, playing tricks with color so the grey disappeared from Nat's hair. She was wearing a ruffled nightie and looked like a little girl. I said, "Honey ...?"

She blinked. Looked away. "I didn't say yes."

Voices. A car door slammed. A moment later the engine started. The dog up the street had quit barking, but I could hear our Fergus whining at the door. "It would never work."

"He looked so sad."

Sitting up, feet on the cold floor, I muttered, "Basset hounds look sad." My Natalie has a heart you could lose a small planet in. She takes in stray puppies and kittens, sprinkles kibble on the deck for the raccoons and skunks that knock over our garbage can and flower pots. Me, I think they're low-lifes and run them off.

"He'll never manage the stairs," I said. "He can barely get dressed without help. You know how disoriented he gets; he'll try to cook something and burn the house down."

"He'll have a companion. We'll hire someone."

"A companion who lives where?" The apartment is a studio. Small. When she countered that maybe we could expand into the garage I knew we were in trouble. She'd been giving this serious thought, and not a word to me about it.

She touched my shoulder. "What if it were your father?"

Already I've lived longer than my father did. For the last two years of his life he was "sick," his illness unnamed partly because no one wanted to name cancer in those days and partly because silence was my family's way in all things. One day he went to the hospital -- a minor operation, supposedly, but his heart stopped beating. I found out when I got home from Girl Scouts. A neighbor told me, Mrs. Dockett from next door, waiting for me in the kitchen. "Your father died," she said. Like that. And wasn't I a brave girl not to cry and did I want some cookies and a glass of milk?

"You'll be at his beck and call," I told Natalie. Companion or no companion, it was true. When he and Miriam were still in Los Angeles, they'd had, at the end, a round-the-clock staff of three, plus cook, not to mention the highly-paid Ubersocialworker who oversaw them all and hired replacements for those who, on an almost weekly basis, were fired or quit. There had been constant turnover, usually because Bill fondled or insulted the women, sometimes because the men wheedled large "loans," most often of all because none of these caregivers, no matter how warm, how decent, how dedicated, was Natalie or Susan, and what kind of daughters were they, not to quit their jobs, sell their homes in distant cities and return to LA now that they were needed and which they never should have left in the first place?

"You'll never have a moment's peace," I said. "He'll want an intercom put in. He'll get a little bell and ring it. He'll bang on the ceiling with the broom handle when we're making love, and expect you to come down and give him a foot-rub. And he won't stay downstairs," I went on, warming to my task, "you know he won't. He'll hire a decorator and throw out all our furniture and have the living room painted some color we hate."

All that was quite possibly true, but what I really meant, of course, was that he and I would be under the same roof, a toxic situation. I meant we'd be fighting for Natalie, which we'd been doing for years anyway, but at a distance. A fight to the death, which by all rights I should win, being thirty-five years younger, but you never know. Mr. Microchip-Ticker might just turn himself in for more surgery. New knees and hips, a new lens in the milky left eye, a penile implant. It was frightening to contemplate -- the old bastard was mean enough to live forever. Meanwhile, I was a getting-up-there woman with scary cholesterol and a family history of life-shortening diseases.

Flash: the writer on her deathbed. Natalie and Bill stand by, Nat weeping, Bill trying not to smile. As the scene darkens, he slips an arm around his daughter's shoulder, pulls her near as if to give comfort. The last thing I see is his hand -- gnarled and arthritic, nails ridged and thick as oyster shells -- creeping down from her shoulder toward her breast.

Flash #2: the writer-as-child, in the study off the dining room where her father slept for the last six months of his life. He's dead now, but the little book-lined room is as he left it, smelling of Vitalis hair oil, illness and decay. The writer-as-child, call her Brave Girl, she never cries, is alone in the house this morning. She lets herself into the study. She doesn't feel brave at all. If she weren't so scared she'd run away. Instead, she moves about the room, touching his things one by one: his old-fashioned pocket watch, his spare glasses in their scuffed black hard-leather case, his pencils and pocket slide-rule, the framed picture of her brother, age six, awkwardly holding a blanket-wrapped newborn baby. This baby is herself, she has been told.

I was never that small, she thinks. I'm ten. She would rather be nine. When she was nine, she didn't even know her father was sick; he was as good as well. But her father is dead. She's stuck with ten and her father is dead forever. She's afraid she'll be ten forever, forever having to catch herself, to remember not to listen for his footstep or his voice. If she could jump ahead to twelve, would she be used to his absence? If she could trade for nine-forever, would that bring him back?

Too hard. Her head has started to ache. I'll run away, she thinks. They'll never ever find me.

"Where's he going to go, then, if not here?" Natalie raised herself on one elbow and peered at me. "Back to LA?"

For me the only surprise was that he hadn't insisted on it already. LA, where his business was located, and the office where everyone still respected and depended on him and was properly grateful and deferential. LA, where his house was, and his tennis club and the community orchestra. "This place up here," as he called the nursing home, "This Place Up Here" was "where I came because Mom needed help" -- he needed no help whatsoever, of course -- "and then it killed her." He didn't like This Place Up Here one bit, and whenever I'd thought about what might happen when Miriam died, what I pictured was the tiny half-blind old man behind the wheel of his enormous black Cadillac, weaving precariously down the Topanga Canyon road on his way to work as he'd done six days a week and sometimes seven, for more than half a century.

"Don't I have any say in this?" I reached for my robe. Coffee, cocoa, a hot fudge sundae -- something seemed called for. "Don't my feelings count?"

"Of course they do." Her warm fingers caught me, traced the tendons on the inside of my wrist. "And of course you have a say." But then, softly: "He's done so much for me."

"He's done so much to you!"

"Nothing's definite," she assured me. "I didn't say yes, I made no promises, no commitments."

"But?"

"I said I'd talk it over with you."

"Well," I said. "That's that, then. We've talked it over. If he doesn't want to stay where he is, and that's understandable enough, I'll help you look for someplace else."

Some of His Bad Qualities (a short list):

1. Lechery;
2. Fussiness and faultfinding;
3. Capriciousness and arbitrariness-decisions, promises made today are likely to be disregarded tomorrow;
4. (Related to 3) His money is his dick. He offers gifts: cars, trips to Europe or Hawaii. Offers these to people he meets on airplanes, a pretty new receptionist at the office, once in a while even to Natalie or Susan. Don't ask for a loan, though: "What am I, a bank?" If you don't ask, it pleases him to offer, and then to deliver or not, as the mood strikes.
   4a. Digression. "How long has it been since you've seen Paris?" he'll ask -- Natalie's a French teacher. Too long, obviously, the implication is. If you'd gone to work for me you could afford Paris every year, travel the way Mom and I used to. Or: "Are you sure you don't need a new car? Wouldn't you rather have a Lexus than an Accord?" Tell him to fuck himself, I say. Tell him to fuck himself, I've been saying since the Sunday in September six years ago when in a craven, soul-dead moment I admitted that yes, I could use a new car, no not an Accord, I'd really love a LandCruiser. And for a week, against my better judgment and all the evidence of everything I knew about the man, I let myself believe he really was going to write me a check for $10,000 to put toward the truck of my dreams. Let myself believe I could accept it from him and still sleep at night because ten grand was just the down payment, it wasn't exactly like he was actually buying it, exactly, and I'd wanted one of those monsters so badly for more than twenty years. Didn't happen, of course. But a few months later, there appeared a pair of first-class airline tickets to Bermuda, where Nat and I had no particular desire to go, and an all-expenses two weeks in a resort far swankier than we were comfortable with. No particular reason: "I just felt like it." Within days of our return home, he's on the phone, berating Nat for our profligate ways;

   Guilt-tripping. Coldness -- he has never once in their adult lives told either of his daughters that he loves them. Worse, he brushes off their expressions of love for him: "You sound like an actress." Switching off his hearing aid and opening his book. Dreiser again, the same pages over and over now because he can't remember what he's read from one day to the next.

   He doesn't like me either.

The short list, as I said. And (in the name of fairness) how about my own father's Bad Qualities? Again, I'm stopped by all I do not know.

I can't make him not-nice. I never saw him angry (he must have gotten angry), rarely heard him raise his voice (he must have yelled a few times!). I can't make him real, can't bring him to life to ask what kind of flawed and faceted man he really was, what his weaknesses and who his enemies were, and what he thinks of me. Even as a fiction there's not enough to go on. The stories I make up about him have snappy beginnings but come to the same dead end. Like poor Brave Girl they threaten to go somewhere, but like her, never do. He's frozen forever as Good Dad, a paragon, false hero to Bill's real-life villain -- an oversimplification that does justice to neither man.

Natalie buys a pager. "What if he needs me in the night?" He weighs maybe 130 pounds now, just skin and bones, a little gristle. She may be right to worry about losing him. There has been nothing more about his moving into the apartment downstairs.

"What if I need you in the night? He has a buzzer; he can call the staff."

"I know," she says. "I can't help it. Are you mad at me?"

"I'm mad at him."

"For being old and sick?"

I don't have an answer. Not one I can name, anyway

* * Lunchtime, Easter Sunday. We're at a table on the sunporch: Bill and Natalie and I, with Mrs. Silverberg and Mrs. Kaplan in their wheelchairs basking in his attention. Our table has bunnies and eggs on it. Some tables have little plastic pietás, some have crosses. Lunch consists of a slice of ham, carrots, and mashed potatoes. Bill eats ham, no problem, as does Natalie, but the two old women look askance at the deep-pink slabs. "Smoked turkey," Bill tells them. "Breast." His new dentures gleam. "My favorite." He saws at his meat with his knife, manages to push carrots over the edge of his plate, pretends not to notice when Natalie cuts his food for him. "You have an attractive décolletage," he tells Mrs. Kaplan, seated across from him. "I'll bet you were a handful."

"Dad," Natalie begins, but Mrs. Kaplan's hearing aid is turned low; it's enough that he's talking to her, smiling, a man.

Later, in his room, he knocks books and knickknacks from the shelves with his cane. "This Place Up Here is a prison!" he shouts. "You" -- shaking the cane at Natalie -- "you brought me up here and had them lock me up. You brought Mom and me up here, and it killed her, and now I'm alone, surrounded by old people, old decrepit people, like those two old biddies at lunch! Anybody'd get depressed, having to be around old decrepit people all the time. Why couldn't you take care of your mother in our own home?" He bangs the cane's rubber tip on the floor. "Such bad luck we had! In other families, the children don't leave their parents in the hands of strangers."

Natalie is in tears by this time. Me, I don't know whether to comfort her, punch him, or just get up and leave. It's an old, old story, acted out in different forms for as long as I've known the two of them. She's a bad, selfish daughter. What did he do to deserve this treatment?

Don't get me started, old man, I want to say.

Suddenly he's weeping too, big silver tears that catch in his mustache. "I'm all alone," he wheezes. "All alone in This Place Up Here, this warehouse of old decrepit people, this prison. My wife is gone. My daughters don't love me." With this, he levels a baleful look at me. Look what my Natalie loves instead.

Flash #3. In the moment that Brave Girl stood paralyzed in front of the photo of her infant self, Evil Girl took over. First, she "dropped" something -- the framed photo itself, perhaps. It almost jumped, it did jump out of her hand, it plunged suicidally to the floor, glass splashing across the hooked rug and under the desk. That was the signal. It set her free and she trashed the place, giggling her Evil Girl giggle. Finally, elated and breathless, she peed on his bed, watching the puddle spread and spread between her feet, darkening an area shaped like the map of Texas on her Grandma's handmade quilt.

Terrified then and wild with guilt she swept up broken glass and ripped paper and dumped it all onto the soiled quilt and sheets, bundled and dragged it to the back yard, doused it all with kerosene from the garage, struck a kitchen match and then another. Her mother and the fire engine arrived. Her mother pretended to believe Brave Girl's story that the dog had made the mess. And the fire had just, well, happened. In silence, Brave Girl and her mother finished cleaning the study, returning it to its barely remembered pre-sick-Dad condition. And neither of them mentioned the incident again.

* *

The beeper peeps. Three a.m. Peeps again at three-ten, three-twelve, three-twenty, three-twenty-seven, three-thirty. Natalie sighs and punches the phone's autodial. "Yes, Dad. Yes, Dad. In the morning, Dad, it's still night, we're still asleep." A pause. "No I don't think the night nurse has a criminal record. I don't think he has the combination to your security box. Try and sleep now. I'll talk to Dr. White in the morning." She hangs up, rolls over, heaves another sigh. I lie there listening to myself breathe in, breathe out. After a bit she asks, "Mad?"

It feels as if I'm mad at everyone. Nat, for no reason except she has a father and I don't. Myself for feeling this Evil-Girl way.

"At him."

She doesn't push it this time, so I don't have to explain that it isn't only her father I mean.

Two Fathers -- a fancy

They'd have been about the same age, had mine lived, and sometimes I imagine their paths crossing in their youth, unlikely as that seems. But young Bill was a salesman; he got around. And Allen, my father, worked for the Bureau of Public Roads. He got around too, with his survey crews. I imagine them meeting, seated perhaps in adjacent booths in some little prairie-town tavern where beer was served in big German steins, both of them tired after a hot day on the road. Neither man was much of a drinker, but I imagine them drinking beer that night. I expect they may have gotten a little drunk. I'm sure they were reading. Perhaps they were reading the same book that night, the same author at least; they had similar tastes. Perhaps one of them noticed and that's how their conversation began.

They talked books and politics and baseball, the tribulations of the traveling life; they talked family, hopes and dreams. And then by some trick of fatigue and alcohol and anonymity, a window opened and their futures spread before them. Allen, youngest son of a French-Norwegian Minnesota homesteader, would marry his college sweetheart, have a son and a daughter, and be dead by the age of fifty. Bill, raised in New York, would have a daughter with a woman he did not marry, not long before his fortunes led him to California. He'd rarely see the child. A pretty little thing, she seemed happy enough without him. In time he would marry, have another daughter -- and then suddenly, word from New York. His old lover dead, his child left orphaned.

Ten years old. He crossed the country to get her.

Ten years old. He died and left her. What did it mean, this weird symmetry? To two slightly inebriated young men late at night in some nondescript little town a long way from home, I imagine it must have resonated with a powerful, mysterious significance.

* *

Not long after Easter the phonecalls begin. Two or three times an evening: "I can't find Miriam. She's missing, no one knows where she is." Patiently Natalie explains, or I do if she isn't at home. A stroke, yes I'm sure she's really dead, yes it was sudden (probably a blessing, I always think but don't say), no she didn't suffer (we hope this was true). Yes there was a funeral; we list off the family and friends who came. We do not mention cremation, or ashes waiting to be scattered at sea.

Some nights after it has been established that yes, Miriam is dead -- a stroke, sudden, she didn't suffer -- and at least figuratively buried, he asks why he isn't in his "regular room." At first we are puzzled. "You are in your regular room, Dad," Natalie says. "You don't live in LA now, remember?" He snorts impatiently. Of course he knows he doesn't still live in LA! He means the room in the Claremont Hotel with the view of the tennis courts, the one he and Miriam always took when they visited the Bay Area. "There's no view at all," he complains now, although there is, and quite a pretty one, of hills and trees. Natalie explains that he isn't at the Claremont, he's at the. . .and she carefully pronounces the nursing home's official name. It's where he lives now, she tells him. If he likes, she'll drive him to the Claremont on Sunday for the champagne brunch. It isn't far. He can watch the tennis.

"You killed your mother, you know," he says, "bringing her to This Place Up Here. Now you're trying to kill me. Other men's daughters care about them. You want my money, but you won't get it."

Two fathers -- a fancy. Take 2

Say they decide to leave the tavern, which is noisy, and go someplace else, perhaps the bar in the hotel where it turns out both of them are staying. They're talking books, they're talking politics, they're talking opera, they're talking the future and family. They both want kids. Perhaps they buy a bottle and take it to one of their rooms, where one man sprawls on the bed with its worn yellow-green chenille and lumpy pillow and the other perches awkwardly on the hard chair by the window, legs crossed ankle over knee, foot jiggling, both of them silent now as the night sighs opens like a vast black door and the rest of their lives reveal themselves like a movie you can't get up and leave. In a kind of waking dream I see them in that little room, the window open behind them and a warm breeze blowing in. I see their loneliness and their fear -- of a life broken off short, messy and painful as a green-stick fracture. Of a life attenuated, a late-day shadow growing longer, growing thinner until it disappears.

"She came into my life a stranger, almost a woman already. I never saw anyone, anything, so beautiful."

"I was gone from her life while she was still a child, just on the brink of adolescence. I never saw anyone, anything, so beautiful."

* * *

I have been in the mountains. I go for three weeks every September, by myself, hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in stages. My father used to tell me bear-and-fox-and-poison-ivy stories of walking the Appalachian Trail the summer after he finished college. We'd make the trip together, he used to say, to celebrate my own graduation. I walked it without him when the time came, walked it drunk and stoned and in the company of people who made too much noise. I've been a solitary hiker ever since.

My last night out I camped on a granite ledge just below the treeline overlooking two small lakes in the canyon below. I ate the last of my freeze-dried dinners and drank the last of my tea; I'd have cocoa in the morning before hiking on down to the place where I'd left my car. It would be a long hike, close to fifteen miles, but easy going with a light pack, and I looked forward to being home again.

The night was cold and brilliant, the sky pulsing like an arcade game, crisscrossed with shooting stars. I made a small fire and on it laid twigs of sage brought from lower elevations and marijuana from Telegraph Avenue, and watched the herbs flare up and curl and fall away to ash. I don't usually smoke but that night I rolled a small tight joint. The wind came up, batting the flames about, flattening them against the ring of blackened stones. I watched for my father's face in the embers and listened for his voice in the wind; I really wanted an epiphany, closure, revelation, a lottery winner, something. The wind blew up from the canyon, empty as a skull's eye-socket. I sprinkled a little brandy on the flames, where it flared with a satisfying blue hiss, and then sprinkled a little more and then a little more still into the dregs of my tea, but he knew better than to show up for the party.

When I return, Natalie tells me that Bill has suffered a series of small strokes. He is disoriented almost full-time now, convinced he is in "one of those places where they experiment on people." He whispers escape plans and gives her illegible notes to smuggle to the outside, where "Mom will know what to do." He paws at the nurses, straining even their practiced patience to the limit. He exposes himself, tells smutty, infantile jokes she was only the farmer's daughter, but all the horsemen knew'er! to Mrs. O'Donnell and Mrs. Langley who fortunately can't hear him.

Susan flies down from Spokane every weekend now. She visits a few hours and then leaves, shaken and tearful. "He doesn't seem to want me there," she says; "he acts like I'm interrupting something." Natalie has taken a leave of absence from her school and spends hours at the hospital every day, not that Bill seems to notice except to complain, occasionally and without much enthusiasm now, about his bad luck. Sometimes I go with her, sometimes not. "His heart is strong," she reports. "Physically, he's doing pretty well," has even gained a pound or two because she's been feeding him. Singing him the Russian song he taught her on the train so many years ago, and feeding him.

"Does he sing too?" I ask. It feels important. "Does he respond at all?"

She shakes her head. "No, he doesn't sing. Doesn't seem to notice, really. But he eats." I can't tell if she thinks the weight gain is good news or bad.

And then he falls. Nothing broken; nothing physical broken, but he has had enough. He stops speaking. Stops eating. When Nat offers the spoon now he clenches his teeth and jerks his head away. He lies on his bed, tiny and waxen in his hospital gown and diaper, bones thrusting up through his skin, glaring at her with cold, accusing eyes.

Susan's daughter and sons fly in from El Paso, Chicago, New York. They hover by the bed, waiting for a loving last word or at least acknowledgment from Grandpa. Not a flicker of eyelid from the old man. He knows they're there, I believe, but he has had enough. He refuses to respond.

On the morning that he died, I sat beside his bed in This Place Up Here, keeping his body company while Nat talked to the rabbi and we waited for the mortuary people to come. I hadn't thought I would want to see him, but it turned out I did, perhaps to make sure he was really dead. And he was. A gaunt little white-haired dead guy in a wrinkled blue cotton top. He'd smelled, earlier, but an aide had cleaned him up. I looked at him for a long time, trying to reconcile what I saw with the villain who had cast such a shadow over my life. Trying to feel something other than a weary relief that it was over. It was hard to do. Dead is dead, I thought. Dead is really dead.

I walked to the window and looked out, yawning and rubbing my eyes. A cab pulled into the parking lot. Susan got out and crossed the pavement with a purposeful stride. There'd be no cremation nonsense this time, she'd make sure of that. But the funeral and burial details were already taken care of, Nat and I taking turns on the phone most of yesterday, into the night.

Beyond the parking lot was a cyclone fence, and beyond the fence, in a backyard, a man and three little girls were playing a game I recognized as "Statue." My friends and I had played it too, long summer evenings with moths butting against the glass of the kerosene lanterns on our backyard picnic table. My father would grab a child by the wrists and swing her in a circle around him and then let her go, catapulting her staggering and stumbling across the grass. The game was to hold whatever position you ended up in when your momentum ran out, the more convoluted the better. You stayed perfectly still, like a statue, until all the kids had been whirled, and then you collapsed in a heap on the coarse clumpy grass and listened to the cars on the highway two blocks over swooshing like the ocean.

Natalie's and Susan's voices in the corridor. A male voice -- the rabbi? -- joined in, and then another. I heard footsteps, more voices and the whispery rumble of a gurney's wheels. When I looked again, the man and the little girls had gone inside.

Bill's eyes were open when I turned around. It gave me a start, because I was pretty sure they hadn't been before -- some kind of muscular contraction, I supposed. A bit of dust or lint had settled on one eyeball and stuck there. I almost expected him to blink. Carefully, trying to touch him as little as possible, I reached over and wiped the dust away. And then, using my thumbs the way I'd seen it done in movies, I closed his eyes.

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