The Boat Comes In |
Issue 16
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At the age of 91 my father was shutting down. Having him around for all those decades had made his presence a given in my life. His decline began with driving, and as the insurance companies always said, the accident happened within a few blocks of home.
John Fairbrother didn’t like being pushed. He was on his way to get an oil change, and he’d stopped at a red light to make a left turn. When the light turned green, the driver behind him must have been in a hurry and honked his horn. Annoyed, John stepped on the accelerator and steered into the path of an oncoming car. He explained later, in the Geordie accent his decades in America had never worn away, “Bloke ahint me tooted, and I just turned.” I got the call from my wife when I was in the middle of a meeting at PharmaCom about a new drug that showed promise for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers weren’t ready to turn me and the rest of the writing unit loose on news releases until test results were more definitive, but they did want us to do some articles hinting at breakthroughs to come. Annie taught anthropology at the university, so she could spend a fair amount of time in her home office, meaning she frequently got stuck with John’s problems while I was at work. “I’m really sorry to break into your day,” she said, “but John just totaled his new Corolla.” “Jesus,” I said. “Is he all right?” My colleagues glanced at me with raised eyebrows, then quickly turned their attention to the reports on the conference table. “He’s okay, miraculously. We’re at Benson Emergency.” “I’ll wind things up here as soon as I can,” I said, “and get over there.” “No rush. Really, he’s fine. How’s it look for the Alzheimer’s drug?” “I forget.” “Bad joke,” Annie said. The irony wasn’t lost on either of us, though my father certainly gave no signs of losing mental acuity. “The cop on the scene wasn’t even going to give John a ticket,” Annie said. “I told him I wished he would. So he did. And John told me he should maybe quit driving.” “Thanks, babe,” I said. “You may have saved some stranger’s life, never mind Dad’s.” * * * *
On the way home from the hospital John said, “I feel fine, you know. Champion. Maybe I can go back to driving once t’car gets fixed.”
“The car’s a write-off, Dad.” I glanced in my rearview mirror long enough to catch Annie’s eye-roll from the back seat. “I’ll be glad to handle the insurance settlement.” Ultimately, the three of us agreed that John’s driving days should come to an end. I helped make the decision less painful for my always-frugal father by getting the insurance company to settle for pretty close to the original price John had paid for the Corolla. “How am I meant to get around?” John asked in a last attempt to forestall the inevitable. I held up a hand. “We’ll drive you wherever you need to go, Dad.” John lived in an apartment complex two or three miles from our downtown condo. He’d been unwilling to move out of the apartment, which was really too big for him, after my mother’s death three years earlier. Not because of any sentimentality about my mother Eloise, I knew, but because John valued control. The complex catered to elderly residents, but John didn’t like being subject to the timetable or the authority of its shuttle service. John’s driving involved not much more than trips to the supermarket, doctor’s appointments, and weekend visits to our place to watch baseball or football, and of course the occasional Newcastle United Magpies game on one of the streaming services he’d never think of paying for. Nonetheless, we knew life was going to get more complicated. But what else could we do? * * * *
Initially, we timed shopping trips for weekends when I was available or weekdays when Annie had no classes or office hours. John would trundle around the market with his own cart and rendezvous with Annie or me at the checkout counter. Annie preferred the days when I could join them and help carry in the groceries. John preferred to shop on Wednesday, Senior Discount Day. After a while, though, John decided to give us a shopping list and stay in his apartment to read or watch television.
“I don’t know why they charge me for all these shows,” he’d say about his bare-bones cable package. “All I watch are the three, what d’ye call ‘em, networks. Never bother with all those strange channels.” Except when you come to visit us, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I wish you’d get out more. Going shopping is good exercise.” “Annie does the needful,” John would respond. End of discussion. So, Annie would dutifully take the penciled lists, written in John’s meticulous old-fashioned cursive, bring back the groceries and carry them in, then show him the receipt so he could write her a check, just as meticulous but in ink. “I get the feeling he’s hoping every time I’ll forget to ask him to pay up.” Annie shook her head ruefully. “Fat chance, after schlepping all the groceries in.” “I’m sorry I can’t help more often,” I said with a frisson of guilt. “Nothing for it,” she said. “You’re tied up all day. And I’m an academic, so I don’t really work for a living.” This last remark was our running joke about Annie’s colleagues, almost all of whom insisted they worked an eighty-hour week. “At least his lists are easy to read,” I said. Annie laughed. “They can be cryptic, though. His list the other day included muffins. ‘What kind?’ I asked. He almost did a double-take, then said, ‘English, of course.’” I laughed, too. “I’d like to see him get into that with one of the employees at the market.” * * * *
I would drive over to the apartment complex on weekends and bring John back to watch sports. On the fifteen-minute trip John would keep up a running analysis of other drivers’ shortcomings.
“Look at that oud wife,” he said on one occasion. “Divena ken enough to signal a change of lane.” I glanced at the other car as it slowed to make a right turn. “Dad,” I said. “That old woman is probably younger than I am.” But I knew John’s self-image was of the ballroom-dancing Lothario he’d been sixty years ago in England and for several decades afterward when he and Eloise had immigrated to the States with their young son: me. Not that I had ever known my father to stray, or even betray much interest in sex, though one day a couple of months before the traffic accident John had alluded to another “oud wife” in the apartment across the hall who kept inviting him in for coffee. John had snorted. “I think she’s just ettlin to get lucky.” On his visits to our condo, he and I would eat snacks, washed down with beer and an occasional shot of single-malt scotch. Though I’d take a scotch with my father now and again, I never drank the beer, which I stocked especially for John. Avoiding the carbs was one of my own concessions to aging, even though John always eyed my diet soft drinks with disapproval. “This is champion beer,” John said one day, and it was, made at a local micro-brewery. “It’s no’ Broon,” he said, referring to his beloved Newcastle Brown Ale, “but it’s no’ bad.” “It’s readily available,” I pointed out. “We get it at the market. You could, too.” John grunted. “If I bought it, I’d just drink it.” The beer he bought for himself was Miller Lite, a step up from ditchwater. But it came cheap, in a case of thirty cans, the extra six tinted orange so they wouldn’t be missed. And his scotch was J & B. No tempting malt whisky for him, except on weekends. “This cheese is good and all,” John said of our favorite Irish cheddar. “We get that at the market, too,” I said. This brought on another ambiguous grunt. Annie would usually head off to Macy’s while John and I watched the Tigers, the Lions, the Red Wings, now and then the Pistons, and whenever possible the Magpies. Then she’d return, often sneaking her purchases into the house so John wouldn’t realize my second wife was such an extravagant woman. “He likes the way we live,” Annie said one day after I had taken John back to his apartment. “And he can afford everything we can. He just can’t summon the will to do it.” “Tell me about it,” I said. “He never spends an extra dime on himself. Or anyone else.” Annie laughed. “He just can’t bring himself to loosen up and enjoy himself unless he’s here.” “I guess it’s not going to happen now,” I said. “Not at his age.” * * * *
“John is so lucky to have Dr. Diefendorfer,” Annie said some months later. “With his congestive heart failure and phlebitis he’d likely never have had the last few years to enjoy if Dr. D hadn’t been so vigilant about tuning him up.”
“I hope Dad’s all right at the moment,” I said. “He was in a big rush to get to the restroom.” We’d just arrived at Food Waltz, a newly trendy restaurant where we were treating Dad to brunch after a visit to the young doctor who’d been our own family physician for ten years, and who—we were happy to note—was enough younger than all of us to make his being around for the foreseeable future a reasonable bet. Dr. D’s latest diagnosis was that John’s pacemaker was working nicely, and that his apparently grapefruit-sized prostate wouldn’t be an issue at his age. “More men his age die with prostate cancer than from it,” Dr. D had told us. Of more concern was John’s general mobility, exacerbated by phlebitis that would be more dangerous to operate on than leave alone, and by his gradually diminishing kidney function. “Ready to order?” A rail-thin young waiter with Kohl-lined eyes smiled down at us, pad and pencil poised. “We’re waiting for our guest,” Annie said. “He should be back shortly.” “No problem. I’ll be back soon, too.” The kid grinned, turned on the heels of his earth-friendly shoes, and walked off. “Nice that we’re not causing a problem,” Annie said. Food Waltz was located conveniently, but was not one of our favorite places. “The only problem around here is pronouncing ‘scone’ properly,” I said and got up. “I’m going to check on Dad.” I made my way past murals of babies nestled under cabbage leaves and fields full of other primary-colored vignettes that celebrated organic farming. No pesky pesticides. Nor pesky pests. When I got into the antiseptic-smelling men’s room, it gave no sign of occupation save for one stall with a closed door. “Dad?” I said. “Edward?” John’s voice sounded oddly tremulous from the closed stall. I approached the door. “It’s me, Dad. Are you okay?” “Edward,” John said again, as if fixing it in his mind. He went on reluctantly. “I’ve messed myself. I’ve peed myself. I couldn’t get in here on time.” My heart quickened. This was the beginning of something, I realized. “How about your trousers?” I asked. “They’re okay. Damp. But my underwear’s soaked.” John spoke each word like the admission of an atrocity. “Push the underwear under the door, Dad.” I got a sheaf of recycled paper towels from a dispenser. “I’ll get rid of it.” “I could wash them,” John said in a firmer tone, his concern for thrift a lurch toward normalcy. “No need to throw away a good pair of briefs. Maybe you can find a plastic bag.” “Not here, Dad.” I wrapped John’s sodden tightie-whities in paper towels and dumped them in a waste container. Adult diapers, I thought. We’d need to add them to the next shopping list. The rest of brunch was somber. Not even the chance to correct the waiter’s pronunciation of “scone” could cheer John. “I’ve told yon fellow before,” he said. “Skahn, not skohne. Then he corrects me. They’re not really scones, anyway. More like shortcake.” Annie and I exchanged looks. I’d tell her later about the toilet crisis, though I knew her always-sensitive nose had registered the faint whiff of urine. * * * *
I recognized how humiliated John must feel as the infirmities of age mounted. On another day he admitted that he’d been unable to lower himself slowly onto the toilet seat in our main bathroom. The impact of his weight had caused the seat to split down the middle.
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You keep track of the Magpies and I’ll drive over to VanEyck’s for a new toilet seat. I’ll have it replaced before Annie gets back from shopping.” “Magpies are like me,” he said, “bound for relegation.” He was right; the United were about to lose their fourth straight match, this time to the upstart Brighton and Hove Albion side that had recently won promotion to the Premier League. As I drove to the hardware store, I resolved to step up my own exercise program by including a few more deep knee bends. I bought the new toilet seat; then, before returning home, I stopped at a medical appliance store and bought a lightweight but sturdy foldable toilet-seat frame John could use at home or during his weekend visits. The frame cost a hundred dollars, but I knew better than to expect reimbursement from my father, and I couldn’t be bothered with helping him to make an insurance claim. Life was developing enough added complications. John had always taken pride in his independence and general fitness, even though I had never known him to take exercise other than an occasional walk—his afternoon constitutional around the apartment complex—or lugging groceries in after a shopping trip. Among the family photographs on our bookshelves were two similar shots of John, trim and handsome, one in his British Army uniform, field service cap at a jaunty angle, the other in stylish pleated slacks and sweater, an Ascot at his neck and his hair Brylcreemed to a leathery sheen worthy of Noel Coward. In each shot he was leaning against a wall, one leg insouciantly crossed before the other. Dandyish images of masculine self-confidence. Thinking of those photographs reminded me of our trip to England the summer after my mother’s death. We’d planned to scatter Eloise’s ashes, and had decided on a visit with our relatives, who lived in the Lake District in Keswick not far from Beatrix Potter’s cottage. We told ourselves the reunion might help distract John from grief, though he had reacted to his wife’s death with his customary stoicism. But he was happy enough to join us. * * * *
We’d landed at Gatwick on an uncharacteristically hot English day. Discovering that our four-door Hyundai with automatic shift wouldn’t be available from the rental office until the following morning, we opted for a night in an air-conditioned room in the airport’s Holiday Inn, where we availed ourselves of the swimming pool and later a bottle of good Champagne. Frugal as always, John took an un-air-conditioned room at the same hotel and decided to visit some old haunts from when he’d been stationed in the area during World War II.
Though he always said his unit had expected an imminent German invasion, John had described many more instances of non-military adventures, always obliquely alluding to various encounters with women, both young and middle-aged. With Eloise safely ensconced in the Lake District and working in a Northern munitions factory, John had apparently found ample wartime opportunity to indulge himself, to use the English idiom, as “a bit of a lad.” This hazy personal history was difficult for me to reconcile with what seemed like my father’s almost fanatically asexual existence over the past couple of decades. “Your parents obviously had a sex-life,” Annie said. “Otherwise, how do we explain your presence?” “You’re obviously right,” I agreed. “But you couldn’t prove it by my experience. I do remember hearing what might have been my mother’s cry of passion one night from my parents’ room in the apartment house they managed in Detroit. But it could just as easily have been her reaction to dropping something heavy on her foot.” “I don’t think you’ve paid enough attention.” Annie shook her head at my obliviousness. “He’s mentioned enough stuff obliquely to me to suggest he has a past, and not just with your mother.” And, indeed, when John returned from his pub crawl around the environs of Gatwick, he regaled us with a story of how he and a couple of his barracks-mates had been detailed to do some work for a well-to-do widow. She had apparently cooked them meals, and something in his tone in describing occasions on which he’d worked at the house alone made Annie raise her eyebrows at me. On the other side of the ledger, his most vivid and pungently-described recollection—triggered by his stop at a hotel that was still in business—involved his having been stiffed on a bar bill nearly sixty years earlier by a mooching lance-corporal. “And to make up for it he’s been stiffing you on bills ever since,” Annie said as we settled in our king-sized bed at the Holiday Inn. We weren’t exactly amazed to see John paying cash for his room the next morning—he couldn’t stand the idea of being “in debt” to a credit card company. But driving north later that day in the rented Hyundai, we were horrified to learn that the cash was coming, not from his redeeming traveler’s checks, but from a money-belt stuffed with around two thousand dollars. He probably wore it to bed. * * * *
Finally in Keswick, we settled in a bed and breakfast place, The Roses, where our stifling room was right next to the street entrance and the late-returning guests seemed mostly drunk. Meanwhile, Dad conducted himself like a visiting dignitary in his sister Ruth’s semi-detached bungalow and treated her ex-miner husband Tom Carricker like an old family retainer. Ruth’s house and our bed and breakfast quarters featured similar décor, heavy on Toby jugs, music boxes, flowered wallpaper, and different-patterned carpet in each room. Fawlty Towers sprang to mind.
Much to my surprise, the Carrickers, unfazed by my father’s inflated bearing, held a family gathering attended by Ruth and Tom’s children and their spouses, as well as their teenaged grandchildren, and the occasion turned out to be a revelation. Strong tea was on offer, of course, but so were Newcastle Brown Ale, whisky, sherry, ginger wine, and soft drinks for the youngsters; the family also provided a variety of sweetmeats including trifle, rhubarb pie, Shrewsbury cake, treacle tarts, and, yes, scones both plain and currant, pronounced accurately, with lots of fresh-churned butter and homemade jam. And as the evening wore on, the crowded living room of the little house rang with unaccompanied song. Ruth Carricker sang in her clear alto, joined in harmony by her husband and her daughter Sheena. “Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, Blow the wind south o’er the bonny blue sea; Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, Blow bonny breeze my lover to me. They told me last night there were ships in the offing, And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea; But my eye could not see it, wherever might be it, The barque that is bearing my lover to me.” I saw Annie transfixed by the unexpected beauty of the moment, which brought up a flood of associations from my own recent memory. Before she died, my mother had requested that I sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” at her wake, and I had done so, introducing almost the only sentimental note into the occasion. I’d sung it again before our arrival at Ruth and Tom’s, when we’d stopped to scatter Eloise’s ashes at the Cumbrian stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Sisters. And now I sang it yet again for the family: “Will ye go, lassie, go, And we’ll all go thegither, Tae pull wild mountain thyme All around the bloomin’ heather? Will ye go, lassie, go?” Annie, always easily touched, was dabbing at her eyes by the time I finished singing. And then, without request or remark, John began to sing, in his rumbling bass, a song he might not have sung since my childhood in Detroit. “Dance to your daddy, my little laddie. Dance to your daddy, my little man. You shall have a fish and you shall have a fin; You shall have a codling when the boat comes in. You shall have a haddock boiled in a pan. Dance to your daddy, my little man.” Shocked, I had to excuse myself and make a trip to the tiny bathroom with its miniature bathtub—“Not big enough to drown a mouse,” as a querulous guest at Fawlty Towers observed. I stood at the minute washbasin to rinse the tears from my face before returning to the party. I’d been quite unprepared for my father’s uncharacteristic tenderness. John certainly felt no residual warmth for the memory of his own long-dead father, from whom he’d been estranged for most of his life. I abruptly recalled my four-year-old self standing before a couple of neighborhood boys on a Keswick sidewalk. Dressed like me in short pants and sleeveless Fair Isle sweaters—“jumpers” we’d called them back then—they’d pointed out a dour-looking old man with a nicotine-stained handlebar moustache, wearing a greasy-looking overcoat and a brown cloth cap pulled down over his thick white hair. “That’s your granddad,” one of them said. The old man shuffled along the sidewalk and let himself into a semidetached flat only two doors down the street from where my parents and I lived. How could I not have known—or been told—about the existence of another grandfather in my life? Stomach fluttering, I’d knocked on the door of the flat, just above the brass plate that bore the name Jas. Fairbrother. When the door finally opened, the old man looked down at me without speaking. For a few moments I stood silently, registering his collarless shirt, the broken veins in his weathered cheeks, and the large pores in his nose. “I’m your grandson,” I finally said. “Eddie.” The old man had stared at me for a moment or two, then jerked his head in what might have been a nod, grunted, and closed the door. Later, I asked what had caused the estrangement from my grandfather. John’s mouth drew down at the corners. “My mother died early,” he said. “Cancer. I left school at fifteen and got work on the docks in Newcastle. I turned over my pay to him every week. Then I had a chance for an apprenticeship at an engineering firm. He wouldn’t part with the fifty pounds I needed for my fee. So I left and got a room at a boardinghouse in the city. Never spoke with him again.” And when I was ten, and we were living in a Detroit apartment, my father got a Transatlantic call from Ruth, informing him that James Fairbrother had died. By then I knew adults assumed that children either weren’t paying attention to their serious conversations, or simply couldn’t understand adult matters. But, listening to the one-sided conversation, I realized that Ruth was discussing funeral costs. And my father’s definitive pronouncement, which ended the call, was, “Don’t expect me to spend a penny on him.” We hadn’t been back to England since the trip to scatter Eloise’s ashes, and now I could see that John wasn’t likely to return except in the same way Mum had found the final embrace of Long Meg and Her Sisters. * * * *
“How’s the Alzheimer’s drug shaping up?”
Annie and I had just finished hearing Dan Diefendorfer’s summation of my own health—we always attended each other’s checkups—and this one had given no cause for concern beyond a borderline cholesterol count, so now the doctor was catching up on my work at PharmaCom. “The R and D people have run into some snags,” I said. “Unacceptable side-effects. But they’re still hopeful something will break within the next year or so.” “Too bad they can’t come up with something to help John deal with his infirmities,” Annie said. “Alzheimer’s is one thing,” Dr. D said, “but old age is finally just a matter of the machine wearing out. Pumps and hoses and generators. John’s had a good long life, and you two have helped keep him as well as can be.” “You certainly have,” Annie said. “He might have been gone five years ago if you hadn’t given him such good care.” Dr. D spread his hands. “It may be time to think about a hospice. I’d recommend The Arbors.” “His problems are really just physical,” I said. “His mind’s sound enough. I’ve been trying to get him to write a memoir about his younger days. I thought it might help give him a sense of purpose. And I’d like to know more about the past. Before it evaporates.” “Good idea. It’ll be good for his cognitive functions.” Dr. D stuck out his hand to signal the end of the appointment. “Who knows if he’ll ever do it?” I said. “You can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to.” “And time’s running out,” Dr. D said. Annie silently touched my shoulder as we walked out to the parking lot. * * * *
A week or so later we installed a hospital bed in John’s apartment and arranged for a visiting nurse. John was no longer able to move around without assistance, and he needed help washing himself, even in his walk to the shower stall. The teak stool in the corner let him sit, but getting him to his feet again was another challenging task.
The nurse, a cheerful Jamaican woman named Sylvie, was helpful. But she often arrived late to John’s apartment, and sometimes not at all. I tried to be on hand when Sylvie was there, partly to be of assistance, but mainly to forestall John’s saying something outrageous to her. I needn’t have worried. “That poor man,” she said in her musical lilt one day when I was seeing her out into the parking lot. “Most of his energy’s going just to keep breathing and taking care of business.” When I returned to the apartment, I found John distressed by having “messed the bed,” as he put it, speaking with effort. I helped him to the bathroom, which I found more taxing than I’d anticipated, helped him take his pajamas off, and got him into the shower. Cleansing John of shit and piss simply took its place among the array of new tasks that had to be performed. I was touching parts of my father I’d scarcely glimpsed over the decades, let alone laid hands on. Babies, old people. “As it was in the beginning,” I thought. The monotonous human cycle of birth, life, and death, with ours much less unusual than any of us would like to believe. Only what came between the beginning and end had any unique particularity. Ultimately, though, we were reduced to the elemental. Sylvie certainly earned her meager pay. When I finally got John cleaned and changed, then settled back in the hospital bed on fresh sheets, I drew a chair beside the bed and sat holding his hand, which felt desiccated and papery in my own. All the snotty things Annie and I had said over the past couple of years tumbled in my mind. I squeezed John’s hand, and the old man opened his eyes, Before I formed the thought I found myself saying, “I love you, Dad.” John focused on me for the first time in days. With a breathy effort, he sai, “I love you, too, son.” I couldn’t remember ever having heard those words from my father. As my eyes blurred with tears, John’s fingers tightened on my hand and he rasped, “This is taking too long.” As I sat there feeling the magnitude of the moment, John added, “By the way, you’ll find a hundred twenty-dollar bills in a check-box in the top dresser drawer. Don’t forget.” Then he closed his eyes. I realized that, however debilitated his body might be, the father I’d always known was still somewhere inside. And I was sure the money belt was tucked away, too, probably still crammed with dollars and pound notes. * * * *
Two days later, John closed his eyes and stopped talking. His breathing became labored and stertorous. He was, indeed, shutting down.
Annie called The Arbors, and to my surprise found that the usually wait-listed hospice was able to find an immediate place for my father. I called an ambulance service and John’s transfer from his apartment was accomplished with a measure of care and ease by two linebacker-sized med-techs and a gurney. Both Annie and I were impressed by the thoughtfulness and solicitude of the staff at the hospice, and by the quiet, cleanliness, and attractiveness of the place, both outside and inside. With its blonde wooden beams, soft lighting, and Swedish modern furniture, it looked more like a Scandinavian lodge than a holding tank for the doomed. Before doing anything else, the staff bathed John, transferring him from the gurney to a pulley arrangement that lowered him into a tank filled with gently moving warm water. I mentally compared this confident efficiency to my own fumbling attempts to clean John in the shower. After the bath, and with a minimum of effort, several Arbors staff members situated John in a pleasant sunlit room, where he looked much more at home than he had in the makeshift-seeming hospital bed in his own apartment. After we took care of the paperwork for admission, the director, a smartly-dressed, attractive woman in her forties, said, “Stay as long as you like. And if you want, we can set up another bed in your father’s room.” Then she added in a kindly tone, “Of course you’ve probably been putting a lot of things on hold lately, and you’ll want to catch up on those.” As we walked to our SUV in the parking lot, Annie said, “I thought I was a lot better at concealing my expressions.” “Me, too.” I poked her arm. “I guess she sees a lot of them.” * * * *
That night Annie and I made love for the first time in over a week, guilty and grateful and desperate. Then we both fell asleep as if we’d been shot with tranquilizer darts.
The trilling of my cellphone roused us both from our deep exhausted sleep into darkness. The phone’s timeline showed 4:12 a.m. as I answered the call which was, of course, from the hospice. Beside me in the bed Annie switched on the light on her nightstand and took hold of my forearm. The soft-voiced woman on the other end of the line identified herself as Virginia Kovacs. When I confirmed my own identity, the woman said, “I am so sorry, Mr. Fairbrother. Your father slipped away a few minutes ago. I check on all our guests regularly through the night, and I try to watch the signs so that family members can be here at the end. I’m so sorry.” She sounded genuinely stricken. “Please don’t feel bad, Mrs. Kovacs. We knew this was coming. We’ve said our goodbyes, and he was ready to go.” As I spoke, I registered the irony of my trying to comfort this stranger at the death of my father. “We’ll be there shortly,” I said, realizing we no longer had to rush. When we arrived at the hospice, Mrs. Kovacs was waiting just inside the main entrance. She was a plump woman in her sixties with a round face molded into an expression that combined both sympathy and anxiety. Once again, I reassured her that our not being present for John’s last breath had done us no injury. Then I went into my father’s room, leaving the two women in the hallway, knowing that Annie would not want to join me. John’s features were still indisputably those I’d come to know so well over the decades. But he didn’t look as if he were asleep. He was dead. Absent. Gone. The neural network that had made him endearing, whimsical, intransigent, miserly, formidable, infuriating, was no longer part of the world, except for what still endured in my own sparking circuits. Unable to squeeze out any tears, I touched the back of my father’s cold hand, muttered, “Nothing more,” and went back out into the hall, where Annie watched me over Mrs. Kovacs’ shoulder, closed her eyes, and nodded twice. She looked tired, but beautiful, and I felt a tear trickle down one cheek. Later, after we’d arranged for death certificates, selected a funeral parlor, opted for cremation according to John’s wish, taken care of the logistics of a life come to an inevitable and orderly end, we once again climbed into my Toyota Highlander and sat quietly for a few moments before setting off for home. My mother had died when Annie and I had been at coincidental professional meetings in Manhattan, I at a palliative care conference on behalf of PharmaCom, and Annie moderating an anthropological panel on ritual practices of Pacific Coast Indian tribes. We’d cut short our meetings and returned to the Midwest. Eloise had been cremated, and John had pretty much left all the arrangements to us, so we’d opted for no minister, no service, nothing at the funeral parlor, just a party at our place with a chance for friends and family to visit and reminisce. James and Alan, Annie’s sons from her first marriage, taught at universities like their mother, but they and their families lived so far away and were so busy that I insisted they not try to attend. And now, thinking of John’s leavetaking, I leaned back in the SUV’s driver’s seat and said, “We need to let Jim and Al off the hook. They have way too many demands on their time at home.” “I suppose you’re right,” Annie agreed, “though I know they’ll feel bad.” She frowned. “I wish you were able to keep Rhonda from being there.” Rhonda was my ex-wife. “She walked right into our house for your mother’s wake and never said a word to me, never even made eye contact.” “But you were the perfect hostess anyway. The hell with Rhonda.” After a moment or two Annie said, “What would John want for a sendoff? The same as we did for your mother?” “I think so,” I agreed. I took her hand. “Poor Annie,” I said. “You’ve been an orphan for a long time. And now you’ve gotten stuck with pitching in on all of this. I feel as if I’ve hardly done a thing for you.” “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “My mother died before we even met. And you were wonderful when my father died—and my Aunt Nellie and Uncle Sam. Don’t let me hear you say something stupid like that again.” “Yes, ma’am.” “I can’t remember your father ever saying anything about religion,” Annie said, looking at me inquiringly. “He seemed to live pretty much in the material world.” I grinned. “John and Madonna,” I said. “Interesting combination.” “You know what I mean,” Annie said, laughing. “He seemed to look at everything from a purely rational viewpoint. Nothing mystical or metaphysical.” “Not like your Indians up in Vancouver,” I said, “that’s for sure. We had the religion talk one day when I was in high school. Sitting in the car the way we are now. It didn’t last long. I asked him what he thought about God and the afterlife. He said, ‘You can believe in magic if you want. I don’t.’ End of discussion.” * * * *
After the cremation, with less time-pressure than that exerted by traditional observances, we decided to have John’s wake on the following weekend, assisted by funeral home personnel and catered by one of our favorite restaurants. “Just as long as it’s not Food Waltz,” Annie said. The decision gave us time to deal with legal matters and go through John’s apartment to decide what to do with his household goods, as well as selecting what we might want to hang onto as keepsakes.
John’s will, a simple document written in his beautiful calligraphic cursive, left everything to me. Never eager to spend money, either on himself or anyone else, he had accumulated well over a quarter of a million dollars, mostly in his savings account and several certificates of deposit. We found the check box in the top dresser drawer filled with two thousand dollars in crisp twenties; and, unsurprisingly, in a lower corner of the same dresser we uncovered the infamous money-belt, which indeed still had over five hundred dollars and nearly two hundred pound notes left over from the trip to England. We had picked up most of the travel expenses for the three of us, except on the few occasions when John had “stood treat,” as he put it, at occasions involving family and friends, ostentatiously flourishing cash like a visiting millionaire. “If it’s okay with you,” I said to Annie, “we’ll send five thousand to Ruth and Tom in Keswick. Dad would never have done it, but I know they could use the money. We’ll do the same for Jim and Alan.” “It’s too bad,” Annie said, “he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy what he saved. I think toward the end he knew his daughter-in-law would wind up blowing most of it on frivolous things—like us and our kids. I wish he’d spent it on himself. Or Tom and Ruth. Or the boys.” “I think one of the reasons he lived so long,” I said, “was knowing he couldn’t take it with him. So he decided to stay with it.” I turned my attention to a box of photographs, hundreds of crimp-edged black and white pictures and faded color shots, many dating back fifty years or more. Snapshots of my parents and me as a child, English relatives and friends, vacation pictures taken on the shores of Lake Windermere, postcards, old birthday cards, photos and congratulatory cards from John and Eloise’s fiftieth wedding anniversary party, which Annie and I had planned and made happen. Pictures of Jim and Alan’s graduation parties and weddings, their children and in-laws. An occasional heart-catching discovery, like a portrait of my mother at about ten years of age, one of the few photos I’d seen in which Eloise looked relatively happy, rather than worried. Why had I been so fixated on my father? I wondered, realizing I’d never solve the mystery of my mother’s habitually melancholy expression, enigmatic as the Mona Lisa. I wiped my eyes and forced my attention to the brown paper shopping bag sitting at my feet into which I’d been discarding stuff we knew was, as John would have put it, “surplus to requirements.” I was trying to decide about pitching a handful of pictures featuring people I’d either forgotten or only dimly remembered, when Annie said, “You never told me you’d had a brother.” Her tone wasn’t accusatory, just puzzled. But she was no more puzzled than I. “Brother?” was the only response I could muster. Annie waved a piece of paper at me. I set down the box of photographs and took the document from her. Sure enough, it was a birth certificate recording the entry into the world of one Thomas Fairbrother, weighing six pounds, thirteen ounces. The place was Keswick, the parents John Fairbrother, metalworker, and Eloise, his wife. The birth had occurred some seven months after John and Eloise’s wedding day. The baby had died some four days later. “I never knew a thing about this,” I said, feeling as if my head were enclosed in some sort of buzzing globe. I set the certificate on the flimsy metal table next to my chair. “He must have died as a result of being premature.” “Six pounds, thirteen ounces?” Annie said. “Pretty sturdy for a preemie. James and Alan weren’t much heavier than that, and they’re big boys, like you. Maybe it was something else.” A silence stretched between us as we contemplated the likelihood of another familiar story. I finally broke it. “I wonder what other surprises are lurking in the nooks and crannies.” “Well,” Annie said, “there’s this. It was under the cash box. It looks as if he actually wrote the memoir you were always nagging him about.” She handed me a letter-sized spiral notebook. The cover bore the words, “I Remember.” I opened the book and looked at the first page. The graceful handwriting was unmistakably my father’s, and the narrative began with an epigraph, a poem by Thomas Hood from which John had obviously taken his title: I remember, I remember The house where I was born, And the little window where The sun peeped in at morn, And the tall yew trees so high, Whose feathery tops would brush the sky. I remember, I remember. I began leafing through the early pages, not really registering a great deal except that my father, unsurprisingly, wrote clearly and with an eye for telling detail. I realized that there were, after all, ways in which I took after him. “Check the last page,” Annie said, her tone carefully neutral. I glanced at her. She always liked to know how a book was going to end before she started reading. I flipped through the narrative, which was about thirty pages long, to the final page. Having begun with his earliest memories, John ended the account with what he referred to as his marriage, a civil ceremony before a magistrate, without reference to Eloise, noting that it had endured for fifty-seven years. But there on the page was the sentence I knew had caught Annie’s eye: “I had been trapped into a marriage I neither wanted nor could afford.” Another sentence noted that “with the ceremony, dinner, theatre, drinks at the King’s Arms, then the honeymoon, I spent all my savings.” “Sentimental soul, wasn’t he?” I looked at Annie, who regarded me steadily. “Well, I never thought it was a match made in Heaven.” I started to lay the notebook on the metal table when a small loose piece of paper fluttered from between the pages to the floor. I picked it up and looked at it. The writing was my father’s, but faded and in a smaller, more cramped hand, the ink faded with age. “What is it?” Annie asked. I twitched the sheet in my hand. “Poetry and song are becoming a motif,” I said. “Read it,” Annie said. “It’s called ‘The Nameless Lass,’” I said, my voice constricted. Then I began to read aloud. “There’s nane may ever guess or trow My bonnie lassie’s name. There’s nane may ken the humble spot My lassie ca’s her hame. But though my lass is nameless, Her kin o’ low degree, Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pure, And aey she’s dear to me. Her heart is warm, her thoughts are pure, And aey she’s dear to me. “He used to sing it as a party piece,” I said, feeling empty and untethered. When I was finally able to go on, I added, “I always thought he was singing about my mother. Now, who knows? The hits just keep coming.” Annie sniffed. “Johnny, we hardly knew ye.” * * * *
After the wake, when everyone else had left, Annie and I sat down in our living room with a half-empty bottle of champagne.
“Nice work, kiddo,” I said, raising my glass. “Nice work, yourself,” Annie said, and we drank to that. “Thank goodness Rhonda didn’t show up.” We drank to that, too. “I see nobody was tempted by Dad’s leftover Miller Lite,” I said. Annie shook her head. “I couldn’t even get the kid we hired to pour champagne to take it off our hands. He said it was the same swill his father drinks.” “So here we are,” I said, “orphans together. It’ll be hard getting used to his not looking over my shoulder, literally or figuratively.” “You’re not like him, you know,” Annie said. “You’re loving and generous. And you’ve forgiven him.” “Forgiven him?” “For being who he was.” “He wasn’t so bad.” Annie poured us the last of the champagne and, raising her glass to me, recited, “Dance to your daddy, my little laddie. Dance to your daddy, my little man.” “I guess the boat has finally come in,” I said. We drained our glasses and looked at each other. Then Annie got up. “I think,” she said, “there’s another bottle in the fridge.” END
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Arnold Johnston’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Arnie’s recent books of poetry are In and Out: Love Poems (Kelsay Books, 2025), The Infernal Now (2022), and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been (2020). His two novels are Swept Away (2021) and The Witching Voice, A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns (2009). His plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife Deborah Ann Percy, have won over 300 productions, readings, awards, and publications across the country and internationally. Arnie taught for many years at Western Michigan University, where he co-founded the creative writing program and founded the playwriting program.
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