So Much for That (28 page)

Even at half-steam, Fraser Paper was still exuding its heady perfume. In the parking lot of Androscoggin Valley Hospital, Shep took a big lungful of acrid air: nostalgia. Faced in flat polished granite, this wasn’t the grungy Victorian hospital of the same name in which he’d had his tonsils out at ten. With an atmosphere of suffering, stringency, and boiling sheets, the original Androscoggin Valley had seemed more honest, more like a real hospital. Constructed in the 1970s, the new one had a municipal innocence about it, less like a building where they’d cut off your leg than one where they’d renew your driver’s license. Neater, cleaner, and brighter, it also seemed deceiving—like the blazing sunshine of winter mornings in New Hampshire that could look so inviting, until you stepped outdoors and were slapped in the face with a wind chill of thirty below.

By the time he was directed to the room where his father was still sleeping off the anesthesia from surgery that morning, Shep was no longer thinking about Medicare. They’d had their disagreements, but Gabriel Knacker had always been formidable. His resonant powers of oratory had been mismatched with his modest congregation, the minister’s intense engagement with issues like world poverty and apartheid in South Africa out of sync with his parishioners’ more immediate concerns with keeping their jobs at the mills. As a father, he had wielded his judgment with the same heavy-handedness with which other dads had slapped their kids’ behinds, and the sting had lasted longer than any spanking. Shep’s greatest dread as a boy was of his father’s “disappointment.” As a one-time handyman magnate who had demoted himself to functionary in his own company, no doubt he’d become a permanent disappointment. But then, Gabe Knacker wouldn’t care if his son
owned the company or worked for it. A corporate entity, if not outright wicked, was at best morally neutral, and good men doing nothing in the minister’s view was tantamount to wickedness. Arguments about how if the entire population of the Western world joined the Peace Corps we would
all
starve went predictably nowhere, though Shep had won grudging acknowledgment for having at least provided employment for numerous hard-up Hispanic immigrants. Considering that he couldn’t remember his father ever expressing sympathy for people of European extraction in his own country, it was a tribute that his white, American congregation had put up with the guy.

The moment must arrive for most grown children sooner or later: a startling apprehension that a parent is old. So abiding is the authoritative imprint from childhood that this realization might commonly descend years after said parent has appeared glaringly geriatric to everyone else. Yet however routine the epiphany, it did not feel routine. Washing his hands at the disinfectant dispenser outside his father’s door presaged Shep Knacker’s first belated reckoning with the stark, objective reality of paternal decline.

The looming figure of his boyhood took up an incongruously small amount of room on the narrow bed; maybe Shep should have tried to beef up his father’s steady diet of grilled cheese sandwiches after all. His father’s skin had a watery translucence that it had no doubt achieved years before and Shep had declined to notice; he did not enjoy noting it now. Well into his sixties, the Reverend had boasted a remarkably dark, full head of hair—which had somehow enabled his son to fail to observe that in the last decade the man had, finally, started to bald, and the wisps that remained had, finally, turned white. The hand that clutched the sheet was crinkled, spotted, and slight, and presumably this transformation of the broad, vaulting extremity once raised weekly in benediction had not happened overnight.

Shep and his father had fought plenty—over Shep’s “spurning of higher education” and thus “wasting his fine mind,” his selling out to Mammon, his tawdry pursuit of an apostasy of an “Afterlife.” (Saving up to help the Third World poor would have been one thing; hoarding
cash to kick back with pineapple drinks was quite another.) Yet the clash between generations was a battle that no self-respecting son would hope to win. Shep did not want his father to capitulate by dint of mere years on the planet, which converted stealthily from advantage to handicap while your back was turned; victory through youth alone was cheap. He did not want his father to stop being frightening, or intimidating, or infuriating, or insuperable. If he did not want his father to be old, that was only by way of saying that he did not want his father to stop being his father.

Shep kissed the sleeping patient’s forehead lightly; against his lips, the thin skin was unnervingly mobile on the skull. He assumed a chair beside the bed. There he kept vigil for perhaps half an hour. He listened to the ragged breath, sometimes resting a hand on his father’s atrophied arm. It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called “doing nothing,” the smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. He wasn’t sure if his father knew he was there, and that was all right. This was a form of companionship that he’d been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself.

S
hep pulled in the drive on Mt. Forist Street; little wonder he’d felt like a hick when he first moved to New York, coming from a place that couldn’t pronounce the capital of Germany or even spell
forest
. As ever, the sepia-shingled, two-story colonial with a wraparound porch was confusing. It fostered a warm, cozy sensation mixed ambiguously with depression, like a gallon of golden paint contaminated with few drips of greenish umber to become a queasy hue that didn’t have a name. Hazily idealized pictures from memory clashed with the more hard-edged perception in the present that the place was growing dilapidated. The chipped cedar shingles could stand replacing. The porch railings were warped. Still, it was a solid building from 1912, with some architectural distinction in the quirky round turret that rose on the right to a
third floor. His old bedroom was at the top. While it was impossible to arrange furniture properly in a small round room, that wasn’t the sort of thing that bothered a boy. He’d treasured its spiral staircase and tree-house atmosphere, the sound of the brook down the slope trickling through the curved windows. Effortlessly convinced of occupying the center of the universe, as a kid you never seemed to notice that you lived in the back of beyond.

Beryl waved from the porch. The crochet weave of her misshapen chocolate-colored top was loose enough to expose her bra, an uncomfortably eye-catching pink. She no longer quite had the figure for those snug denim cut-offs. Then again, the days in northern New Hampshire when you could get away with shorts numbered a mere handful, and local gals were apt to drag on the hot pants the moment the thermometer edged above sixty degrees. Besides, he was in no condition himself to call the kettle fat.

“Shepardo! I’m so relieved you’re here!” She gave him a bear hug.

“You have no idea…I’ve felt so alone. God, I just keep reliving that sudden
boom-boom-boom
from the staircase. Didn’t sleep a wink. And I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t been home.”

“Yes, that was lucky.” Shep shouldered his bag inside while Beryl prattled about having done “everything she could” and being “frazzled” and “That her wit’s end”—with a two-handed clutch of her thick, curly brown hair for effect—and “really needing some relief here.” He couldn’t imagine what had been required aside from calling for an ambulance and getting their father admitted, but he shouldn’t be ungrateful.

Shep started up the stairs to drop his bag. “Oh, you should take my old room,” Beryl called. “I’m in yours.”

He stopped. “Why’s that?”

“You know I always wanted your room. It was the coolest. And I’m living here; you’re just visiting, right?”

He repressed an annoyance, one that resonated with an old twinge of resentment that at eighteen Beryl
had
to follow her big brother to New York City, like activating a touch of rheumatism when it rained.

Returned to the first floor, Shep took in the degree to which his sister had occupied their father’s house. Her whacky antiques from the apartment on West Nineteenth Street were crammed into every corner, cluttering what had once been an airy expanse of hardwood flooring. Film magazines and photographic equipment piddled every surface like dog pee. Her laptop computer enjoyed pride of place on the dining table, strewn with printouts. A sagging bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace in a mayonnaise jar was oblivious to the fact that their father suffered from hay fever.

“You saw Dad?”

“
Saw
is the word.” Shep collapsed on the couch. “He was still asleep. But the nurses say he seems to have come out of surgery pretty well.”

“I know, I know. I’ve been calling, like, every half hour.”

Shep wondered if his sister called the hospital with the same imaginary frequency with which Amelia may have called her mother. “Hey, do you have anything to drink around here? I’m beat.”

“Well, yeah…I guess I could find something.” Beryl shuffled reluctantly to the kitchen, returning with a depleted bottle of Gallo rotgut. The glass she poured was about three sips’ worth, so he got the message. In addition to having stopped by Nancy’s next door to make sure Glynis could turn to her in an emergency, making breakfast for his wife who just happened to have cancer, boning up on New Hampshire retirement communities on the Internet in preparation for taking full responsibility for what came next, and driving the length of New England for eight hours in thick vacation traffic, he should have remembered to arrive with a couple of (unlike this one) drinkable bottles of wine, a six-pack of micro-brew, and a family-size bag of Doritos, preferably Beryl’s favorite Cool Ranch.

“So where should we go for dinner?” said Beryl. “The Moonbeam Café? Eastern Depot?”

The Moonbeam was back down in Gorham, which he’d just driven through, and the trip back would constrain his booze intake to less than his mood required. The Eastern Depot was the swish place most folks reserved for anniversaries and birthdays, and Shep’s natural generosity was under strain. “What’s wrong with walking to the Black Bear?”

Beryl wrinkled her nose. “It’s all meat. I’ve gone back to being a vegetarian.”

“Since when?”

“Since that lasagna at your house. It made me, you know, totally ill.”

What had made her ill was not getting her way. “Thanks.”

“Don’t take it personally.”

“Why don’t we eat in? I’ll make a run to the state liquor store over on Pleasant Street, but that’s all I’m up for.”

As for not taking her out to eat, she would make him pay. One way or another, Shep ended up paying for everything.

I
’m starving,” Shep announced, putting the bottles on the counter.

His sister raised an eyebrow at his waistline. “You don’t look starved.”

“I have to make Glynis the heaviest food possible. I end up eating it, too.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, with all this stuff about Dad, I forgot to ask!” Beryl turned from the stove and creased her forehead, assuming an expression of deep, worried solicitation. “How is she
doing
?”

It was a look that Shep had learned to recognize. The very music of her question—drawn out, searching, dropped in pitch—was identical in timbre to the queries he’d fielded from ancillary characters for months now. Beneath the perfunctory, brow-furrowed performance lurked the hope that the answer not be awkward, that it not ask anything of them, and that most of all it would be short.

“Seems we may beat this thing,” he said, forcing himself to remember that he was a believer now, an evangelist, a zealot. “Chemo’s working.”

“Fantastic!” The cryptic, positive response had let her off the hook, and that was that.

Beryl cooked the way she dressed. Everything she prepared came out lumpy and brown. The concoction on the stove tonight was classic: a mash of soggy cashews, blobs of soy-stained tofu, and bloated pinto beans that were starting to disintegrate.

Abandoned on high heat, the gunk was clearly burning, but Beryl
would never detect the singe in the air. Discreetly adding a little water, Shep reflected on the fact that his sister regarded her absence of a sense of smell as not a deficiency but a badge of honor. These days everything had got mysteriously turned around so that not being able to see, hear, learn, or walk made you superior. So he was bewildered by what to do with his sympathy. Wishing that his sister were able to savor the aroma of snapping pine logs was now apparently an insult.

Once they sat down, the serving on his plate looked like a meadow muffin from a cow with digestive problems. The Moonbeam Café served great homemade bread and fruit crumbles; maybe this sandy, sticky mass was what Beryl enjoyed, but he couldn’t help but feel he was being taught a lesson. At least the dumpy dinner would not distract them from the main agenda, although the main agenda was no more appetizing.

“You know, about Dad,” Beryl began. “I hate to say I told you so—”

“No, you don’t. So go ahead. Smugness is one of life’s pleasures.”

“I just mean, like I was saying in Elmsford, this was bound to happen—”

“Okay, you finished? It did happen. Next.”

“You don’t have to be so snippy. This is hard for everybody.”

“It’s mostly hard for Dad.”

“Well, of course,” she backpedaled.

Stirring the crust from the bottom of the pan had been a mistake. Black flakes turned up on his fork in sheets.

“I’m horrified by the reason, naturally,” Beryl continued. “But getting a break from Dad and me in close quarters will be a bit of a relief. He’s grown so persnickety! His day is super-ritualized, and everything has to go just so.”

Shep nodded at the computer at the end of the table. “He seems to have accommodated your stuff. That’s pretty flexible.”

“But I make him his grilled cheese, right? Trying to be nice? And it supposedly comes out too dark, and the cheese isn’t melted enough. You have to keep the heat at exactly this little point on the dial, and put a pan lid over the sandwich, a particular lid that’s exactly the right size for
Branola. And God forbid you should forget the two dill pickle chips, or come back from the store with a brand that isn’t cut with ridges. I think of him as so frugal, but he actually threw the sandwich out and made another one!”