All the Houses (42 page)

I walked over to her and hung up the phone, then dragged her stumbling and protesting over to the sink and made her drink some water. Half of it went down her shirt. I grabbed a banana from the fruit basket and told her to eat it.

“No way,” she said. “You eat it.”

The stairs went slowly, and she was still talking about Brian, whoever that was, and suddenly I got angry. I told her Dad would notice how many beers were missing. Maggie turned her head back and forth.

“No. He won't.”

At last we reached her room, and I told her to get ready for bed. I ran downstairs, gathered up the bottles, and took them outside to the neighbor's garbage can. Back upstairs, my sister had passed out. I took off her socks, then tried to take off her sweatshirt but it was too hard to do that. I put the blanket over her and then went to bed myself, though I didn't sleep for a while, thinking Maggie would wake up and be sick. I kept listening for puking noises. None came. Courtney returned, my parents returned, everybody went to their rooms and slept.

 

2005

Dad had been instructed to report to the cardiac imaging center at 7:15 a.m., earlier than I'd ever gone to any doctor. The night before, I slept over at Albemarle Street, and in the morning we both came downstairs at around the same time Dad used to leave for work during his White House years, the hinge of the day just creaking.

There was a question of who should drive. I said I would, and he hesitated but then took his seat on the passenger side, put his hands under the flaps of his winter coat, and leaned his head against the headrest. Both of us were quiet, and the streets were still, lined with cold cars, everything crusted with frost. I wanted to ask him about his health, specifically about this appointment, but it was so early. He turned on the radio, which purred its bulletins from elsewhere.

The sky over the hospital parking lot was dark, but by the time we'd taken two different elevators and turned through hallways and arrived at the waiting room, a watery early-morning light rilled down from above, through skylights, landing upon a few synthetic plants and groups of chairs upholstered in dull orange fabric. Immediately, Dad was chuted into a Process: first he had to note his arrival on a slip of paper and place that in a plastic tray, then he had to fill out two forms, and then, heeding a sign that had been printed on pink paper, in an unusual font, he had to
Please Wait Until Your Name Is Called.
The sign put me on guard. I figured it had been placed there by some snippy person, dug in behind the reception desk, who had come to think of heart patients as needy morons and who felt under siege each time one of them had the gall to approach the desk
before
his or her name was called. It was true that these tyrants of the reception areas, in their jersey separates and scuffed pumps, had their antagonists (the ever-ringing phones, the hostile software) to cope with, and yet I did wonder at the fact that jobs of this kind, jobs that revolve around interacting with other people, were often filled by men and women who apparently despised other people. Had they always been so, or did the jobs make them that way?

Around the corner from the counter where Dad had filled out his slip of paper were two window bays with chairs pushed up to them, like the setup in prisons allowing visitors to talk to inmates. Only one employee was visible when we arrived, her small, froggy head attached to a large body. She was seated on her side of one of these windows; a middle-aged, sun-baked patient sat across from her, earnestly answering her questions as she recorded his responses on a computer.

My father and I were the only people in the waiting room besides that man's entourage—four other people, his family, sprawled across the chairs.

I said, “Seems like an okay place.”

“I'd like it better if I could have a cup of coffee,” he said. He'd been fasting since the night before. He picked up a magazine
.

Another patient arrived, a woman carrying two big tote bags, and then came a wiry man with a beard, wearing a Hoyas sweatshirt and black sneakers. More people followed, old people mostly, each scanning the room as they entered, filling out their slips, taking seats, peeking over their periodicals, waiting for their names to be called, and I thought about all the vexed hearts beating beneath all the sweatshirts and sweaters.

The woman in the reception area dismissed the man she'd been talking to, and then she called the name of the man in the Hoyas sweatshirt, who'd arrived a full five minutes after us. I wasn't the only one to notice. Dad kept looking at her. Finally I went up to the counter. “Excuse me,” I started.

“Ma'am, take a seat, please,” the woman said.

“But my dad's been—”

“Take a seat and I'll be with you shortly.”

Shortly indeed. Behind her was a poster of the human heart colored red and blue, a hunk of meat with a tangle of plumbing on top.

“Don't mess with her, is what I've learned,” Dad grumbled when I sat back down.

“Got it.”

“She's what your mother would call a … a…” At first he seemed to have forgotten this label of Mom's, but in fact it was just a word he was not used to saying, one that he uttered softly: “a bitch.”

Then she did call Dad's name, his full name—the name of that person he was officially. His shirt had come untucked, and the wrinkled tail swung behind him as he made his way over to her. He took his time pulling out the chair and lowering himself into it, and once they got started, although I couldn't hear the rote questions and answers, I could hear their mutual impatience, Dad's and the receptionist's. They were well matched, Churlish v. Churlish, the two of them making no secret of their disdain.

When she was finished with him, Dad walked back toward me, rolling his eyes. It was a shared moment, and perhaps an opportunity—I could've asked him then to further explain the condition of his heart—but we were in public, and I was too shy to do it.

A man in sage-green scrubs appeared and led my father away. I read a pamphlet that explained what would happen back there: he would be injected with an isotope, a radioactive tracer that would diffuse through his vessels, and then he would be slid into a machine that would take pictures of the flow of his blood. Dad's veins and arteries, the cavities of his heart would be illuminated on a screen. A little while later they would have him walk, then run, on a treadmill, and the machine would take pictures again, after the exercise. Four or five people in addition to my father were being led through the same sequence of steps, which meant that the interior door kept opening and closing, these patients venturing in and coming back out again with needles in their wrists or dried sweat in their hair. And less frequently, the door from the hallway would open and a new patient would appear, to be entered into the cycle.

*   *   *

While Dad was still back there, a new man came in from the outside, satisfaction in the set of his mouth, in the calm mass of his forehead. The hearing aids he wore didn't take anything from his air of contentment. A woman in a velour sweatsuit accompanied him, and both had the faraway faces of a couple that had exchanged maybe three words since breakfast. They seemed well-off, and not merely in the financial sense. Comfortable in the world. Then I recognized the man, remembered who he was. In the flesh he looked very different from his author photograph.

It was the woman who had the appointment—she went to the window to be interviewed and returned to her seat, calmly. Then the interior door opened, and in it stood a handsome older man with hair that was still thick and eyes that looked just like mine. He grunted, and he was Dad again. For just a moment I'd seen him without knowing him, a stranger to me and at the same time more familiar than ever. I'd seen the cast of his eyes and been reminded of this thing we shared—a kind of yearning without an object. What in other people might grow into a spiritual tendency in us had been thwarted, misdirected. It coursed around those branching tubes I'd seen in the heart poster, lost in the arterial maze, and manifested as a general, constant ache in our chests—in my chest, at least, and I assume in his—and a damp, expectant look that came over his face from time to time, I gather it came over mine too. I don't mean to say that we were especially sensitive people. I mean that we were dumb about our sensitivities, we pretended not to have them, like people pretending not to have their own noses even though everyone else can see them plainly.

I was hoping against hope that Dad wouldn't notice James Singletary sitting there. He took two rigid steps into the room, then stopped by a pile of magazines and started to sort through them.

“Tim,” the woman in the velour sweatsuit said. “Tim Atherton? Is that you?”

My father looked up, not bothering to pretend he hadn't seen them already. “Gail,” he said. “Jim.” Then he took a seat right where he was, well away from them and also, as it happened, across the room from me.

“Come over and say hello!” the woman said. Dad reluctantly got up again and scrutinized his own feet as he crossed the waiting area.

“It's been a long time, hasn't it?” said Singletary as he offered his crackled hand, which Dad took limply in his own and then dropped. In his other hand Dad was holding a
TV Guide
. “It's been a long time,” Singletary said, answering his own question. He was shifting in his seat, narrowing his eyes, taking my father's measure. “You been keeping busy?”

The man in the green scrubs called, “Gail Singletary?”

My father blinked at them. Anyone would've assumed it was the husband who was the patient, not the wife.

“She's a nutritionist, a tennis player, healthiest woman I know, and they've got her coming in here for this deal,” Singletary said. “I smoked for thirty years, ate steak like it was going out of style, sat at a desk, and they tell me I'm doing great. How's that for fair.”

Gail, who had probably heard this little homily before, barely acknowledged it before she disappeared. Singletary took off his sweater, exposing a golf shirt and veiny biceps. “So what are you up to these days?” he asked Dad.

Dad's shoulders popped up and down. “I'm here, today,” he said finally.

“Sure, sure.”

My father glanced back behind him, at his original seat next to mine. I didn't know whether to go join him or stay put.

“And you?” Dad asked.

“One thing and another. I've got a book that just came out.”

“Oh really?”

“The title is
A Call to Honor.
My editor came up with that.”

“Well. Congratulations.” Dad gestured toward me. “I'm here with my daughter.”

“Your daughter? Holy cow. Last time we saw each other, your girls were in high school, I think.” He started waving at me. It seemed he meant for me to come over there, and so I went.

“You live here?” he asked, and before I could formulate an answer he turned to Dad and said, “Must be nice. I've got two in the service and one in the Bay Area. I hardly ever see them. Any grandkids?”

“Not yet,” Dad said.

“We're at two so far. I tell you, I am loving it. Kind of makes up for all the stuff we missed out on the first time around, you know? Always working around the clock, weren't we?” He looked at me. “Are you married at least?”

“No,” I said.

“You've still got a little time.”

More than you, I muttered to myself.

“Beg pardon?” he asked, touching one of his hearing aids.

“Thank you,” I said.

He turned to Dad. “How's Eileen doing?”

“We're divorced.”

“Ah. Sorry.”

“Don't be.”

“I should let you get back to your seat. It's nice to see you, Tim.”

Dad tilted his head, as though puzzled by the idea that there was anything nice about it. He might've been working up to a reply, but just then they called his name again, and he seemed glad enough to be summoned.

I was left there with Singletary, who was staring at the door that his wife and my father had passed through. “I guess your dad's had some heart trouble—”

“He did,” I said reluctantly. “He does.”

He nodded. “Gail too. She's on this reversal diet now, where you reverse the disease. No butter, no oil, we've got none of that in the house anymore. No meat. No sugar. I've lost fifteen pounds.”

“Does it work?”

“Who knows? They say it does. They've got her on Coumadin, Lipitor. She rides her bike all the time, does yoga. Oatmeal. Oatmeal every morning.”

I stared helplessly at his shirt. “Are you a golfer?” I asked.

“Love to golf. You?”

“No—no.”

“What do you do?”

I said I was a writer, said it plainly without my usual qualifiers (
trying to be … but my day job is…)
. It felt good at first, less so when I realized that I would have to explain what sort of things I wrote. But before he could ask, Gail came out, and Singletary introduced us. We smiled politely.

Singletary said to her, “What did you do with the parking ticket?”

“You never gave it to me,” she said.

“I absolutely gave it to you.”

“I don't remember that,” she said, opening her purse and pawing through the insides. “I don't see it in here.”

“Maybe you put it in your wallet,” he said.

“I don't think they validate here anyway.”

“We still don't want to be charged for a lost ticket!”

“It's probably in the car. We'll find it when we leave.”

“Check your wallet, please.”

She did so, carefully, with no resignation or resentment that I could see, and then said, “It's not here.”

They were still discussing the ticket when I excused myself. Maybe five minutes after that, my father returned. He was breathing heavily in and out. Only later did I learn what had happened back in the examining room: after he had been on the treadmill for a short time, walking at an easy pace, the technician sped the machine up, and though it wasn't going all that fast he began to feel light-headed, short of breath. The electrodes on his chest, it was like they'd been delivering little shocks, that's what he told me. He had to tell the technician to stop the test.