Crossing the Borders of Time (72 page)

“I even got Roland’s address,” I murmured. Hoping to lift her spirits, I offered her the card with Emilienne’s handwriting, but Mom just shook her head as tears sprang to her eyes.

“Not me,” she said. “I’d never have the nerve to write to him. I don’t know how you do these things. But even if I could, he’s a married man. Why would I cause trouble for him now? I only know too well how terrible it feels to have your husband chased by some other woman. No, that’s not for me. Definitely not.”

“What’s on the agenda? What shall we do next?” my father asked repeatedly on his last full day of life, as if he knew that something really big was happening. Despite our efforts to maintain a mood of normalcy and join him in denial, he may in fact have sensed the approaching hand of death, as he suddenly began to press me with that same unnerving question every hour: “What’s on the agenda?” Like a busy top executive committed to appointments whose details were the duty of an underling to organize, he called the question out to me from the room where he was sitting with a dumbbell at his feet, ostensibly watching television, although his mind was fading. Or else, perhaps, there was only one inevitable appointment that he dreaded with such anxiousness he couldn’t bring himself to name it. Whatever we had planned, he wanted reassurance we were doing it together.

“When you’re finished with your toilette, tell me what’s on the agenda, what shall
we
do next?” he called to me as I was getting dressed, his tone so companionably relaxed that it saddened me to realize I had never heard him speak that way before. Oddly out of character, something vague and vulnerable had permeated his personality. It was frightening to find our warrior laying down his armor with the enemy massing. If this supremely strong and vital man could die, I understood at last that none of us was safe.

The date, November 9, was the anniversary of
Kristallnacht
, a day already set aside by many Jews for mourning loss. Since coming back from Germany, I’d gone home to be with Zach and Ariel for Halloween, the quasi–holy day of childhood, before returning to my parents. I had somehow also felt impelled to spend a day reading in the library. Approaching death like cramming for a test, I was seeking expert guidance to explain it to my children—or so I told myself—as if there were an answer that would make it acceptable for anyone we love to disappear forever.

I passed the days that followed living with my parents in an intimate cocoon. At times, Dad lay in bed, curled upon his side with his head resting in Mom’s lap, and she stroked his hair and rubbed his back, as if he were a schoolboy who had been bested in a fistfight and craved his mother’s solace. It broke my heart to watch them come together in this way, with so much pure affection and so little time remaining. Few people came to visit, but Dad’s secretary Zoanne would make her way upstairs and stand beside Dad’s bed or chair to report to him or seek direction on the business she was still conducting. The moo-like buzzer for the office entrance blasted through the house, and the grumbling garage door rose and fell, and the UPS man entered with deliveries and exited with shipments, and Zoanne dragged on her cigarettes and blithely informed any customers who called and asked for Len that, sorry, he was out and would have to call them back.

In the evenings, when Gary came to see him after work, Dad had just one thing weighing on his mind. He didn’t like the woman in my brother’s life, and he roused himself from an unaccustomed fog of enveloping indifference only to harangue his son to give her up.

“That girl is not for you,” Dad said, his only parting words of real advice for anyone. “Can’t you get it through your head? There are lots of other girls out there. Remember my night nurse at the hospital? Donna—wasn’t that her name, Janine? Now she was really something, and I could tell she liked you.”

“Hell, after seeing
you
, she’d just find me a disappointment,” Gary answered with a comic frown, half joking in his reference to Dad’s endowments. Still, that Gary actually eloped with that same nurse within the year our father died—inflating Dad’s suggestion and hurriedly entering a marriage that ended in divorce only three years later—was testimony to our father’s enormous hold on him. Even with Dad gone, Gary was still clinging to that vestige of his guidance.

At nights, in that last week of his life, as might have been predicted, Dad’s neuropathy was aggravated miserably by his new and deadly illness. Mom had given up their bed to him and was camping on the carpet, wanting to be close in case he needed something, while trying to protect herself from being whacked by flailing arms and legs. Restlessly, Dad tossed in bed, struggling to move his leaden limbs, and more than once he landed on the floor, bruised and moaning. Mom cried out in the darkness for me to come and help her lift him, and when we failed, we had to call the fire department.

Men in boots and yellow slickers came charging up the stairs—the white lamps of their truck’s revolving lights bringing daytime to the sleeping street at three a.m.—the effort to restore my father safely to his marriage bed now finally become a medical emergency. With all good humor, exemplifying youth and vigor, the firemen lifted Dad and got him back between the sheets, but his helplessness in the face of their easy masculinity was mortifying to him. So on the morning we failed to recognize would be his last, Mom rented a hospital bed with railings. In order to make space for it, their queen-sized bed was dragged into the hallway and stood on its end, like a billboard advertising the temporary nature of the sickroom.

We spent that final afternoon sitting in my girlhood bedroom. Mom had turned it into a study, and there Dad generally watched television, clicking from sports to news to some familiar classic movie in which he could depend upon the hero’s coming out on top. Now, however, suddenly and wordlessly, he twisted in his chair and fumbled on the skirted table at his elbow, clumsily attempting to reach the telephone. A large jar lamp wobbled precariously, and Mom shot up from the couch to steady it. She placed the phone onto her husband’s lap, and intuiting the meaning of his effort, crossed the room in search of her address book. Then, with no time left to repair the hurts between them, resigned to all the sorrows of a marriage that might have ended differently, she dialed Carole Gordon’s number.

“Hold on, Len would like to talk to you,” she said into the phone, as efficiently impersonal as if she were his secretary. With such openhearted tact that she gave no sign of knowing who was on the other end, she handed the receiver to my father and drew me from the room so that he could say good-bye to the woman he had promised to give up countless times before, never really meaning it. Mom closed the door behind us and only then gave in to the tears she never let him witness, so determined was she to allow him to believe he was truly getting better.

Indeed, all week, still following his lead as the doctor had advised, none of us indulged in any talk with Dad that seemed beyond the ordinary. To Mom, he had simply voiced regret that he was “a failure,” meaning he had not attained the level of financial success he expected of himself.

“That’s not what ever mattered to me,” she answered him. “I only wish that you were faithful.” Now she said that regardless of how much we craved the closure of a deep and meaningful conversation with him, forcing final talks would just be selfish. But how terribly I ached to tell him how much I’d always loved him. The oppressive weight of silence with so much left unsaid was almost unendurable, while the words I longed to say and longed to hear from him never entered into speech to be engraved in memory.

That afternoon I prevailed on Mom, who hadn’t slept in days, to hire a nurse to spend the night. Before the nurse arrived, Mom decided to turn dinner into a sort of picnic. Since Dad no longer had the steadiness to make it down the stairs, she set up a card table in the study so that we could eat with him. She sent me to buy fish and vegetables—the meal she had been pushing on him ever since his first heart attack more than twenty years before—and for the first time in days I went out into the world. Like a hostage escaping from the scene where a madman held my parents captive, I wished that I could summon help to free them. I drove into Fort Lee as the lights began to glitter on the bridge into Manhattan and on all the storied towers across the Hudson River that my father so admired. I was stunned to find the world proceeding in its pace.

After dinner, as we helped him to his feet, his arms around us both, Dad went limp. Staggering together, Mom and I fought to keep him from sliding to the ground, and we called out to the nurse for help. We struggled to the bedroom with Dad’s knees buckling, and we lifted him onto the rented bed. Hollow and cruelly wan, his handsome face was robbed of resolution, yet as we tried to raise the railings to ensure that he would not fall out again, something within him snapped. This loss of his autonomy proved one loss too many. The furious fire of life in him could not be tamed or caged. My father, a lion to the last, roared and thrashed against the railings and gasped for breath, his blue eyes staring wide in fear and rage.

I reached into the bed to calm him, but his arms were spinning crazily. His clawing fingers were ripping at the air, and some awful final panic took him, and he fought me off with all remaining strength, and wrestling in delirium, he slashed the skin below my thumbnail, drawing blood. Even now, the skin below the nail on my right thumb bears a small, white, ineradicable remembrance of my father, from that moment when we battled one another, fighting in our love, Dad asserting independence throughout his final hours.

His suffering that night was horrible. Weeping in frustration at our inability to soothe him, Mom tried to reach his doctor, a man whose interest in this patient had evaporated on the day that chemotherapy sparked a heart attack. Now, past midnight, when the answering service succeeded in relaying a message filled with sufficient anguish for the doctor to call us back, he told us to give Dad a stronger sedative. It might conceivably hasten death by slowing down his heart, he warned, but bringing peace would be a mercy. Mom hung up the phone and stared at me in silence, her face devoid of color. Then she said that the noble view of human life that had always been the cornerstone of Dad’s philosophy was not well served by permitting him to suffer like a mute and wounded animal.

Numbly, I stood beside her at the kitchen counter where so often at this early morning hour in autumn she had fixed us a special snack reminiscent of her childhood: roasted chestnuts with sliced apples and white wine. In deference to Dad’s limited dexterity, she always peeled his chestnuts for him, rummaging in the bowl to find him the biggest and the best. Now, with no less love but with tears coursing down her cheeks, she prepared to feed him one more time. Honoring the man with whom she’d shared her life, she took a pill and crushed it into applesauce and carried it upstairs. We sat with him until his limbs stopped thrashing and he drifted into sleep, but we failed to understand the ominous significance of the rattle in his chest. And so, past three a.m., I prevailed upon my mother to take a little rest herself. She told the nurse to call us the instant Dad awakened, and she came into the guest room with me, where, as we had done when I was just thirteen and Dad left home to try living with another woman, we lay beside each other in the dark.

Now the other woman with my father was a nurse, a woman who had never known his many charms. No, she had never heard his eloquence or the sensual music of his deep bass voice, had never been impressed by his lightning analysis of any complex problem, had never swirled across a dance floor with him, had never giggled as he trimmed her hair with a T-square to ensure he cut each strand precisely, had never watched him work all weekend to create a cozy home for her, had never heard him tell a joke in a faultless foreign accent, or seen the joy of life that sparkled in his eyes. No, never having known these things, she took advantage of the quiet of the night, sitting at his bedside in a chair where she was posted to keep watch, and fell asleep. And thus, at some unnoticed moment of a cruel, unguarded hour, my father fought with death alone.

Dawn was gray and seeping underneath the blinds when I woke up to the nurse pulling on my toes through the blanket. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned me to follow her. Wedged between my mother and the wall, I crept out from the bottom of the bed, so as not to waken Mom. I was glad that after so many sleepless nights on the floor, she was breathing deeply and restfully.

“He’s gone,” the nurse declared abruptly in the hallway where my mother’s antique clock, unwound for many weeks, had also ceased its ticking.

I would have liked to build a barricade. I was afraid the nurse would summon some authority to steal him from us, and so I quickly ushered her out the door to keep the world at bay. I went back up and kissed Dad’s vacant face, the fine sandpaper of one day’s beard, and I clasped his cold and densely heavy hand between my own. Then, sinking into the yellow silk French provincial armchair that the nurse’s dozing body had left warm, I grappled with the fact that even as he’d left me at a distance totally unbridgeable, my elusive father seemed more wholly available than he ever had before. I considered letting Mom sleep a few more hours, her duty to him over, to keep him to myself. But I sat with Dad a little while and then went to awaken her. I realized that I needed her to stand between her husband and still another woman who had, in her own way, always been in love with him.