Haywire (49 page)

“Seems to be a slight improvement since yesterday.”

And, “We simply don’t know enough about the brain’s ability to regenerate itself. Remarkable organ, the brain.”

We—Pamela, Bill, and I, and, later, Pamela’s son, Winston—would stand, arms crossed, unified for the first and last time behind the impenetrable revetments of family crisis.

Yes, our eyes would answer the brilliant young surgeon, do go on. Tell us more. Tell us why, if he’s better this morning, there are two new catheters running out of his nose and mouth or arms and legs or urethra and colon that simply weren’t there last night; seemingly more yards of flexible plastic tubes flowing out of him than of arteries circulating within him. And to think it was all because of that one little inch of plastic tubing we allowed to be implanted in his neck and grafted to his right carotid—a miracle inch, we were advised, that would save his life.

Daily we waited for the doctor to wind up his cheery forecast. Then—politely—it would be our turn. Father, we pointed out with all due respect for the doctor’s chipper medical prognosis, was getting worse instead of better.

One morning, Bill, Winston, and I were gathered in the hall by the elevators when the doctor breezed out looking as if he’d come from a bracing game of tennis. He was a good-looking man in an Ivy League way; he always looked appropriately scrubbed down and disinfected. His eyes looked directly at us without wavering or blinking, an attitude that may have reassured some of his other patients’ kin but had the reverse effect on our group. “I don’t trust folks who don’t blink,” remarked Bill. To which I’d said, “Well, he’s wearing blinders; how else can he wade through the drek he has to face every day?”

“Good morning, Haywards. And Mr. Churchill. How is our patient this morning?”

“Worse,” I said.

“Well, now—”

“Now, look, Doctor,” interjected Winston, whose sober pinstriped suit and Turnbull & Asser shirt lent Bill’s and my appearance a measure of respectability, “I haven’t been here all along, I admit, but it is evident to me that Leland doesn’t seem to be making any sense. It’s not that he’s delirious and he’s not potty or senile. It’s something else. And he’s not improving.”

The doctor looked serene. “We can’t tell at this point whether or not—”

“Oh, yes, we can,” I interrupted. “That is to say,
we
can. We ought to be able to, we’ve known him for thirty-odd years. And since one or another of us is in the room with him all day every day—”

“Our empirical observations should have some value,” drawled Bill.

“He was definitely improved last night,” said the doctor imperturbably. “We talked at length about photography.”

The vein in Bill’s temple began to pulsate. “Look, Doc, you’re not in there all day. Stick around. You’ll see what we’re talking about.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are moments—”

“Moments, hell,” said Bill. The passion in him that I sometimes thought had solidified into ice was flowing. “Look, we know all about the trauma to his brain. It’s a wrap on that dialogue. We
also know that the consensus is we should cool it because there is this possibility he may regain some of his faculties. But let me tell you that the gray matter in the middle is
dead
—and there ain’t no way—”

“D-Doctor.” Winston was stuttering slightly. His face was flushing as red as Bill’s was getting white. “Every day the family comes here and looks to see—it’s been weeks now—if there’s any improvement—”

“To his head, Doctor.” I re-entered the fray. “To his head. You can understand that’s what really scares us. It’s bad enough dealing with the physical stuff, the surgery and bandages and so on, the by-products, but that’s secondary when we’re faced now with something that’s happened to his mind. As a result of all this.”

The doctor shook his head and a bemused smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. He looked like a beleaguered math teacher.

“You know, I don’t understand your family at all,” he said. “I’ve never encountered anything like it. Most people would be grateful to have him
alive.
”

“But, Doctor,” I said, feeling my intestines tighten, “what possible good is it for him to be
alive
if he can’t use his mind? How do you think—if he were given a choice—
he
would feel about living like that? This is no dimwit, this is a very intelligent, active man.”

“Certainly he’s still aware enough to know what’s going on,” said Bill, “and to hate it. Poor son of a bitch just doesn’t happen to have a gun lying under his saddlebag or the wherewithal to use it anyway.”

“Most people—” responded the doctor earnestly.

“Well, we’re not most people, thank God,” Winston interrupted.

“What happens when we take him home?” I asked, wanting to clutch my stomach and rip it out. “He just sits in a wheelchair with a lap robe, unable to see, to speak or walk, to
think
—for the rest of his life, however long it is that he lives?”

“A vegetable,” said Bill, studying his watchband with fixed interest. “He won’t even be able to see the stars at night. He loves the stars.”

“Most people,” the doctor tried again, “would be grateful to be able to take their fathers home at all. Even if his mind isn’t as acute as it was, things won’t be as bad as you anticipate. It’s like
having a pet—a cat or a dog—around the house. I’ve known cases where the woman of the house told me she was happy to have someone to take care of—”

“A pet!” we exploded. “Doctor, you have to be kidding! A cat or a dog! Woman of the house to take care of!”

And that was the end of it. He moved on to make his rounds.

“I do not believe what I just heard,” I seethed. “I did not hear it.”

“Wait till Mummy hears about this,” said Winston, shaking.

Bill’s laughter began again. “Spooky dialogue,” he said. “Guess saving someone’s life is all he thinks of. Guess he thought he did enormously well from the surgical end of the thing. Absolutely bananas conversation. They’re even more bananas than we are.”

But that didn’t seem to matter. It was more and more horribly true that Father could be less and less relied on to recognize all of us all of the time or, at the scattered moments when he did, to make any sense. However, on those increasingly rare occasions when he did make sense, there was a single sentiment that he expressed lucidly, vehemently, and with unremitting clarity of articulation. He wanted to go home.

Father lay immobilized, wrists bound down with strips of sheeting in case he might gesticulate and displace a tube or two, in his adjustable iron hospital bed for about four weeks.

Then Pamela, outraged and horror-struck by the barbaric customs in this country when it comes to death, spoke up. It was another of those dramatic morning conferences.

“Children,” she said after the doctor had left, “please help me. In England when someone is fatally ill—My father died at home. He was very old, and when he became ill, that’s where he wanted to die. And of course we respected his last wishes. The situation had some dignity. He was surrounded by the people who most loved him, in his own bed in his own house. But this—I don’t understand.”

I was grateful. After all the empty proselytizing for life at any cost and the emphasis on stuffing everything handy into that
life even at its end, with total disregard for the quality of the end itself, it was nice to hear a sane voice.

I broke the silence, swallowing hard: “The problem is that euthanasia is illegal.”

“Unless we take him out of the hospital,” said Winston. “That in itself would be a form of euthanasia. They couldn’t stop us from doing that.”

“What do you think, Bill?” asked Pamela. There were tears in her eyes.

Bill unraveled himself from the tangle of some sort of labyrinthine inner contemplation.

“Well,” he said slowly, “my guess is the surgeon is not going to go for that one at all. Don’t forget, his reputation’s at stake. But a certain amount of time
has
passed since the operation—so Father is out of his responsibility or jurisdiction.”

And so we got over that stumbling block, and Pamela, with our thankful consent, took Father home.

But first she had to make the agonizing decision to sever Father’s lifeline. Some lifeline, Bill and I remarked to each other. To us it looked like a cocoon of man-made webbing spun over and under and around Father’s body to pin it down to the hospital bed, a closed circuit that conducted God knows where or why a pitiful trickle of God knows what. We didn’t trust it any more. We had begun to suspect that Father’s lifeline really led neither here nor there, maybe nowhere.

It had taken us the month since that second operation to admit it. Plenty of time for me not only to think about what was happening right in front of my eyes, but also to look back at everything that had ever happened and to imagine everything that was to come.

It was a new experience, although one I hated. Well, I thought, you should be grateful for the chance to know (much more than you ever wanted to) about the mysteries of death as they relate to yet another member of your family. The titular head of it, in fact. Just thinking that way made me shiver. Well, I comforted myself, this time you’ll be able to follow right along, assimilate all the medical expertise, see for yourself that the mysteries of death are really exaggerated. See it all as a long, exploratory, circular journey where the end runs into the beginning like the great serpent that coils back on itself and swallows its own tail.
You know very well that the process of dying is part of the process of living. This time, at least, you can observe firsthand the natural conclusion to a first-rate life (only why does it have to be my father’s? And why, if it’s so natural, does it seem so artificial?), a life that’s just going by the book, doing what it’s supposed to do in the end: shed its last trappings one by one, the way a tree sheds its autumnal leaves.

This is a good opportunity to observe firsthand all the miracles of nature
. Remember when Mother used to say that, years ago, on the farm in Connecticut? Remember Agnes the cow calving? Stewart the dog being run over? Chickens flopping with their heads left behind them in the dust? Do you remember
Mother?
What a twist. And Bridget? Well, no surprises this time, even though this time was definitely not one that I, Brooke, would have picked as ideal—meaning that Father’s death could have been considerate enough to have scheduled itself after mine, so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Father would understand best of all what I felt; except that Father, for obvious reasons, wasn’t going to be there to help me this time.

Until my early twenties, I had believed—not believed, really, blithely
assumed
—that I was immortal, under the brooding protection of my own private guardian angel assigned by God to watch over me day and night. I could even feel my angel’s wings brushing my face just before I fell asleep; in times of danger I imagined his shadow hovering just above my head. When I no longer knew whether or not I believed in God, my angel left his post. Then I no longer believed that I was specially blessed and immortal. Bereft of that romantic conceit, I had more respect for—and fear of—life.

Until my early twenties (when Bridget and Mother died deaths that were still as mysterious to me now as then, that people still mentioned—if the subject came up at all—with hushed questions in their voices), I had my guardian angel, and never wondered what life would be like without anyone. Life was forever. Here we go again: that terrible elevator ride in the pit of my stomach. (“Take it easy,” said my pounding head to my pounding heart; “no surprises this time. You know so much more going in.”)

The truth was these conversations with myself didn’t help at all.

The truth was this time was much worse than either of the other two, even if it was more logical.

The truth was logic was useless. The feeling of abandonment
prevailed against all emollients, tranquilizers, anodynes, and razzle-dazzle philosophizing. Feeling abandoned was an insidious, incurable, cancerous feeling, and a cumulative one.

The truth was death may not be so bad, but watching Father die was awful.

He lay in that pleasant, corner hospital room, with belly distended, flesh sunken, the shipwrecked hulk of what had been a magnificent man. And still, probably thanks to my childhood reading of all those beautifully illustrated books he’d commandeered, I clearly saw him as a distinguished old general from the
ancien régime
, who had weathered the maelstrom of the Revolutionary Wars and was preparing himself for a brief nap on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz. He was having trouble getting his boots off. He’d already sat down ponderously on the edge of his iron Napoleonic campaign bed and, grunting, had found that he couldn’t bend over to unbuckle the polished leather straps. With a long sigh, he had leaned back into the pillows and called for his beloved aide-de-camp, Lucio (the butler). Lucio, by now, had loosened all the brass buttons on Father’s jacket—heavy as armor with the weight of its decorations—and had covered him with a warm army blanket.

“I think I’ll sleep for a little while,” murmured Father apologetically to Bill and me as we stood at the foot of his bed. (Lucio had removed the boots as gently as possible and they lay crumpled on the floor.)

“That’s good, Pop,” said Bill, walking around to the side of the bed where—to judge from the way his head followed movement—Father could still distinguish shapes with one eye, although that, too, had lost its acuity.

“Water,” croaked Father, clicking his tongue against his dry palate. Sometimes the corners of his mouth crusted up now that the tubes had been stuffed into it.

“Water.” The word was barely intelligible.

“He wants water.” I moved toward the metal pitcher by his bed.

“Not too much,” remonstrated one of the omnipresent nurses.

“Why not? He’s thirsty.”

“Bad for his stomach, Brooke,” said Bill. But Father only wet his lips on the glass anyway.

“Thank you, darling,” he said with effort, making my heart
turn over. For a fellow who had grown rather crotchety (the first stroke, a few years earlier, had partially paralyzed one side, and although with intensive physical therapy Father had managed to thwart most of its physical effects, it left him irritable, something of a curmudgeon), he had now become amazingly polite. Very courtly. With people to whom he might have been very rude before—nurses, doctors—he now went out of his way to say please and thank you, like a small child. The more indignities he suffered, the more pain he endured, the closer he came—with fear—to death, the more gentlemanly he behaved. His disposition regained its former sweetness. Once Bill and I got over the initial shock of finding out that, in his head, he was living in a different time zone—the thirties, mostly—and conscious only in a more primary way, we started to enjoy talking to him. It could be kind of fun. We didn’t have to make a lot of sense or try to impress; we could trip around in pleasant conversations that didn’t relate so much to us as to another time.