Indiscretion (32 page)

I had an old green Audi then and drove it as quickly as I could out to the hospital. The holiday exodus had already begun, and it took me longer to make the trip than I would have liked, even though I knew all the back roads. This was before many people had cell phones too—I certainly didn’t, although I did have a beeper from work—and I didn’t know what the situation was when I pulled into the parking lot.

My mother was in the waiting room, looking remarkably composed. Not a hair out of place. After she called me, I’m sure she had carefully selected the right skirt suit for the occasion, chose the appropriate earrings, handbag, and shoes, and sat down at her desk to write in her distinctive cursive instructions for Genevieve in her absence. Only then would she have had Robert drive her to the hospital in the big old Cadillac.

“How is he?” I asked, after giving her soft, old cheek a perfunctory kiss. As always, she exuded a subtle hint of Chanel No. 5.

“He is under observation,” she replied in a firm voice. “The chief of medicine is attending to him.”

He should have been. My parents were generous supporters of the hospital.

My mother stopped a passing nurse and asked her to have the doctor come out to explain to me what was happening. That was a harder thing to do than it sounds, but she had always had the knack. Nurses, waiters, stewardesses, taxi drivers, government officials. There was something about the way she spoke and carried herself that commanded attention, even of those who in most cases would be least inclined to stop. It may have helped that her father was a general, but I think it was something she was born with.

My father was a gentler soul. Tall, serious, kindhearted. On my mantel at home, I have a photograph of him as an undergraduate in the late 1940s. No one would have called him handsome, but he had a solid, reassuring face and the broad shoulders of an oarsman.

When my parents married and had me, they were older than most of their contemporaries. It was, I think, a happy marriage. She played bridge and ran their lives. He worked at one of Wall Street’s great banks, where he was apparently greatly respected for both his fiduciary acumen and his integrity. He traveled a good deal on business, usually accompanied by my mother. For a while, he even served as an undersecretary of the Treasury in the Nixon administration. One of the senior partners of my firm, who had known him for years, remarked to me shortly after joining, “I have always admired your father. He was an indispensable man to many dispensable people.”

It was difficult to see him lying on the hospital bed unconscious, an oxygen mask over his face, intravenous tubes in his now skinny, pale arms, a catheter, a battery of blinking machines in the background. Ever conscious of his dignity, he was a man who wore a necktie even on Saturdays, always kept the tail of his tennis shirt tucked in, and I don’t think ever swore, even when another driver swerved in front of him. He would have hated the thought of being poked and prodded by a group of strangers, and I was secretly grateful he had been sedated.

“We are not sure what exactly caused the seizure,” the chief of medicine informed me. “We have run a series of tests, X-rays, CT scans. So far nothing is conclusive. Your mother has filled us in about his diet, sleep patterns, and exercise. We had his personal physician in Manhattan fax out his records, and nothing’s presenting itself yet.”

“But surely you must be able to tell something?”

“We will continue to run tests. For the moment, it is better to keep him sedated. We will keep you posted.”

My mother and I dined at home that evening, attended by a worried Genevieve and Robert. Mother had already been on the phone after returning home, calling up the handful of guests who were expected for dinner the next day.

“Oh, I am so sorry,” I heard her say from her office near the drawing room. “But I am afraid I have to cancel Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I know it’s terribly last minute, but poor Hugh’s not well, and we had to take him to Southampton Hospital this morning. Yes. Thank you for being so understanding. No, no, please, no need to send anything. I am sure he’ll be home in a few days, right as rain.” Click.

“How are you, dear?” my mother asked me from across the table, putting an emphasis on the pronoun. “Any news?”

I was startled by her questions. Her husband of three decades was lying in the hospital, quite possibly dying, and she was keeping up the façade. I wanted to tell her what I really thought but instead only answered, “No news, Mother. I’ve been working hard, but that’s to be expected.”

“Any girls?”

“Alas.”

She sighed, so I said, “You mentioned on the phone this morning that Father hadn’t been well for a few days. Do you have any idea what was wrong with him or whether it’s connected to his seizure?”

“Dr. Marshall told me the tests were inconclusive, as I believe he told you. I am not sure what good it does to speculate. Neither of us is a trained medical professional.”

“Yes, that’s true, but I was wondering if there was anything you told the doctors that could shine a light on why Father’s in the hospital.”

She shrugged and took another bite of her dinner. “I told the doctors what I know. I am sure you do not appreciate it when a layman tries to tell you how to do your job any more than a doctor does.”

My father lingered for days. Thanksgiving was a joyless affair. Just my mother and me. After dinner I went for our traditional walk to the beach but did so alone. It was cold, and I wore a scarf around my neck, my tweed jacket protecting me from the wind. I stood there overlooking the waves for a long time, praying silently for my father’s recovery. I had already offered up more vocal prayers that morning with my mother when we went to Thanksgiving services at St. Luke’s. By then news had spread around the congregation, many of whom were my parents’ friends from the club. The rector stood by the door in his long white surplice and held both my mother’s and my hands warmly, tendering his most sincere thoughts and prayers.

Mother’s friends were no less attentive. “Oh, Elizabeth,” they said, swarming around us, the older ladies dressed like my mother, skinny, artificial hair; the men in blazers, tweeds, and club ties, most of them walking with sticks and with hearing aids in their ears. The men tended to hold back while the wives pressed forward. I couldn’t blame them. It must have been damn depressing for them to see one of their own go down, leaving each of them to wonder who would be next.

On Friday a battery of specialists came out from Manhattan. Nephrologists, neurologists, cardiologists, even tropical disease specialists. “Had your father been to Brazil in the past six months?” one of the last asked me brightly.

The next day my father woke up, groggy and confused. I was there when he did, having spent each night with him, as I knew he would have done for me, sleeping on a chair. “Walt,” he said, a look of panic in his eyes, “what the hell is going on?”

“You’re in Southampton Hospital, Dad. You had a seizure at home. They’ve been keeping you sedated.”

I could tell he still didn’t quite comprehend what I meant, so I repeated myself. “You’ve been here since Wednesday.”

“Since Wednesday? What day is it today?”

“Saturday.”

He looked away from me. “My god,” he said, the reality of the situation beginning to press in on him. “And your mother? How is she?”

“She’s fine, Dad.”

He patted my hand. He looked so small and etiolated. Not my father but a pale shadow of him. “Walt, could you ask the nurse to bring me some water? I’m awfully dry.” He ran his hand over his face. “I also need a shave. I must look like a bum.”

For the next several days, he had moments of lucidity, but the doctors usually tried to keep him pretty dopey. I would go home every morning to shower and have breakfast, and then, unless my mother needed me to run an errand for her, I returned to the hospital. Of course, I grew to hate the place, the beginning of my apostasy toward the medical profession in general. It was so depressing, the smells of shit, disinfectant, and death. The lonely people moored in those impersonal rooms, televisions blaring, the coughing and moaning from behind pulled curtains, doctors and nurses walking in clusters up and down the fluorescent hallways. The lack of information, the air of superiority, and yet, for all their training and experience, they still hadn’t been able to find out what was wrong with my father.

It often seemed to me as though the tests were making him worse. They kept trying out different medications, many of which made his heart rate increase, or they pumped him full of solutions so the scanners could do their job. The worst thing, for me at any rate, was that there were always new doctors popping in, many of them absurdly young, scanning charts and asking me the same questions over and over. How much did he drink? (Not much.) Was he a smoker? (Quit years ago.) Did he exercise? (Several times a week.) Was there any family history of heart disease? (Not that we knew of.) Had he been to Brazil in the past six months?

It went on and on like this. It was exasperating. I kept wondering what the scrawls and hieroglyphics on those charts actually meant. Why didn’t the doctors confer with each other? If lawyers handled our profession the same way, without any communication between the different attorneys working on the deal and going back to ask the clients the same questions repeatedly, it would lead to utter chaos. It was a joke. But now, faced with a crisis, these doctors seemed less competent than the man at the office who fixes the copy machine.

My father was a stoic man. He had been born and raised during the Depression with a sense of the deprivation that most of his countrymen endured, although his family’s wealth had shielded him from the brunt of the impact. He had joined the Navy after Yale in the postwar years, and his knowledge of languages, the legacy of a French governess and a German fräulein, as well as several years spent traveling abroad with his parents and siblings in the 1930s, had earned him a position as an aide to Admiral Sherman, who was at the time chief of naval operations. After resigning his commission, he joined the bank. In all the years I knew him, I cannot recall my father raising his voice or complaining about anything other than politics and the New York Yankees.

And so it came as an even greater shock when, one afternoon, I was sitting there, trying to work—my office having sent the papers I was to review—and my father called out to me. “Walt,” he said. “Come here.”

I leaned over him, and he gave me a wild look, a look I had never seen before. “You’ve got to get me out of here,” he pleaded. “You’ve got to get me out of here. I’m going to die here if you don’t.”

I looked at him, trying to tell if this was the real man speaking or just someone who was still loopy from the cocktail of medications they had dosed him with. Had he woken up from a bad dream? Or was he genuinely terrified? The look in his eyes told me he was serious. I felt helpless. I looked at the tubes being fed into his body and could only imagine what it would entail to remove any of them. And how was I supposed to get him out of there? Carry him? I imagined the two of us limping down the hallway, shrugging off security guards, clinging to an IV stand. Would they let me use a wheelchair, or should I just wheel him out on a gurney? And then what? Take him home? How? In the Cadillac? In my Audi? Would they let us use an ambulance? I knew it was irrational to even contemplate such rash action, but I did anyway. I would have done anything for my father, but I couldn’t do this. Lord knows, I didn’t want him to be there any more than he did, but to remove him now seemed the height of irresponsibility.

“Dad. I’m sorry. I can’t get you out of here. You’ve got to stay. The doctors are doing everything they can.”

“I don’t believe you. They’re going to kill me. You’ve got to get me out of here.”

“Dad, they aren’t trying to kill you.”

He gripped my arm. “Please.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The hell with you,” he said and started to sit up. He was old and frail but not without strength. I had to put my hands on his shoulders to keep him from getting out of bed.

“Dad, you’ve got to stay in bed.”

“You’re no son of mine. Let me go.”

I ignored him and instead called for the nurse. She came and injected a sedative into his arm while he struggled against us both. Within seconds he was asleep.

The next day he seemed back to normal. He was sitting up in bed clear-eyed and was getting a shave when I returned. The remnants of a breakfast tray sat on the table, his first solid food since he had been admitted.

“Morning, Walt,” he said, evidently pleased with himself. “Can you do me a favor? I have a board meeting next week, and I need you to have the papers sent out. Can you please arrange that?”

I was heartened by this turn of events. The doctors still hadn’t determined what was wrong with him or what had caused the seizure, but they were as relieved as I. They informed me that, if he continued to make such progress, they would be able to move him out of the ICU to a regular room. I spent the day with him watching football on TV. He napped occasionally, but mainly he was interested in catching up on what had been going on in the world. I had saved the past week’s worth of
Wall Street Journal
s and brought them to him. This made him very happy, and he told me that I didn’t need to spend the night with him. Grateful to sleep in my own bed, any bed, I stayed until eight
p.m
. For the first time since I was a child, I kissed him good night.

At his insistence, I returned to the office the next day. He and I talked on the phone that afternoon. He told me that, if everything went well, he would be out in a few days. He said my mother had already booked their flight to Florida and called the housekeeper to give her a shopping list. It was the last time we ever spoke.

At four that morning, the phone rang in my apartment. I had again worked late but sprang out of bed at the first ring. It was my mother’s voice on the other end. “Your father died,” I heard her say. I stood in my bedroom not comprehending. “He had a heart attack.”

I fought back the urge to shout or cry but instead said, “I’m so sorry, Mother.”