Willow (4 page)

Unlike my adoptive mother. Aunt Agnes refused to wear a wig. She thought it was vain and undignified to battle too hard against aging. Aside from a little lipstick and some rouge, her store of cosmetics was anemic compared to the arsenal of skin creams, eye shadow, brushes, pencils, and makeup kits my adoptive mother had kept ready for her wars against wicked time.
Aunt Agnes had been a thin woman for as long as I could remember. Amou used to refer to her as
Sonora da Passaro
, "Bird Lady," because of her fragile bone structure and the way her nose had turned downward with age and become beaklike.
I
also thought she fluttered when she entered a room, always doing a little shiver as if she were throwing off some chill she had anticipated in coming to our home to speak with my father.
When she saw me, she reached up and put her hand on the nurse's wrist, and the nurse turned.
"Oh, it's my niece, his daughter," I heard her say. "Finally."
The look on the nurse's face was as good as a sword through my heart. I barely felt myself walk up to them. Aunt Agnes shook her head.
"We lost him," she said. "Just twenty minutes ago."
I
stared down at her and smiled with incredulity as if she had said the most ridiculous thing. Lost him? How can ire lose Daddy? Because of my silence and my expression, the nurse felt obligated to add to it.
"There was just too much heart damage. I'm sorry," she said.
Margaret, who finally caught up with me, just went right into a tirade about greeting me at the airport and our trip back to the hospital.
"You've got to speak to whoever got you that car service, Mother. The driver wasn't around, and we had to take an ordinary taxicab. Willow wanted to get right over here. I told him to wait at the curb, but he was an unpleasant man. and..."
"Shut up!" I screamed at her.
She looked as if I had slapped her. She brought her hand to her cheek and stepped back.
"Willow's father has passed away, Margaret Selby," my aunt explained.
"Oh," she said, her eyes widening with the realization. "Oh. dear."
I turned to the nurse. "I want to see my father," I said sharply.
I
don't know how
I
managed that many words. My throat had already begun to close and felt as dry as soil in a drought.
"Of course." she said, reaching out to touch my arm. "I'll take you to him."
I set my bag down to follow her.
"I'll start seeing to arrangements, dear." Aunt Agnes called after me.
"Oh, Mother," Margaret moaned, "a funeral."
I felt as if I were sleepwalking. Everything around me seemed vague, foggy. I kept swallowing down the urge to scream. So often people feel that they can scream away their troubles like some giant blowing unpleasant and ugly things out of his way. My heartbeat was so tiny.
I
imagined my heart itself was withering, closing up like a clam somewhere deep in my chest. In fact.
I
thought I was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until I was just a little girl again, a little girl being brought to see her daddy.
I
stood in the doorway as if I were waiting for him to sit up on the gurney and beckon to me. The nurse stood at my side, wondering why I was so hesitant. I'm sure.
"I'm sorry," she said. "It's never easy losing a parent, no matter how old they are My mother was eighty-six when she died last year, but I still felt as if the world had dropped out from under me."
I
looked at her and nodded. "I'd like to be alone with him for a while," I said.
"Of course. Just call for me if you need anything." she said.
If I need anything? I need a second chance. I need to have gotten here before he died. Could you please arrange for that?
I
thought.
I
looked at Daddy lying there so peacefully. His reddish-brown beard was as trim and neat as ever. He hadn't been gone that long, so his skin wasn't the pale of the dead yet. They had closed his eyes.
I
wished they hadn't. I needed to look into those eyes one more time, even though they would be empty. At least I could remember what had been there.
It took a few more moments for me to draw close enough to take his hand. Funny. I thought as
I
held his hand in mine, my father had never once raised his hand to me, not even to pat me on the rear end. His anger, his chastising, lived in his voice, in those eyes, in his whole demeanor, and for as long as I could remember, that was sufficient.
My adoptive mother didn't hesitate to take a swipe at me now and again, even if it was always more like waving away a fly. She was very protective of her hands. Too many women her age showed their age in their hands, and she was determined that wouldn't happen to her. With Amou in our home. my A.M. never washed a dish or wiped a piece of furniture. The only thing she cleaned was her own body, and as gently as she would clean a piece of fine china.
"I'm sorry I didn't get here fast enough. Daddy." I began. I took a deep breath. Tears were trapped beneath my lids. I thought I was looking at him through a fishbowl. "But we were never really people who made much of goodbyes, anyway, were we? You accompanied me when I first went off to college, but, unlike the other parents we saw, there were no tears, no desperate hugs, no efforts to cling to the little girl who once was. We were so mature about it, weren't we?" I said, smiling down at him. "We knew how to deal with what for other people were very traumatic experiences.
"Focus, focus. remember?" I laughed. "I don't think you realized how much you lectured me on the trip. I bet you were like that because you were afraid of saying goodbye. I know
I
was. Daddy. Even though I never shed a tear in front of you or said anything to make you unhappy, I was afraid to say goodbye to you.
"Mother was already gone, but she had missed so many special occasions in my life, anyway. One more didn't seem to matter all that much.
'Well, you kept saying. 'Well, well, well. I suppose I should be going,' you said. 'You'll call me should you need anything, of course.' you told me, assuring yourself more than me. I think.
"Of course. I would call you. So much of our lives was built around of course, Daddy."
I stared at him. He was starting to look more like a statue, a monument of himself, a body already lying in state. It occurred to me that I had rarely seen my father asleep. Neither he nor my adoptive mother welcomed me into their bedroom that often, even if I had a bad dream. He would always come to me and talk the dream out of my head. He reassured me but left me to sleep in my own bed.
"I'm sorry I didn't get here in time. Daddy," I repeated. "There were so many things to say. We had just begun saving them to each other. We had many years of silence to make up for. What do I do now?"
I smiled because, even though his lips were sealed forever and ever. I could hear his response. Naturally, it was in the form of a question.
"What do you do now. Willow? What do you think you should do now?"
"I guess I should finish college and marry Allan or someone like him and eventually have a family of my own. I don't know all the details of our finances, but I will very soon. and
I
hope
I
can keep our home. Is that a good answer. Daddy?"
"Is it?"
"I think so."
"Then it is." he would say.
And it occurred to me that I was all right, that it didn't matter that I didn't get back in time to see him take his last breath on this earth, because he was with me forever and ever, his voice always there. I would always hear his questions, be guided by his wisdom. It was not something that died with his body. He had planted them in me like seeds, and they had blossomed and taken root. They would always keep me steady and guide me and help me to see the way.
I leaned over and kissed his cold forehead. Kisses were as rare as birds in winter at our house. My adoptive mother was always afraid of smudging her lipstick. She greeted people with an air kiss, a smack of the lips near their ears, and if she ever kissed me, which was something she was more or less forced to do in front of others, it was still as if she were using her lips to push me away.
Daddy kissed me, but it was always a quick kiss, almost like someone afraid of being caught doing it. which I thought quite funny considering he was a psychiatrist.
Do psychiatrists analyze themselves all the time?
I
wondered, Did Daddy worry about why he was so afraid of being affectionate?
I
brushed aside some strands of his hair, which was something I had never done when he was alive. Sometimes, we would look at each other across a room. and
I
would see the desire to hold me. I would catch him staring at me with a warm smile on his lips. I could sense the struggle going on within him, the battle between the urge to embrace me, to kiss me, to be my father completely, and this iron restraint that snapped his head around or darkened his eyes or made him sigh and walk away.
Why?
Why was that inhibition there? What had I done to cause it-- or what had he done?
It occurred to me that he had fears, too; my strong and powerful father was afraid of something. Even with all his psychological techniques, his proven methodology, he was like one of his own patients, haunted by something too powerful to ignore or escape.
What?
What could possibly do that to him?
I
missed my chance to ask him the questions the way he would ask them of me. That I did regret.
But I was about to discover that
I
didn't need to rush back here to ask the questions.
The answers were waiting for me. I had merely to look in the right places, behind the shadows that for so many years had kept them securely hidden,

2
A Letter from My Father
.
"Why is it." Daddy once asked at dinner. "that

My adoptive mother raised her eyes to the ceiling so often in our house. I used to wonder if she actually saw something up there, or maybe someone, some compassionate invisible friend who sympathized with her daily turmoil.

"I absolutely hate it. Claude, when you bring home your work, when you use us as your sounding board and treat us as if we were your patients. I'm sure in your mind everyone but you is crazy," she said.

I
shifted my eyes from him to her and to him as if watching a tennis match. but I dared not say anything or even look too hard at my A.M.
I
was a teenager by then but still under the rule she had laid down as gospel: children speak only when they are spoken to at the dinner table, especially at her dinner table.

You know I hate that term. Alberta. People are not crazy, They suffer from a variety of maladies, psychoses, and neuroses. It's difficult enough to get the public not to use the term, but the wife of a psychiatrist should be the last one to be heard uttering it," he said in his measured, soft tone.
I
often thought that no one, not even a Buddhist monk, had more self- control than my father.

My adoptive mother pursed her lips. "Yes, doctor." she quipped. All right," she said, returning to her food with a deep sigh. "tell us what you're talking about now. Who's deceiving herself?"

She lifted her head quickly and glared at him with fire in her eyes, just daring him to accuse her of having that fault.

"I didn't mean anyone in particular. Alberta. It's simply an observation about the human condition, a rhetorical question. I am just trying to make intelligent conversation."

She raised her eyebrows. "Oh, you're just making intelligent conversation. Yesterday. when I wanted to talk about redoing the pool decking, you barely grunted," she reminded him.

"That's not exactly the sort of conversation
I
was referring to. Alberta."
"It's conversation, isn't it? What? It's not intelligent enough for You?"
'Okay, okay," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you," he told her, and returned to his food.
Silence dropped over us like a lead curtain.
I remembered that question he posed, however, and it came back to me, flashing like a movie marquee when Aunt Agnes, Margaret Selby, and
I
returned to my house from the hospital. Surely.
I
thought the moment I set eyes on the stone pillars at the driveway entrance. I had been deceiving myself thinking I could live in this house without Daddy. Despite my adoptive mother's continual decorating and redecorating, it was his personality that loomed over every important room.
His chair at the head of the table would be terribly empty. and I could never get myself to sit in that seat. His favorite overstuffed armchair in the living room would still bear the imprint and wear from his body. and I could never look at it without seeing him in it, his feet up, reading one of his journals or his books. Certainly, his office was like the heart of the house. Rarely did he treat patients in our home, but important people still came to see him and went directly to it. From it, he would issue his orders to Miles and, when Amou was still with us, to her. All of his plaques, awards, and cherished photographs were on those walls. How could it ever be anything else but my father's office?
Upstairs, his and my adoptive mother's bedroom remained the central suite. I couldn't see myself moving into it What would it become, a shrine? Perhaps
I
could give away his clothing the way we gave away my A.M.'s, but there were too many personal things of his that I would never relinquish, and as for the bed itself with its oversize headboard and canopy, why would I sell it?
And what about the walking paths? Could I look down any and not anticipate his lanky form trudging slowly back from one of his famous strolls? Or look at one of the benches along the way and not think of him resting, thinking, composing one of his scientific papers in his mind?
Regardless of how my adoptive mother tinkered with our property and the house. Daddy loved it so. Of course, she never believed that he cared. If he questioned something she wanted to do to a room or on the property, she would stop and shake her head and ask, "Why do you even ask about it. Claude? You spend most of your time at your precious clinic. That has become more your home than this. It's a wonder you remember where your socks are."
She didn't understand him. I thought. Although he wasn't there as much as he would have liked, his house was truly a meditative place for him, a sanctuary. At least, that was what I believed. With him gone, it would all be so hollow to me, a shell of what was once a home and a family.
"You've got to think about what you will do with this property," Aunt Agnes said as soon as we drove through the entrance at the driveway. It was as if she could read my mind. "It's far too much of a responsibility for a young woman of your age.
You're in college. anyway. Who would look after it?"
"Who does now?" I responded. "Who has looked after it all these years?"
"That man of your father's? Really, Willow, I could never understand how he put so much trust in someone like that," she snapped.
"Did he or didn't he kill his own child?" Margaret Selby demanded of me.
"He didn't kill his daughter. no She was killed in a car accident."
But he was driving, and he was drunk, wasn't he?"
He didn't mean for her to be hurt. Alcoholism is a disease," I said.
"How can alcoholism be a disease? You can't catch it, can you. Mother?"
"People who can't control their bad habits classify them as diseases. It's convenient." she replied.
"That's not true." I said. "There is scientific evidence..."
"I never understood why your father went into psychiatry," she said. It was something I had heard her say on other occasions. "Our father wanted and expected he would become a successful heart specialist and perform those bypass operations. At least with that, you have something concrete to show for your efforts."
I bristled. I couldn't ignore everything, I thought Forgive me, Daddy.
"Your brother, my father, was one of this country's most respected psychiatrists, Aunt Agnes. This is hardly the time to try to tear down his achievements."
I
said when the car came to a stop.
I
couldn't wait to get out. I felt as if
I
had been locked in a jail cell and could hardly breathe.
Miles was at the door, standing there with his head slightly bowed. The mere sight of him freed the tears lodged beneath my eyelids. They streamed freely down my cheeks when I saw from his face that he had been crying awhile.
He was nearly sixty-five now, but if my adoptive mother were alive, she could point him out as evidence to support her them
^,
that mental disturbances aged a person. He looked more like seventy-five, eighty. Despite his six feet, two inches, he actually appeared shorter than average, slumping and squeezing his shoulders inward, dropping his neck down into his chest cavity. Daddy was always working with him to help him build his selfconfidence.
My cousin wasn't entirely wrong in her accusation. Miles believed he was responsible for his daughter's death, and that was what drove him to attempt suicide and then to Daddy's clinic. His wife had left him. His family had disowned him. It was Daddy who helped him live with the tragedy and go on, helping to convince him that his poor departed child would certainly want him to continue.
"Willow," he managed through those pale, trembling lips.
We hugged. I could feel Aunt Agnes and Margaret Selby shaking their heads behind me. How could I be so intimate with a servant?
"I got to him as quickly as
I
could," he said. The moment I saw he had fallen."
"I know you did. Miles,"
I
said, and offered him my best smile of reassurance. He welcomed it with a tiny smile of his own,
"I'll brew some tea for you," he said as we entered the house. "We'll have to order in some food now that we have some overnight guests." He looked at Aunt Agnes and Margaret Selby. "Your father and I didn't require much these days."
"I'll take care of all that." Aunt Agnes said, coming up behind us. "See that we have clean linen in our bedrooms and enough towels and washcloths." she ordered, marching past him with her shoulders back in a military posture.
"How long are we going to stay here, Mother?" Margaret Selby asked.
"Until we are no longer required," she replied. "Now, go to your room and rest and then freshen up. People will be coming to offer their condolences. I'm sure. I'll see to the proper refreshments." she told me. "First. I'll evaluate what is in this house.''
She marched down the hallway toward the kitchen and pantry. Miles and I simply stood there, almost like disinterested observers. Margaret Selby released a small groan of frustration and then pressed my arm.
"I'll just take a little rest and then be with you as much as you like. Willow.
I
remember what a trying time it was when my father died, but Mother"--she looked after Aunt Agnes-- "is so good at things like this. You can depend on her just like I always do."
She leaned in to kiss me on the cheek and then hurried up the stairway.
Miles and I looked at each other, both fighting off an urge to break into laughter at her anemic attempt to be sincere and concerned.
"I'll be in Daddy's office. Miles."
"Very good. Willow. I'll bring you in a cup of tea and some biscuits. You know, the ones your father is so fond of." he said, and then realized instantly that we would both have to change our verb tenses forever in relation to Daddy. "The ones he was fond of."
"Thank you. Miles,"
I
said.
I
walked on, past the entrance to the kitchen where I could hear Aunt Agnes opening and closing cabinets, taking her instant inventory. Some people invite the opportunity to take charge of other people's lives, I thought. They are like firemen who can't help but welcome the challenge, the battle, the surge of adrenaline, forgetting for the moment that the theater in which they are performing their necessary roles is a theater featuring pure misery for someone else.
"My goodness," I heard Aunt Agnes declare to Miles when he went into the kitchen, "You would think my brother was living off his Social Security,
I
haven't seen pantries as bare as this since I worked with Meals on Wheels for the house-bound elderly."
"Dr. De Beers had all he required," Miles remarked firmly. "He lacked nothing he wanted."
She grunted her displeasure. but
I
was positive Miles wasn't going to kowtow.
I
smiled to myself and walked on toward the office, well in the rear of the house.
Our house was a large Gothic revival and too grim for my adoptive mother, who was fond of saying, "It always looks like it's scowling at me when I drive up, no matter how I dress the windows."
If she could have, she would have ripped it down and started over, but the house had been in my father's family for nearly one hundred fifty years. It at least gave my adoptive mother reason to feel some superiority over her acquaintances who lived in more modern structures or whose homes didn't have the history ours did.
We had two stories with a large attic that ran nearly the entire length of the home. The house had one prominent gable and one on each side. Most of the windows had drip-mold crowns and were arched to protect them from water running down the face of the building. We had a one-story porch with flattened arch supports.
My adoptive mother was always frying to find a way to replace the pointed-arch front door because she thought it looked too devilish-- the entrance to hell, she called it But it was too much a part of the architecture, and despite her desire to change the feel of the house, she was afraid of looking foolish or losing its historical uniqueness.
We had five bedrooms, maid's quarters Amou had used and which Miles now used, a separate living room and den, a very large dining room with a table that could seat twelve comfortably, and, of course. Daddy's office.
I paused in the doorway. Although it was never set in stone or voiced with regal authority, it was understood that I was not to go playing or exploring in Daddy's office when he wasn't there. Even my A.M. rarely went in there when he wasn't occupying his desk. She never put it in so many words, but she gave the distinct impression that she felt the mental illnesses Daddy treated, the patients he occasionally saw in that office, could be infectious, as if paranoia or compulsive obsessions were spread through germs.
I
knew for a fact that she had never sat in any chair a patient had sat in and had never sat on the couch in that office.
If Daddy sensed her feelings, he didn't do anything to change them.
I
think he enjoyed having a place to go in his home where he could feel insulated. As I stood in the doorway and looked in at his large, dark cherry wood desk and his high-backed leather chair. I smiled, recalling my adoptive mother standing in this doorway and making some demand or another on him without crossing her imaginary line.
I
knew he deliberately spoke more softly than usual because she would keep asking him to repeat something and she would raise her voice. Frustrated, she would stomp away. Once. I was there quickly enough to see a tiny smile on his lips. He winked at me. and I felt as though he had passed a secret note for me to bury at the bottom of one of my dresser drawers.
About ten years ago. Daddy had a cabinetmaker construct new shelving over the left wall. Besides shelves, it had a row of small cabinets at the very top. He kept his books, papers, and reports on the shelves, in the middle of which stood a miniature grandfather clock, which was a gift from a very appreciative Englishman whose daughter Daddy had treated successfully at his clinic. On it the man had inscribed "To be ill is human, to heal divine." a play on Alexander Pope's famous line "To err is human, to forgive divine." The clock was gilded with precious jewels at each of the Roman numerals, Daddy used to say it had a distinctly English accent to its tick-tock and went tick-talk instead. Listening to it now brought a smile to my lips and helped me feel his presence in the room.
There was so much that would do that. however. The closet door was slightly open. and I could see one of his tweed sports jackets with the leather elbow patches. Daddy liked this very manly scented cologne, which, although he never smoked, had the aroma of some fine tobacco. When I walked in.
I
realized it still hung vividly in the air.
I moved slowly around the office, gazing as if for the first time at his plaques, his awards, and the pictures he had chosen to hang prominently. There were a number of framed photographs of him with important political people, even the governor of the state and a senator, but in a central location were two pictures of me. one when I was about five, all dressed up for a party my adoptive mother had arranged to celebrate their anniversary, and another of me at my middle-school graduation with both him and my A.M. at my side. She looked as if she were trying to get someone's attention. Her gaze was off left. distracted. Daddy was looking at me, his face caught in one of the most affectionate gazes
I
had ever seen. I had forgotten this picture.
I paused at his desk chair. The very thought of sitting in it was inhibiting. I never had. Glancing over his desk. I saw a yellow pad with most of the first page completed. A quick perusal told me he was putting down thoughts for a new paper on bipolar disorder. It appeared he was going to discuss the benefits of being in nature. The meditative power of his famous walks was to find a place in his therapy again and again. How disappointing that he would never finish this_. I thought. He had so much yet to give.
The ringing of the phone jolted me out of my reverie. For a moment. I just stared at the receiver. I never answered the phone in here, of course, but it rang on. Finally.
I
picked it up and said hello. It was my family attorney. Mr. Bassinger.
"Willow, my deepest regrets and condolences," he began.
I
had met him only a few times, usually at social occasions. He was a man pushing seventy, nearly ten years older than Daddy, but he and Daddy had been friends for as long as I could remember.