I try to time my visits on Tuesdays, when I don’t have to be at the office.
I have my own key so I can let myself in when Nora’s at work. Just inside the front door, there’s a set of stairs to the main floor. Nora’s rumpled bed sits in the living room.
I greet the cats, who weave in and out of my ankles as I walk through the dining room to the kitchen and set my grocery bag on the counter.
I unpack the glass jar of chicken soup, still warm, that I made this morning; and the Haagen-Dazs Coffee Chip and Double Stuff Oreos that I picked up on the way over. I take out the three jumbo straws that I got at Panera when I ordered his Frozen Mochacino.
Nora keeps asking me to bring her more straws, which, she says, Dad needs to drink his meals. I fold the brown paper bag and stash it under the sink. Then, I go up to see Dad.
The plan is that I’ll come by twice a week and do the interviews. Each time I return I’ll bring the typed pages for his review. But we only do it twice before he tires of it.
“Turn off the tape,” he says, falling back against his pillows and closing his eyes.
Dad says, “After the closing, when the house is sold, if your mother gives me any money—and I am not going to ask her for any—I will give it to you so you can buy a house. I will give it to you and your sisters. I just want to make sure that some of the money ends up with you girls and right now, I’m not sure that it will.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
I don’t know what he means.
I dream that I’m driving with Dad in a little red car. As we weave through the winding streets of an old European city I describe, with great enthusiasm, the place I’m trying to find: its wide hallways, arching entrances, velvet drapes and tapestries.
Suddenly, a deer dashes across the road and I slam on the brakes. I leap from the car and chase it, leaving Dad behind.
“I don’t want to be a burden,” Dad says. The phone connection isn’t clear. His speech is slurred and hard to follow. “You have your life. Only come if you want to come.”
“I want to come.”
He laughs. “Okay,” he says. “Then come.”
At first, Dad only wants to talk about my mother and about how betrayed and abandoned he feels. “She aligned herself to Esther,” he says. “The same way she once aligned herself to me. There was always someone to save her, to take care of her... a whole string of people all of her life.” He sorts through his thoughts like poker chips. Stacks them into theories. “She has to do this,” he reasons. “She believes she can’t take care of herself. I understand.”
He doesn’t want to talk about nursing homes or health care aides or how he’s feeling.
“The world breaks people’s hearts,” he says one afternoon, lying on his bed, addressing his comments to the ceiling because he’s unable to turn his head in my direction.
“Maybe our hearts break because we think things should be different,” I say. “We think we should be special; we...”
“What do you mean special?” he frowns.
“You know. We think we won’t get old, won’t fall apart, won’t die.”
“I won’t,” Dad says, and I laugh. And he laughs.
On the little card table where he takes his meals, there’s a heavy glass beer stein with a straw, through which my father, who has trouble using his hands, can sip his coffee, light and sweet the way he likes it. My teacup sits on the opposite side of the table, releasing steam.
Dad talks, rests, drifts and, as often happens when I visit, I find myself drifting too — into rooms where we’ve lived, up and down paths we’ve walked, together and alone. I release my hurry-up world of magazine deadlines, of teenagers who have to be somewhere on time, and my heart begins to pace his, just as I used to pace my strides to his longer, faster ones.
In this memory, I’m sitting on Dad’s shoulders, arms wrapped around his warm neck, my cheek pressed into the wool of his tweed cap. The neighborhood is blanketed with snow. Dad holds my ankles.
In this one, I’m younger, not yet walking. I’m sliding a braided scatter rug across the polished wood floor into and then out of a slash of sunlight. I am fascinated by the dust motes, swirling like stars. I can smell the smoke from my mother’s cigarette and the turpentine-soaked rag she uses to clean the oil paint from her brushes. Suddenly, my father’s face looms before me, a bright balloon that I swat at, delighted. I fall back, laughing, and he catches my head in his hand.
—
“I lie in bed remembering,” he says. “The market at Delancey Street was on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Right over the Williamsburg Bridge. There were pushcarts there, on both sides of the street. My mother would buy Kosher chicken, meat and all the goodies there — Halvah, cashew nuts, stuff like that.”
“Frankfurters,” he tells the ceiling. “The butcher she went to, you had to go down some steps... it was in a cellar. In the back, older women with aprons on were plucking the feathers... working very hard, talking Yiddish.”
“You want me to write some of this down, Dad. We can record your memories together.”
“You don’t have time,” he says.
“I do. I could tape record our conversations and type them up for your memory book.”
“That’s a lot of work,” he says. “You don’t want to do that.”
“I do.” I pull out my notebook.
“There were clotheslines,” he says.
For the next 30 minutes, I follow my father through the tenements of the Lower East Side. I see the laundry lines strung from one apartment to the next, through the alleys where, in short pants and suspenders, my father played sandlot baseball with his brothers. He tells me about the markets: “It was right after the war and New York City put up buildings forcing the pushcarts inside a big open market the size of an airplane hangar. Some of the pushcart guys wouldn’t go inside there. Maybe they didn’t want to pay rent.”
As he rests between thoughts, my father’s face twists, one cheek tightening, an eyebrow lifting; the upper lip rippling across his perfectly straight, white teeth like a wave. This rhythm of tics and grimaces, caused by a misfire in the wiring of my father’s brain, is as familiar to me as the steady in-out of my breath. Yet this is the first time in 49 years that I’ve been able to really see it — because this is the first time he is not, as I watch him, watching me.
—
“I think that’s how David got the idea to raise pigeons on our roof. He was interested in homing pigeons with a splash of blue, dark blue stripes that ran across their wings. There was a little courtyard where you could climb out the window and get out in the yard. David built stairs up to the roof and he built the pigeon coop. But those stairs were crazy. He was only a kid, 11 or 12. The stairs were just boards held up by nails. Not safe at all.”
“Later on, when we’d go to the Concord, David would buy a pigeon...”
“He bought the pigeon at the Concord Hotel?”
“No!” he snaps, annoyed when my questions interrupt his reverie. “He bought it back home somewhere. He brought it with us. We kept it — I forget how, it was like a day trip — so before we left, he’d release it before we got into the car. I think he kept it in a cage in the car. Then, just before we left for home, he’d release it and see if it would beat us home. It always did.”
He closes his eyes, sighs. He’s exhausted.
“We can talk more the next time I come, Dad. Is there anything you want me to do for you before I go?”
He is almost asleep when I leave, kissing his wrinkly brow.
A note for readers following along: this scene has been revised. The ending you may remember has found its true home a little further on in the story.
This is a scene from The End of Men, a memoir I started years ago. I’ll tell you more about it as we go along. For now, I’m getting it set up over on my second Substack, All The Books I’m Writing. It’s one of several books I am making there, one chapter at a time.
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If I might suggest - when you publish it (and really aren’t you already “publishing” this work) just call it “A Memoir I Probably Won’t Publish”.
This feeds me in ways I can’t quite articulate.