D-L-R-O-W

Excerpted from
The Bill from My Father : A Memoir
By Bernard Cooper

Before she officially admitted my father to the psychiatric ward at Saint Joseph s. Dr. Montrose drove him to his trailer and then to a nearby Bank of America, where she helped him acquire a safe deposit box. He carried the $5,000 in cash and his important possessions in a grocery bag, which he kept in his lap. Dr. Montrose sat beside him, and as he paused at each blank in the application, she whispered his Social Security and Medicare numbers, die statistics before her in his open file.

That night, she phoned at 11 P.M. to tell me he'd complained of stomach pains that had worsened in a matter of hours. She'd finally sent him to the Intensive Care Unit, where the staff suspected internal hemorrhaging. Tests were being run, she said, and an internist would consult me in the morning. "Your father's been unusually agitated, but it's probably the pain." She told me he'd hurled a pitcher against the wall, swearing a blue streak at Lucinda. who up until then had been able to keep him relatively calm-as long as he understood what she was saying. But whenever fatigue or exasperation thickened her accent, he demanded to speak to Betty, who he'd kicked out of his room just hours earlier for "talking his ears off."

The following morning in the lobby, the buttons for the elevators wouldn't light up no matter how firmly or often they were pressed. People milled around, holding bouquets and sipping Styrofoam cups of coffee. I checked and rechecked the piece of paper on which I'd jotted my father's room number, unable, in my dread, to commit it to memory, which committed it to forgetfulness. The broken button, I warned myself, was only a hint of malfunctions to come. I took a deep breath and tried to both acknowledge the future and hold it at bay.

When an elevator finally appeared, it opened up to reveal Betty. The only passenger, she stood against the dim rear wall, her metallic blond hair like those gold-leaf halos encircling the heads of saints in Renaissance paintings. With her shoulders thrown back and chin uplifted, she stepped into the morning light, her eyes fixed on mine. She looked every inch a heavenly messenger come to deliver momentous news. Tears slid down her cheeks, skin glistening where a layer of face powder had been washed away. She opened her arms, cinched me inside them. I couldn't, and didn't want to, resist. Her bulky lavender sweater smelled pungently of floral sachet, and remotely of Old Spice, the faint, valedictory trace of my father lost to the antiseptic odor of the hospital as soon as I took my next breath.

"It's a miracle!" she exclaimed, pulling away. She dug into her shoulder bag and handed me Kleenex.

I dabbed at my eyes. "What are you saying? Are you saying he's okay? When I saw you crying, I thought. . ."

"He's regained consciousness! He's talking!"

"Are you sure? Last night Dr. Montrose told me .. ."

"Go and see for yourself!"

When she stuffed the package of Kleenex back into her bag, a gilt-edged Bible caught the light. Deathbed conversions couldn't be all that uncommon at Saint Josephs (Brian, who'd been raised in the pragmatic United Church of Canada, referred to these eleventh-hour transformations as "cramming for die final"), and I hated to think that my father might have accepted Christ's salvation while insensible with pain and fear, like a prisoner who finally relents and signs a false confession. Had Betty come here on a mission? Had my father felt it necessary to change who he was, and worse, to disavow who he'd been, that a higher power might spare him from death, or let him die in peace? Better he should dial the prayer line in Texas just to kill time. Better he should defend a headless chicken, proclaiming it a sign from Cod for the benefit of all mankind.

And so the sight of Betty s Bible stirred me to a revelation: the father I had was die one I wanted, even if I was destined to spend my life perplexed. Of course, I still had qualms about him and always would, but relatively speaking, and for the time being, I'd come as close to qualmlessness as I ever got.

Betty and I were dry-eyed by the time the next elevator arrived. She wrote down the number of the Oxnard apartment she'd moved into with her cousin. We said our good-byes and I crowded in with people headed toward other sickrooms on other floors. I was eager to reach my father while he was still aware enough to notice I brimmed with appreciation.

I had to wait in the anteroom of the ICU for Lucinda to buzz me in. The door opened on a swarm of sounds. A suction pump wheezed. Beeping heart monitors drifted into and out of synch, strangers' pulses briefly allied, then divided. Lucinda, every bit as diminutive and efficient as I'd imagined, introduced herself and turned to lead die way. I followed her glossy black hair, the heavy length of it swaying with her gait. We had to dodge doctors and nurses who spoke in code and moved from one curtained enclosure to the next, all of them responding to a set of demands I could perceive only as an overall blur of emergency. We were halfway across the room when Lucinda stopped in her tracks. She explained that my father's kidneys were failing and warned me that I'd find him unconscious. "From sedation," she said, "and losing the blood." She clutched the edge of die curtain and waited until she saw some sign that I'd registered the gravity of his condition. Then, despite my look of dire surprise-had I misunderstood what Betty had told me?-Lucinda yanked the curtain aside.

My father sprawled in the bed as if sinking into his own impression. His eye lids flickered with the urge to open. With his dentures removed, his lips caved into a mouthful of darkness. Lucinda announced that he was being hydrated intravenously and fed through a catheter inserted directly into his stomach. She'd planted die catheter herself, and before I could stop her. she tossed die blanket aside to show me her handiwork, a thin plastic umbilicus trailing from a scarlet incision near his navel.

For the next week, every time I entered the room, I found him sprawled in the same position, jaw lax, lungs heaving. According to Lucinda, he often woke late at night after the sedation wore off, certain she'd stolen his money. Or else he feared he'd forgotten where he hid it, or whether he had money hidden at all. Soon he believed she was stealing his clothes. Stealing the water that filled his glass. Stealing dirt from the potted plant. This endless succession of thefts enraged him, though even he, a former lawyer, could never prove she'd taken a thing. An old hand at dealing with dementia, she took his accusations in stride. Fearing he might harm himself or another patient, Lucinda sedated him when he grew unruly. But even after a dose of morphine he'd try to wrench die tubes from his flesh, claiming he was late for work, and she had to strap his arms to the bed.

When my father took the first wet breaths of pneumonia, sedation was no longer necessary-a fevered weakness kept him in check. I'd squeeze his shoulder: nothing. I'd insinuate my face into his but discover I was invisible, no one's son after forty-eight years. Now and then a reflex fired down his spine, legs twitching for half a minute.

My father's hearing aid had been removed, and one afternoon I apologized for my part in the misunderstandings we'd had over the years. There were plenty to choose from, but I mentioned the car and bill in one breath, as if this, at last, confirmed their connection. I apologized for his part too, since I wanted to believe he would it he were able. I had no illusions that my father heard me or understood a word. There had been so many times, especially later in his life, when he gladly switched off his hearing aid; like a child who closes his eyes and believes the world has disappeared, he moved through a hush that silenced the earth. I wished him that muted refuge now.