The Story of My Father Read online

  What I remember most clearly now is that he said the person they had in custody, James Nichols—they’d picked him up between three and four in the morning in semirural territory when he’d knocked on someone’s door, announcing he was lost—“claimed” to be my father.

  I was indignant. Of course he was my father. James Nichols? He was my father. He said so, didn’t he? What was their problem?

  I didn’t know then any of the other claims he’d made: that he’d encountered a number of small strange people in his nighttime wandering, that he’d been driving a van, which seemed to have utterly disappeared (they’d scanned the area for it, to no avail). In that context, probably other things he told them—that he was a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary, for instance—seemed unlikely too.

  But for now it was the word itself, claimed, that struck me, in its distrust and dismissal of my father’s perspective. It was a word I would come to hear more and more often as Dad descended into illness: well, he claimed he did this; he claimed he saw that; he claimed he thought it was his room. But here, this first time with a stranger, it was startling and offensive.

  I asked to speak with him. The officer wouldn’t let me. He wanted me to come out there. They would release him to me once I arrived.

  He wanted to know how long I’d be. I didn’t know. Where were they exactly? He gave me general directions and I made a guess.

  I got off the phone, and now it was my husband’s turn to ask the futile questions. Together, though, as I quickly got ready to go—brushing my teeth, drinking coffee, washing my face—we constructed a story that made a kind of sense.

  Under pressure from us, his children, my father had recently agreed to sell his house in New Jersey; we thought he was too isolated there since my mother’s death six years earlier. My sister and I had helped him divide up his possessions. Some were shipped ahead to Denver, to an apartment near her where he was going to live for a few years. Some were given away—to the four of us, if we laid claim to them, or to the Salvation Army. Some I had hauled to his summerhouse in New Hampshire in a big rental truck. But there were the last few items left for him to live with until the closing, and he’d told me recently on the phone that he was going to rent a small van and take them up to New Hampshire himself.

  What my husband and I concluded now was that it must have been on the way up to or back from this chore that he’d gotten lost in western Massachusetts and somehow seemed confused enough to warrant a kind of detention, if not arrest.

  It takes more than two hours to get from Boston to the other end of the state, plenty of time for me to imagine multiple variations on this story, other plot lines that might have led to this outcome. But what I couldn’t do for the entire length of the trip was to imagine my father at the center of the drama. That remained a mystery to me: what the actor had felt, what he could have been thinking as he acted. What on earth he was up to.

  My father was a small man, trim and neat. He had a gentle, nearly apologetic voice. He cleared his throat often, a tic and also a response to chronic dryness. He often had trouble being forceful or direct. I couldn’t imagine him—so modest, so self-effacing as to be almost comical sometimes, so much wishing not to be trouble for anyone—doing what the police described: stumbling around the countryside trying to wake someone, ringing doorbells in the middle of the night. Bothering people. Not my father.

  I was appalled when I first saw him, through the glass pane of a door the police pointed me to. He was sitting up, alone in a kind of waiting room set with several chairs. He appeared to be sleeping. When I came into the room, his eyes opened. He saw me with a kind of relief, but with none of the deep recognition that lights a face.

  He looked terrible. He was unshaven. He was wearing old clothes, worn and wrinkled and faded. He had on a particularly unfortunate hat he was fond of, a canvas hat he often wore when he went fishing. It was misshapen and stained. He looked like a vagrant—though later it occurred to me that in those same clothes, even wearing that same hat, he had often looked quite different: an outdoorsman ready to pull on waterproof boots and go fishing; a mycologist off to go collecting; a hiker ready to face Mount Adams, Mount Jefferson. So it wasn’t the clothes so much, I think, that startled me. It was the vacancy of his face, the look of nonrecognition—not so much of me as of the world—that made him seem homeless, lost, in some profound and permanent sense. That revised the meaning of the clothes. That said, “I belong nowhere, to no one.”

  His responses were without depth too. He did apologize for the inconvenience to me, but casually, as though I’d had to drive a few blocks out of the way for him. “Sorry you had to come get me.” That was it.

  He was tired, I told myself. Exhausted.

  The police gave me his wallet and the few other possessions they’d taken from him. They still hadn’t found the van, they said, and they expressed doubt, in front of him and speaking of him in the third person, that there was such a vehicle. I fell in with this rude behavior, to my shame. With Dad standing right next to me, I said, “Well, he lives in New Jersey. He must have gotten to western Mass somehow.”

  The policeman shrugged. He was a nice man, really. He had told me, before I saw Dad, that the people he’d waked in the night had been frightened of him, he seemed so agitated. He’d told me Dad had been “seeing things.” Now we agreed that they’d call me when they found the van, and Dad and I drove off.

  He was silent in the car, looking diminished and exhausted. We stopped for breakfast, and he ate ravenously. I asked him when he’d eaten last and he couldn’t remember. I began to ask him more questions, over breakfast and then again in the car, trying to piece together his itinerary and its timing. It was difficult to figure out. He didn’t know exactly when he’d left New Jersey for New Hampshire or what roads he’d taken. He didn’t think he’d slept in New Hampshire or eaten. He’d unloaded the furniture by himself (he didn’t want to bother anyone else) and then he’d started back down. When? What time? Day or night? He didn’t know. Somehow, though, in the night—or was it night? he just didn’t know—he’d taken a wrong turn.

  By now I realized he was talking about at least twenty hours without sleep and perhaps without food—probably more. I’d been in the house in New Hampshire only a few weeks earlier, unloading the bulk of the furniture from New Jersey. I thought of the way it had felt, cavernous and chilly: the empty unplugged refrigerator, the pervasive smell of the previous owner’s cats, the mouse turds everywhere. It was awful to think of him alone there, tired and hungry.

  And now he was saying something about the way the stop signs had turned into people in the night. People. Disguised as stop signs. As he talked, describing this, there was suddenly more animation in his face than he’d shown since I first saw him. Delight, really—at how they’d spoken to him in the night. Little people.

  “You mean the tops of the stop signs looked like heads to you?” I was already revising his tale, trying to make it something I could imagine too. And I could, I could understand this, that you might be charmed by the sudden notion of octagonal fat heads perched on skinny bodies if they loomed up at you on a dark road.

  He seemed amused, even a little contemptuous of the flatness of my imagination. “No, they were people. They had bodies—arms and legs.”

  I drove for a while, stunned. What was happening to Dad? “And they spoke to you,” I said at last.

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  I stopped asking questions. I couldn’t bear to hear the answers. Clearly the police hadn’t misrepresented anything: Dad was exactly the confused, disoriented person they had said he was. We drove on in silence, and in a little while he fell asleep. That’s what he needs, I thought. Sleep. Food. It was exhaustion, probably some chemical imbalance resulting from his hunger and fatigue, that was making him hallucinatory. As I drove, I looked over at him from time to time, slumped open-mouthed against the car’s window, his hat riding the back of his head. I felt very distant from him, eve
n angry at him—for his otherness, for what seemed his unconsciousness of the strangeness of what he was going though and what he’d done. I wanted him restored to himself. I wanted my father back. This old geezer made me mad.

  At home, I fixed him another snack and then made up a bed for him in Ben’s room. He was happy to take a nap. While he slept—and he slept for some hours—I tried to figure out what to do.

  In the short run, the practical complication for me was that my husband and I were leaving for France for a two-month stay in less than a week. Dad obviously would need attention and care for a while, but I couldn’t go back to New Jersey and stay with him. On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly send him to New Jersey by himself, not as he was, to deal with the final clearing out and cleaning of the house, with his dog, who must be waiting for him with friends or in a kennel, with the van, missing somewhere in the countryside.

  I’m a list maker—I live by them—and I already had a long list of errands to do to get ready to go away. Now at the top of that list would have to be my father, and directly under him, ahead of my own concerns, there would be his list of things to do. I felt overwhelmed. I couldn’t manage this alone. Someone else, one of my siblings, would have to come to help out. Or Dad would have to go to one of them. Or I would have to postpone my going to France; my husband could go on alone, and I’d join him when I could.

  My husband came home and I told him some of what seemed to be happening with my father. We discussed the various possibilities. He was open to any of them but of course preferred one that let me go with him. We’d see, we kept saying. We’d see how he was when he woke up. We’d play it by ear.

  Ben’s room, where my father was sleeping, was in the basement of the house, a big finished space at the back, with a low ceiling. To get from it to the stairs up to the first floor, you had to pass through the unfinished front part of the basement, dominated by the old, cast-iron coal furnace, converted to gas, and its tentacled ducts; and home to the washer and dryer, the cast-off furniture, the junk of our twelve years in the house—we had no attic. Late in the afternoon, I heard odd noises in that part of the basement. I called down, and after a moment Dad appeared in the dim light at the bottom of the stairs, his lifted face smiling. He looked more like himself, I thought, in that he seemed present; he seemed to see me with pleasure.

  “Come on up,” I said. “Have some coffee or a drink or whatever.”

  Our conversation as I fixed coffee was easy. How he’d slept. How he might have gotten lost. Where he thought the van might be. He and my husband, who hadn’t seen each other for a while, chatted about events and concerns in their lives. He seemed all right; he seemed fine. I began to relax. We went to sit in the living room with our cups. And then Dad said, “You know, the little children in the basement wouldn’t say a word when I spoke to them. They wouldn’t answer me.” He seemed puzzled by this, perhaps a little hurt.

  I was quiet for a moment. I met my husband’s eye. I felt as though I’d been hit. “What little children do you mean?” I asked, in what I hoped was only a mildly curious tone.

  “Just now, downstairs. Ben and some friends.” He looked momentarily confused. “Or maybe Ben wasn’t there. But they wouldn’t answer me when I spoke to them. They just moved away.”

  After a moment I said, “Ben?”

  “Well, I’m not sure about Ben. Maybe just some other little children.”

  “Dad, Ben is seventeen now. And his friends are big too. There aren’t any little children around anymore.”

  He didn’t look at me. We sat still for a few moments. I drank some of my coffee. My husband started to speak to him gently, said he really didn’t think—

  “There!” Dad said. “There goes one!” There was a kind of triumph in his voice.

  “Where?” I said.

  “There.” He pointed.

  I got up. I crossed the room and swung myself around in the area he’d indicated. Our living room was a big open space—I’d torn down all the interior walls on the ground floor when I first bought the house. There were no nooks or hiding places. Just air. And me, standing in it. “There’s no one here, Dad,” I said.

  He looked genuinely puzzled. “He must have gone downstairs,” my father said.

  So, after a moment, I suggested we go downstairs too—go downstairs and find the kids.

  We descended and stood in the cluttered space. There was a single bare bulb suspended from the ceiling whose light fell wanly over the abandoned junk. “Where were they, Dad?” I asked him.

  He crossed in front of the furnace and began to look among the boxes and cast-offs, pushing things back and forth, perplexed.

  “There’s nobody here now,” I said.

  “No,” he agreed. “Nobody.” He seemed suddenly tired again. Defeated. He didn’t look at me.

  After a few moments we went upstairs, silently. We sat down in the living room. Finally I said, “Dad, I don’t think there were any little children down there, even earlier. There aren’t little children in and out of this house anymore. There would be no reason for there to be kids in here that I didn’t know about. No way for them to get in, even. And we didn’t hear them or see them leave.”

  He nodded. “No,” he said.

  I tried to speak more lightly. “God knows, I wish we did still have little children roaming around, but we don’t. They just weren’t there, Dad.”

  After another long pause, he said, “So I guess I was seeing things.”

  “I think you were,” I said. “Look, you hadn’t eaten or slept in a couple of days. That does things to you. Chemically. I think you’re exhausted and drained and, yes, that you were seeing things.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Finally he smiled ruefully and said, “Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.”

  There was an unspoken clause implicit at the start of this sentence —I’ve tried to think of all the ways I might get old, but— and I heard it at least as clearly as I heard the part he spoke. I understood, abruptly, that he had wondered how they would come to him, old age and death, and now he was even a little bemused that they should take this unexpected form as they approached.

  I was startled at the time to realize this—that he had thought about it. But now that he is dead, and several others of his generation and the one before it in my family are dead also, it’s my turn to think of it—of death—and I do. I wonder how it will come to me. Unlike Dad, though—but largely because of him—I think often of the possibility that I may lose my mind. And when I do, I remember this moment; when my father seemed to be getting the news about his fate, about how it would be for him; when he took it in and accepted it and was, somehow, interested in it, all at the same time, before my eyes. It was a moment as characteristic of him as any I can think of in his life, and as brave. Noble, really, I’ve come to feel.

  At the time, though, I didn’t think of it this way. I didn’t want to think of it at all. I didn’t want to see what he saw, I didn’t want to accept the larger meaning of the moment. I began to make excuses again to him—for him—the same excuses I’d been making to myself all day about his behavior. And to my relief, he seemed to accept them. He seemed comforted.

  This may just have been a kind of politeness on his part. He saw my distress, after all, and he may simply have been responding to it. Perhaps he knew how much I needed him to agree with me, and so he did. He agreed with me. To be kind. So I wouldn’t dwell on it. So I wouldn’t be troubled.

  I don’t know.

  At any rate, we moved ahead. My son came home, full of adolescent energy and delighted by the surprise arrival of his grandfather. We had dinner, we talked as though this were an ordinary visit. We touched on some of the problems awaiting us; Dad mentioned his need to get back for the dog, I mentioned finding the van. My husband said he’d dig up some toiletries for Dad, who hadn’t shaved or brushed his teeth in a while. Basically, though, we visited. Later in the evening, after Dad had gone to bed, my husband and I again talked
about what we should do. In the end, I decided to call my sister to ask for her help.

  Of course there had been signs earlier. There was the slow weakening of what we might have called his will after my mother’s death six years before. A lack of direction. But other things too. The time I’d gone to New Jersey for a visit and he clearly had no memory that we’d arranged it—though he was, as always, gracious in his expression of pleasure at seeing me. The time he delivered a five-minute sermon in the church in his summer town when he should have gone on for fifteen or twenty minutes—a sermon that had a kind of eloquence, sentence by sentence, but made almost no sense as a whole and then was over so much too soon. There was a palpable shock in the congregation when it ended; after the service, one kind old lady broke the spell by leaning over to me and saying, “That’s how we like ’em: short and sweet.” A little while after that, an old friend of his asked me for the first time a question I would hear over and over as Dad got sick, “What do you think is wrong with your father?”

  There were problems in class, the first he’d ever had. There were his own reports to me of difficulties with his work. There was his arriving at his youngest sister’s house, forty-five minutes away from his own, and telling her he’d had a period of blankness on the road when he couldn’t think where he was or where he was supposed to be going. She called me, wondering if I had any idea what was wrong with him. It was on account of all this, after all, that we had urged him to sell the house in New Jersey, where he was so isolated once he retired, and move to Denver to be near my sister.

  But Dad was by no means so hapless as this makes him sound. He had functioned on his own after Mother’s death, and for the first years he managed it rather well. Whenever I visited, for instance, he was always a welcoming host, making modest but tasty meals for us, having the towels set out, the guest bed made up. He stayed in touch with all of us, his children, by letters and phone calls. More important, he had made arrangements himself within a year of Mother’s death to go to an ecclesiastical retirement community in California (a place he couldn’t have considered before she died—the mention of it made her audibly, visibly, grit her teeth: she would not grow old and die among ministers and missionaries!).