Stuffed (21 page)

We surf the health Net. We keep believing we can make Dad better. It’s a family trait. We don’t relish problems, but we’re good at tackling them. We never give up. Give us a problem, give us
cancer,
we rise. Dad will take any treatment out there. He’ll try anything.

Each time I fly to Florida, when I walk through the front door, I look to my right toward the kitchen. The first good sign is Dad in the La-Z-Boy. If he isn’t there, he’s in bed—the first bad sign. His condition is read, reread, poured over, dissected. Breaths are analyzed. Everything is a clue, a reason to hope or worry.

“Does he look better to you?”

“I think so. Does he look better to you?”

“I don’t know. You really think he looks better?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he finish the egg?”

“All but a little.”

When Mom skins her shin on the Formica corner of Dad’s platform bed, he gets cranky. Cranky! He
is
getting better! I fold a washcloth in half and secure it to the protruding corner with duct tape. An inventor’s daughter does this without thinking. Problem? Solution. Dad’s house is filled with the jerry-rigged. Five bathrooms have eyeglass cases Velcroed to the side of the vanity. The washer-dryer used to dance and rattle until Dad bumpered it with carpet scraps screwed on two-by-fours. Old tennis-ball cans corral TV zappers. The giant dictionary is always open on the stand made of stress rods kidnapped from construction sites. There is pretty much nothing on God’s earth that can’t be recycled or made better.

When you first learn you have cancer, you try to find the cure. When you can’t find the cure, you hope for remission. When you can’t hope for remission, you try for time. We are in the second phase.

Dad issues an edict. No one is to say, “How are you?”

“How do you
think
I am? Knucklehead.”

I ask my sister how she feels when Dad calls her Lardass or Knucklehead.

“He never has,” she says.

“Dad,” I ask him, “how come you call me Lardass and Knucklehead and you don’t call Jo?”

“Your sister’s sensitive,” he says and we laugh. I’m not? I’ve come to think of Lardass and Knucklehead as endearments.

I get on the bed and hold Dad’s hand. I kiss it. The shape of his head is a surprise. It’s flatter in the back and, without hair, smaller. I know Dad has a small head because a few visits ago, when he was still well enough to climb the stairs to his office, he gave me his beloved Tyrolean hat. He looked me in the eyes and said, “Take good care of this, Patricia Gay.” It is green felt with a green rope around the crown emblazoned with forty-four years of enameled and jeweled American Motorcycle Association membership pins and the Heinz pickle pin Dad bought Mom at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. I look like Zeppo in the hat. It perches on top of my hair. Maybe he’s normal, and my head is huge.

Mom has a friend who has a brother who has acute myelogenous leukemia too. He’s a doctor who is seventy-six. He lives in California, and he’s in remission. A time is set. The doctor calls. He’s on the same protocol as Dad. He tells Dad he’s skiing. Dad is cheered. Hope flares. On the way to Good Sam the next day, a car cuts us off. Dad glares at the driver and says, “I slapped his face with leather gloves. We meet at dawn tomorrow.”

I go down on a Friday and come back on a Sunday. Dad and I sing in the pool. I pull him by the noodle. I tell him I’m going to buy him a bench in Central Park. I kiss him and love him up good. We watch
Judge Judy,
the
Antiques Road
Show,
and his favorite, the Nature Channel. We see bears maul humans, moths making love, and a hippo going wild. During the National Cutting Horse Association Super Stakes Non-Pro Final, a palomino does something tricky. Dad perks up. “That horse recovers well,” he says. Of another, he shakes his head, “That horse has no snap.”

Monday, Dad goes to Dr. Harris, and Dr. Harris has good news. Dad doesn’t need blood! Platelets are up! No transfusions! He can go home! But Monday night Mom doesn’t like the way he looks. Tuesday morning they drive back to Good Sam, Dad in the back, his head on a pillow on Donna’s lap. The techs take blood. Dad’s admitted. I cross off the latest DAD IN HOSP. phone number in my book and write in 835-2487.

I dial Dad the next morning. “What’s going on, Dad?”

“How . . . are . . . you . . . Patricia Gay?”

“I miss you, Daddy.”

“Forgive . . . me . . . I . . . have . . . to . . . speak . . . slowly. . . . My . . . tongue . . . is . . . swollen.”

“Want me to do the talking, Daddy?”

“Yes . . . I . . . love . . . to . . . hear . . . your . . . voice. . . . You . . . talk.”

I talk. I ramble. I sing. Singing is something we love doing together. In the car we sing Alphabet Geography. The first song is usually “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Then it’s “Bamy Bound” or “Brazil.” Then “Nothing Could Be Fina Than to Be in Carolina in the Mor-or-or-ning.” Sometimes we sing a moon medley: “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Moon Over Miami,” “That Ole Devil Moon.” Sometimes we only sing songs about love: “Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere,” “I Love You a Bushel and a Peck,” “That’s Amore.” Today I sing my father’s favorite song, “Younger Than Springtime.” When I finish, he doesn’t say anything, but I can hear him breathing.

“I love you, Dad,” I say.

“I . . . love . . . you . . . too.”

That afternoon my sister calls. “I don’t like the way Mom sounds,” she says. “I think you should get down here.”

“What does she sound like?”

“Bad.”

I call Dad again. The nurse picks up. “I’m Mr. Volk’s daughter. May I speak to him?”

“Mr. Volk is unable to speak.”

“Why?”

“His tongue is swollen.”

“Could you put the phone by his ear? Hello, Dad? It’s Patty, Dad. Can you hear me?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I’m coming down, Dad. I’ll be on the next plane. I’m gonna sleep at the hospital tonight and keep you company. Okay, Dad?”

The nurse takes back the phone and tells me he smiled.

I get to the hospital at eleven. I kiss him and pull a chair up to his bed so if he opens his eyes, he’ll see me. I whisper to him, but there’s no response. Then he opens his eyes. I’m not sure if he sees me. His eyes are cloudy, and they don’t move. I lean back in my chair and hold his hand. After a while he pulls his away. I hold it again until he pulls it away again.

The room is dark. The only illumination is street fluorescence angling through the venetian blinds. Suddenly Dad shoots up in bed. “No!” he screams. The watery light reduces his face to white and shadow. His mouth and eye sockets are black holes.

“What is it, Dad? What’s the matter?”

I try to soothe him, but he falls back against his pillows and closes his eyes. A little later, moving stronger and faster than he has in a year, Dad hurls his legs off the bed. The night nurse, who’s been sleeping in a chair, races over and clamps her hands on Dad’s shoulders. She forces him down.

“Let him stand! He has to stand! His legs hurt!” I say.

I remember from childhood Dad bolting out of bed to walk off leg cramps. Even though he wore Murray Space Shoes in the store and took potassium pills, a restaurant man on his feet twelve hours a day gets leg cramps at night.

“You can’t walk, Mr. Volk!” the nurse screams right in his ear.

“Yes, he can! You’ve got to let him!” I scream back.

“He’s been in bed for two days. He’ll fall.
Down,
Mr. Volk!”

“Get a walker! Get an orderly! I’ll help! You have to let him walk.
Please.
”

Dad pushes against her, but the nurse wins. I run to the nurses’ station and tell them my father wants to walk, needs to walk,
has
to walk.

“We can’t let him do that,” the nurse says without looking up. “He’ll fall and break a hip.”

“Not if we support him! He’s in pain! You need to let him put weight on his feet! You HAVE to!”

Is there no way on earth to let my father safely stand? Have they given up? Don’t they care anymore?

Later Dad bolts up again. Again he swings his legs over. I beg the nurse. She wrestles him down for the second time. I’m failing my father. I know I am. My brain isn’t working. I’m desperate. I can’t think of any way to help him. If the tables were turned, he would have found a way to let me stand. The inventor’s daughter can’t invent a way to help her father.

“At least give him something for pain,” I say. They do. He goes to sleep, and I stare at the face I love so much, and the only way I get through the night, what saves me from becoming a sobbing primal wreck on the floor, is thinking about the snow chair. Forty-something years ago we woke up one Sunday and the world was white. We put on our leggings and walked across the street to Riverside Park. Some kids were there with their mothers, some with their fathers. The kids with fathers were making snowmen. Dad began packing the snow. We helped, scooping up armloads. He’d tell us where to drop them. He worked hard, laughing, bending over, shaping it. When he was finished, a giant upholstered armchair overlooked the Hudson. We took turns sitting in it, legs dangling, watching snow-covered ice floes wade down the river. The snow chair, our snow throne. We rarely took a camera. My only record of the snow chair is in my head. I haven’t thought of the snow chair in years. But tonight it comes back, and I relive the feeling of unadulterated joy, the miracle of my father and his imagination. I loop snow-chair footage in my head over and over and over. We wake up. The world is white. We go out. Dad builds the chair. We sit in it. Over and over so that when I look at my father in the bed, I see him in his camel-hair coat and galoshes, roses in his cheeks. When I start to bawl, I say to myself, “Snow chair, snow chair. Snow chair.”

In the morning Mom and my sister get to the hospital at seven. Dad is unresponsive. At ten thirty Dr. Harris makes rounds. He puts his ear on my father’s chest and looks in his eyes. Then he comes out of the room and talks to us.

“He’s dying,” the doctor says, avoiding my mother’s eyes. “I think he may have had a small stroke. If I took a picture of his head, I’m fairly sure I would see he’d bled into his brain.”

“Are you saying you want him to go downstairs for some X rays?” Mom asks hopefully.

“No.”

Dr. Harris tells us he’s going to give Dad morphine.

Someone says, “How long?”

“Two or three days.”

They hook Dad up to the morphine. We sit by his bed till the four-o’clock night nurse comes on. At one point Mom leans over Dad, whispers something in his ear, and he smiles. Over and over, all day, she keeps saying to him, “Dr. Harris is coming with something new. Some magic, sweetheart. Dr. Harris has something magic for you, Cecil. It’s on the way.” She smoothes her hand over his head and trails her fingers. It’s something my father must have loved. We all kiss him. My sister wants to sleep in Dad’s room, but we convince her to come home. At night we share a bed. We hold hands and cry.

At 4:45 the phone rings. My sister runs into my mother’s room. When she comes back to where I am, she stands over the bed and says, “He’s dead.”

I can’t speak.

“Do you hear me, Patty? He’s dead.”

It’s July fourteenth. It’s Bastille Day. The moon is still up. We drive to the hospital.

In his room Dad is lying with the covers pulled under his chin. His eyes are closed. You can see his teeth a little. We sit with him. We each take a few minutes with him alone. We kiss him. He’s not cold, but he is damp. We hold his hand. We talk to him. We sit without speaking, then Mom says we have to go. I don’t want to go. I want to be with him. Mom says, “We have to go now. Bad things start happening soon. Come, girls. We have to go.”

A nurse stops us in the hall, says she’s sorry, and asks about donating Dad’s body to science.

“He’s been cut up enough already,” Mom says.

Another nurse tells us Dad wasn’t alone when he died, that she and a couple of other nurses were there. He wasn’t awake. He wasn’t in pain. He simply stopped breathing. They had told us Dad would have two or three days once they started the morphine. My sister will not forgive herself for not spending the night.

Back at the house, Mom asks her to leave a message on the phone: “Cecil succumbed to leukemia at four forty-five this morning. I will return your call at a later date.”

She doesn’t want anyone around but the immediate family, the sixteen of us. We’re not sitting shivah. We’re not saying
Kaddish.
Dad didn’t want us to. Mom asks her grandson John to go up to Dad’s office and delete all the files in his computer.

My sister and I put on bathing suits. We need to move. We dive into the pool. Without discussing it, we scull ourselves downward. Sitting on the bottom, legs akimbo, we serve each other tea underwater, pouring from an invisible pot into invisible cups. We sip. Then we burst out of the water laughing wildly. We go down again and touch tongues. We haven’t done this since 1953.

Condolence letters pour in. Dad meant something to people we had no idea he knew. There are loving letters from bank tellers, waiters, and car repairmen. His poetry teachers, artists, the children of friends. We get two hundred and forty-six letters.

“Look at all these people who cared about Dad,” I say to Mom.

“Your father felt very welcome in the world,” she says.

When his obit comes out in the paper, a new wave of letters arrives. The obit captures Dad. It captures the high times at Morgen’s. It calls the store “a garment district social center for decades.” It describes Dad’s inventions and how he met Mom. It gets one thing wrong. It says Dad “perfected the art of the schmooze.” But Dad was too deeply private to authentically schmooze. “When you tell someone about yourself, you give them power over you,” he’d say. Dad rarely spoke about himself. He had a joke or a story tailored for everyone. It made people laugh while it gave him distance. The obit ends with a quote from my mother: “ ‘Everybody seemed to think he was their best friend,’ ” Mrs. Volk said. ‘Anybody he touched was very happy. It’s a known fact.’ ”

Two weeks after Dad dies, my nephew John picks up his ashes. The crematologist calls them cremains. He says he’s never felt such heavy ones. We speculate it’s Dad’s titanium hip. My sister wants some of the ashes to bury. Her rabbi has told her it’s okay to do that if it will make her feel better. “You have to respect your mom on this,” he adds. I tell my sister what Tolstoy said: “The body is just an overcoat for the soul.”