Aloft (40 page)

Jack says firmly, "She'll be fine with it."

"But you ought to make sure, don't you think, before getting him all excited? Besides, I don't know if it would be the best thing for him."

Pop calls out, "I'll take the guest room with the big TV, okay, Jack?"

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"Sure thing, Pop."

"Are you hearing me, Jack?"

He stares right in my eyes. "The best thing for Pop, or for you?"

"For me? For him to stay at
your
house? Christ. I don't know what that means. I really don't. And I'm thinking about you, kid, especially you. You've got a wife, and kids, and a big house to run, and a business to . . ."

". You know, the one with the big
tube
TV . . ."

"Sure, Pop, sure," he says, and then to me, "To what?"

"What?"

"To what.
A business to what?"

"You know what."

"Tell me, Dad."

"Forget it."

"Come on, let's hear it."

"I said forget it."

Jack gives me a look—or actually, he doesn't, which is a look in itself—and for a scant moment I feel myself tensing my neck and jaw for what I'm intuiting will be a straight overhand right, popped clean and quick, and I actually shut my eyes for a breath. Of course nothing comes, nothing at all, and when life flips back it's just Jack gazing straight at me, his mouth slightly open in his way, with that resigned enervation, like he's waiting for a train that always runs late.

"Well, don't worry about it," he says. "It's going to be okay."

"I won't," I say. This sounds as empty as it is untrue, but like most men we accept the minor noise of it and try to move on.

But presently we don't have to, as Paul and Patterson and a light-brown-skinned guy with his head wrapped in a bright purple cloth—presumably the doe enter the room in a rush,
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though they're momentarily frozen by the sight of the empty bed; Jack points to the bathroom, where we converge, Tack first.

He knocks, calling for Pop, and then opens the door. Pop is sitting hunched on the edge of the tub, grasping his arm.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"My arm hurts. And my neck. It's like clamped inside."

"Please let me in," the doe says, pushing through. But just as he does, Pop sharply groans and pitches forward with sheer dead weight, and it's only because of Jack's quick reflexes that he doesn't smack his face on the hard tile floor. He and the doc gently turn him onto his back, and the doc gets to work, 100

percent business (definitely a welcome change of pace), checking his vitals, trying to track the pain, with Pop wincing as fiercely as I've ever seen him, tiny tears pushing out of the corners of his eyes.

"What's wrong with him?" I ask, all of it in sum beginning to spook me. "Shouldn't we call an ambulance?"

Paul says, "It's already coming."

The doc tells Patterson to alert the hospital to ready a cardiac team.

"He's having a heart attack?" Jack says.

"Possibly," the doc answers. "But we won't know how bad it is, or even what it is, until we get him to the hospital." He asks Pop if he thinks he can swallow some aspirin, and Pop nods.

Patterson is sent to get some. When he returns with them, Pop takes two, crunching on them like children's tablets, and lies back. The doe now regards him more generally.

"Why is he in such a miserable condition?"

Patterson says, "This is the gentleman who left the premises."

"I see."

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"Can't you do something for him?" I say.

"There's nothing else I can do. We simply have to wait for the ambulance."

But now Pop sort of yelps, and claws angrily at his neck, like there's something ditch-witching its way out of him. Jack holds him steady and then eases him back clown, and for a moment he seems to calm, but then all at once his whole body becomes sort of warped and rigid, like a sheet of plywood that's been soaked and then too quickly dried. He rests again, his eyes shut. And then it starts again.

"Steady him now," the doc says, he and Jack quelling the new tremor. "Steady him. Steady. He'll make it through."

Paul is nodding in assent, but in fact it looks to me like Pop's going, really going. Going now for good.

e l e v e n

I R E M E M B E R , from the time I was old enough not to care so much, Pop liked to say to me, with a put-on twang, "You're

"

okay, Jerome, but I'd like you a whole lot better as a nephew than a son."

And I'd say to him, "Likewise, Uncle Hank."

We'd have a chuckle about it, our little hick routine, and often we'd play along that way for a while, through whatever we happened to be doing, driving in the car or painting the fence, and talk about stuff that we normally wouldn't talk about, which was pretty much everything, though this was of course only when Bobby didn't happen to be with us. When the three of us did go out together I was happy to sit in the back and let them shoot the shit and razz each other and just focus on my books on flying aces of WWII. It's no great shock that after Bobby went to Vietnam we didn't play the game anymore, and not because I was getting too old. But it was sort of fun while it lasted. Maybe we'd be driving out east to buy shrubs for a job A l O F T

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and Pop would ask me about my girl and whether I'd finally gotten my fingers stinky, to which I'd make like I was hoisting my rig and say,
If
my
big one counts,
and we'd stupidly yuck it up like that all the way to the nursery, yakking like nimrods about women in the street and the latest car models and the merits and demerits of certain brands of beer. It was all a dumb joke but it was easy and comfortable and it doesn't take an advanced degree in psychology to figure out what we were doing, or why, or that those times were probably in fact when we felt closest to one another, most like a father and son.

I recount this with less nostalgia than a kind of wonder that we played the game at all, though at that moment in the jostling ambulance with the sirens
wop-wopping
and the sturdy EMS gal barking in Brooklynese his sorry vitals ahead to the ER, when it was clear that this was Pop's last careen on our side of oblivion, I thought for sure that I heard him try to drawl some avuncular sobriquet to me through the misty oxygen mask, some snigger to of Jerry-boy to check out the lushly ample hindquarters of the lady paramedic. But it wasn't that, of course, rather the muffled gasp of a death throe, in equal parts pissed and terrified, punctuated by his grasping my hand so tightly that I had to squeeze back as hard as I could to make him relent, actually crackling the little bones in his hand. Pop then kind of wailed and the butch paramedic possessed of these huge caramel-brown eyes noticed us holding hands and said with a fatalism and tenderness that walloped me deep in the chest, "It's really all we got, huh?"

I guess I blurted a yeah, not thinking much about what she was referring to, and it's only now, a few weeks later, when things have settled down and I'm finally up here again in sleek
Donnie,
Theresa serving as my copilot, cruising at a smooth
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altitude above this familiar patch of planet, that I'm able to peel away to the fuller meanings.

I should note without further delay that Pop has not been lowered into the ground, or sifted into an urn, or shelved away in a granite wall cabinet, nor is he otherwise in any way closer to the netherworld than he was when rescued from the Ivy Acres ground cover, but ensconced in the lap of Jack and Eunice Battle luxury,
bain en suite,
satellite TV clicker and walkie-talkie in hand, so he can squawk down to Rosario and order up a Bloomin' Onion or other microwave treat whenever he feels a lonely hollow in his gut. He is convalescing in style after the combination heart attack and mild stroke (an extremely rare occurrence, we're told, both to experience and then survive, particularly with no extreme ill effects). Eunice I hear has been especially solicitous, turning down his bed herself while he receives his daily bath from the hired home nurse (female, un-tattooed), and then fans out the dozen or so journals and magazines she replenishes weekly for him on the west end of the king bed, pillows fluffed and propped, the forever-blab of Fox News on the big tube awaiting his scrubbed pink return. Jack, too, is being extra helpful, keeping Pop up at night with a special subscription to an adult channel, his favorite program being the
Midnight Amateur Hour,
in which we are introduced to the porn star aspirations of excruciatingly ordinary middle-class folks, one couple Pop swears featuring the head cook at Ivy Acres. Even I have been going over there every other day, bearing gifts of guilt-larded fruit like biscotti and Sambuca and twine-wrapped soppressata or other such items that might bolster his memory of another time in his life when things weren't any better or worse but when at least most of his family and friends were still alive. Maybe it should be no surprise that it A L O F T

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takes a serious brush with death to really land oneself in Nir-vana, which in this case for Pop—and soon enough me, soon enough you—is a convening of family predicated not so much upon either obligation or love as on a final mutual veto of any further abandonment.

And if
family
is the "it" the ambulance gal was talking about, the all-purpose F-word for our times,
really all we got,
like anybody else I'm not sure whether that's an ultimately heartening or depressing proposition, though perhaps that's not the point. I will confess that at the very moment I thought Pop was a goner, kicking the bucket, croaking for good, I didn't much
feel
love for him, even as I
had
love; I felt intellectually sure, is what I'm saying, which is no excuse. What this might suggest about families in general or ours in particular or just sorry old me is that while prophets tell us we're innately bestowed with enough grace to convey righteousness and bliss to entire worlds (much less one person), we mostly don't, at all, just pure potential that we are, just pure possibility. And the people who most often witness and thus endure the chasm between our exalted possible and our dreary actual are the ones we in fact love, or should love.

This is why Pop is in fact so lucky now, so very lucky, which has nothing to do with his being alive. (We're all alive, aren't we?) And for a host of reasons I doubt this attention lavished on Pop will be duly lavished on me when my time comes due, the primary one being that unlike Pop I'll probably be pushing hard for special treatment, and thus receive none in return. I should wise up and probably start getting chummier with Jack's (and eventually Theresa's) kids, besides just appearing in the doorway of their double-height foyer with the Disney video-tape of the week, waving it like Fagan might a piece of bread
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above the dancing urchins. In addition I can't bear to tell Pop that his only grandson and bearer of the Battle Brothers torch will soon have to relinquish several lifetimes of accrued capital for a final grand blowout liquidation sale, which even then won't cover the various notes come due. I can't bear to tell him that our sole recent investment in the property is a fix for the section of cyclone fence that one of the guys accidentally ran through a few years ago with a backhoe, and only because Suffolk National Bank ordered us to secure the grounds and garage.

Richie Coniglio tells me that Battle Brothers will be pretty much stripped, but assures that Jack himself will be safe, if safe means still owning the big house and big cars but no longer possessed of the salary to maintain it for too long.

Lately Theresa has been accompanying me on my visits to her brother's, and to my happiness has been exceedingly warm toward him and Pop and also toward Eunice, who has taken the news of Battle Brothers' demise quite hard. After Pop had his trouble Jack suddenly came clean and opened the books to her, and apparently for a week or so she didn't do anything different, quarterbacking the household offense as always with Rosario blocking upfield, picking through the various ladies' lunches and kids' pool parties with that austere English-German efficiency, even audible-izing an impromptu single-malt scotch tasting at the country club followed by a raclette party back at the house. But then the next day while waiting to pay at Saks, somebody allegedly nudged her and she pretty much freaked and actually started singing a pop song, quite loudly, all of which she couldn't remember, and then bent all her credit cards in two and had to be escorted out to her Range Rover by mall security. She's been seeing a counselor twice a week since, and appears to me to be calmly, perfectly okay, though perhaps A L O F T

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calmly, perfectly okay is a worrisome drop-off for someone accustomed to rolling forth at full throttle and being all-time 4WD-engaged. Though we don't know whether she is on medication, Theresa has recognized the imbalance as potentially serious, and has taken her, without a whiff of irony, on a couple let's-just-be-girls outings, including a longish session at the fancy new Korean nail salon on Deer Park Avenue and an even longer one at the all-you-care-to-eat Brazilian meat palace, where at least Eunice thoroughly ruined her manicure clawing and gnawing on char-grilled short ribs and baby backs.

Theresa, I'm sure, practiced her current form of all-you-care-to-eat, as she did earlier this afternoon at the marina restaurant near Bar Harbor where I ordered us each a two-anda-half-pounder with drawn butter and dinner rolls, she barely touching her meal. We're heading back now along the seaboard, our flight path taking us past the southern beach suburbs of Boston and over Buzzards Bay, to cross the Sound at its wide mouth and then follow the northern shoreline of the Island, until the final turn to MacArthur Field. Having Theresa along is an unusual circumstance, and one she initiated. In fact, I'd normally never fly on a day like this, when the weather, although supremely fine on the journey up, holds the chance for an inclement change. At present, we're approaching the start of the Cape and I can see far off in the distance and probably still southwest of New York City the broad white cottony mass of the approaching system, nothing like dark thunderheads fortunately but to this exclusively fair-weather flyer material stuff all the same, and a sight I've never seen, at least from up here.