I Know This Much Is True (127 page)

The AIDS kids had the hardest struggle, she said. They didn’t want to eat, because eating made them sicker. So on top of everything else the poor little guys were contending with, there was the real danger of malnutrition.

Starve something long enough and it dies,
I thought
.

“So what do you do for these kids?”

She said she read to them, rocked them. Did a little pet therapy.

“Pet therapy?” I said. “What’s pet therapy?”

The kids really responded to animals, she said. There was a cool dog named Marshmallow that visited once a week. They had fish.

And rabbits—Zeke and Zack. “We’ve got to be really careful because of infection—there’s all kinds of restrictions and regulations—but the kids love animals so much.”

Mostly she just held the kids, she said. That was probably the most useful thing she did. “Kids this sick want physical closeness more than anything else. They just want to be held.”

“You sure this is good for you?” I asked. “You sure this doesn’t cost you too much?”

She smiled, shook her head. She knew it sounded depressing, she said, but it wasn’t. That was the miracle. It made her happy to be around these kids—to be a part of their precious days. She felt more at peace with herself than she had in years.

I smiled. Said I thought she’d kept her promise after all.

“What promise?”

“Clapton’s kid? The little dude who fell from the window? I think you caught him after all.” I watched her confusion turn into remembrance of that dream she had told me about. Watched her eyes fill up with tears.

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Did she want to go up? Say hello to Ray?

She checked her watch. She’d like to, she said, but she was running late—meeting Dan for dinner. But, okay, she’d just stop in and say hello. She couldn’t stay, though.

Riding the elevator back to the fourth floor, I realized that she’d just mentioned her boyfriend’s name without me wanting to punch a wall. Progress of some kind, I figured. All that therapy had been good for
some
thing. “So how’s Sadie?” I said.

“Oh. Dominick . . .” She reached for me. “She died.” Her hand fell back to her side. “I had to have her put to sleep. I’m sorry. I should have called you.”

I shrugged. Told her it was okay—she’d been
her
dog, not mine.

“She was
our
dog,” she said.

The elevator stopped on the third floor, opened its doors to nobody, then closed again. We continued up. “She died peacefully, Dominick.” She took a step toward me. Leaned, a little, against me.

When we got to Ray’s room, he was sitting up, having himself a nurse-assisted sip of juice. “Brought you some company,” I said.

“Hi, Ray,” Dessa said. He stared at her blankly.

“You remember who this is?” I asked him.

He took another sip of his juice. Gave us a grin so slight I almost missed it. “Hot Lips Houlihan,” he said.

By the third day after his surgery, Ray was lucid again. His “craziness” had been caused by the painkillers, just like they’d said. Twelve days after the amputation of his right leg, Ray was deemed steady enough on crutches to be transferred to a subacute rehabilitation center.

Rivercrest Convalescent Home had cheerful wallpaper, a cheery staff, and an earnest daily schedule of physical therapy, occupational therapy, and sing-alongs. Each day I visited, I ran a gauntlet of wheelchair-bound “sentries”—old geezers who spent their whole day parked at the front entrance, watching the ebb and flow of visitors, employees, and delivery men. Hoping, I guess, for news of life beyond the parking lot. Some of them I got to know by name: Daphne, the vamp of the I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 851

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group in her Technicolor housecoats; Maizie, who always asked me coming and going if I was her son, Harold; Warren, whose universal greeting was “Hello, Cap’n Peacock!”

Sitting among the sentries, slumped and wizened, was a nameless old woman I came to think of as Princess Evil Eye. Everyone down there made a big deal about the Princess; pushing one hundred, she was Rivercrest’s oldest resident. She and I never exchanged words, the way I did with the rest of them, but she seemed, always, to train her beady eyes on me when I entered the home—to follow my progress down the corridor to Ray’s room. I know this because sometimes I stopped and looked back and it freaked me out a little: the way she’d watch me. . . . “The Crew” I called them. Daphne, Warren, the Princess. The welcoming committee at the way station between life and whatever the hell was coming after it. Rivercrest was purgatory, with wheelchairs.

Ray was sullen and quiet his first week or so, and what his social worker called “semicooperative” after that. At the end of a two-week campaign to enlist him in her programs and special activities, the recreation director abandoned him as a project and let him stay in his room and sulk. He wavered in his decision about whether or not to get an artificial leg. “If I was a horse, they’d just take me out and shoot me,” he said one day.

“Your father’s depressed,” they told me. They said he sometimes cried in private in his room. It was to be expected. These things took time.

I began visiting him almost every day. Began taking his dirty laundry home after Laundry Services lost his favorite shirt. He didn’t have that much; I had the time. By then, I had sold my painting equipment to Sheffer’s buddy or partner or whatever’s the politically correct way to say it these days. I’d gone up to Hartford and taken that test for my teaching reinstatement. Signed up for that refresher course you had to take. I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to the classroom, but I figured I’d get my ducks lined up, just in case. I had until the end of the summer before I’d become “econom-ically challenged.” Sometimes schools needed teachers at the last I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 852

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minute. By then, Ray would be home and, hopefully, self-sufficient again.

I brought him the New York and Boston papers when I visited—the
Post
, the
Herald
. Brought him a hamburger from The Prime Steer once or twice a week because all of Rivercrest’s meat was “like shoe leather.” Because they even screwed up meat loaf. “Jesus, what’d you do this again for?” he’d say, when I’d hand him his take-out food.

“Don’t waste your money. I don’t even have an appetite.” Then he’d dig in—devour the damn thing in six or seven minutes flat.

The staff thought getting out for a couple of hours might lift Ray’s spirits a little, so I took a lesson from the physical therapist on how to help him in and out of the car, what to do when he needed to get to the toilet. We were both nervous the first time. I took him for a drive around Three Rivers, out past the big casino construction. “Jesus Christ Almighty,” he said. “This thing’s going to be huge. Well, what the hell. More power to ’em.” His position on the Wequonnocs surprised me a little; it seemed to me that he’d spent a lifetime begrudging anyone good fortune.

For our second jaunt, we went to Friendly’s for lunch. When I asked him where he’d like to go for field trip number three, his answer surprised me.

“How about the movies?” he said.

“The movies? Yeah?” Ray had been on record since back when Thomas and I were kids: movies were nothing but a waste of time and money.

I held the
Daily Record
’s entertainment ads in front of him.

Figured he’d probably pick
Dances with Wolves
, which I’d already suffered through once.
Naked Gun
and some Arnold Schwarzenegger thing were both playing over at Center Cinema.

“How about this thing?” he said, his finger tapping against an ad for
The Little Mermaid
.

“That’s a Disney cartoon, Ray,” I said. “It’s a kids’ movie.”

He knew goddamned well what it was, he said. They ran ads for it every five seconds on the TV, didn’t they? What did
I
want to see, then? What the hell had I even asked him for?

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“Okay, okay,” I said. “
The Little Mermaid.
We’re there.”

In the theater lobby, people stared at his crutches, his flapping pant leg—kids
and
adults. By the time he’d finished up in the men’s room, the movie had already started. I was a nervous wreck helping him down the sloping aisle in the dark. But after we’d gotten seated, after my heartbeat had gone back to normal and I’d recovered enough to pick up the gist of the story, I saw the logic of Ray’s choice. He’d needed to see a story about a feisty mermaid who wanted what she couldn’t have—wanted legs—and then had gotten both what she wished for and what she hadn’t. At one point, I looked over at Ray, studying his movie-lit profile: locked jaw, scowl. What I was looking at, I realized, was his courage.

“Well, how’d you like it?” I asked him on our way back to Rivercrest. “Not bad,” was his emotionless two-word review. Back at the home, the wheelchair brigade was stationed at the front door as usual. “Excuse me. Are you, by any chance, my son, Harold?” Maizie asked me, right on cue.

Ray answered before I could. “His name’s Dominick Birdsey!” he snapped. “He’s
my
kid!” Heading down the hallway, not quite out of earshot, he mumbled something about “old coots” and “goddamned nuisances.”

Somewhere during that first month at Rivercrest, Ray made a couple of friends: Stony, a retired roofer who’d once fought Willie Pep in the Golden Gloves, and Norman, who’d fought in World War II at Bataan. Back in the old days, Norman claimed—when he was a kid working at his father’s horse-drawn lunch wagon in downtown Three Rivers—he had served Mae West a piece of rhubarb pie. Free of charge. She was passing through town in vaudeville. There was a lot of kidding back and forth about that. What else had he served her? What had
she
served
him
? Maybe that new one—what’d she call herself?

Madonna? Maybe
she
liked a little of Norman’s rhubarb pie, too.

Norman, Stony, and Ray: “the Three Musketeers,” someone on the staff dubbed them. They ate their meals together in the dining room. Played pinochle in Stony’s room. (Only Stony’s radio could pull in that Big Band station from New Haven.) “Your father’s I Know[749-858] 7/24/02 1:42 PM Page 854

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doing much, much better,” the social worker told me. Ray decided he might as well try that fake leg. See how it felt. What the hell—his insurance paid for it. No sense them getting a free ride.

We watched baseball sometimes, Ray and me. Played a little cribbage. Usually the TV did more talking than we did. One day, he started complaining about the crummy shaves the orderlies gave him. They had to use electric razors—there was some kind of house rule about it—but an electric razor never shaved him right.

“Shave yourself,” I said.

He told me he couldn’t—his hands shook. He held them up to demonstrate.“You’d probably come in here someday, find my head on the floor. Why don’t
you
shave me?”

I resisted at first—let it drop the first couple of times he mentioned it—but he kept it up. “All right, all right,” I finally said, wheeling him into the cramped little bathroom adjacent to his room. “We’ll
try
it.”

It felt weird that first time—unnatural—lathering him up, holding him by the chin and scraping the stubble off his neck, his slack cheeks. We’d never touched one another much in our family, Ray and me least of all. But I got used to it. After the first couple times, it didn’t seem so strange. Probably more than anything else, it was shaving Ray that broke down the final barriers between us. . . .

Because getting shaved made him talkative. Made him open up.

I learned more about Ray during those shaves than I had ever known before. He’d lost both his father and his older brother to influenza in 1923, the same year he was born. At least he’d been raised to
believe
they were his father and brother. When he was ten years old, the woman Ray had always been told was his mother took sick with rheumatic fever. On her deathbed, she let out the truth: that she was really his
grand
mother. That his “sister” Edna had given birth to him.

As I listened, I thought about that framed photograph he kept on his bureau back at the house on Hollyhock Avenue: pictured the woman Thomas and I had laughed at behind his back—had called Ma Kettle. Now she had a name: Edna.

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After it was just the two of them—just Edna and him—they drifted from place to place. Someone would hire Edna as a housekeeper, everything would be hunky-dory for a while and then, the next thing Ray knew, they’d have to move again. . . . She’d
meant
well enough, he said; she wasn’t a
bad
person. But she was weak.

“Weak to temptation. In plain English, she was a tramp, I guess.

And a drunk.”

The worst of it came when Edna got them a room above one of the taverns downtown. “Tavern row,” they called it—plenty to pick from. Edna would make the rounds—bring home riffraff, one plug-ugly drunk after another. One night he’d been awakened right out of a sound sleep by some guy sitting there, trying to start something funny with him. After that, he’d slept with a ball-peen hammer in his bed. “It would have been okay if the others had lived,” he said.

“But it had come down to just her and me.”

He’d gotten out as soon as he could, he said—had quit school and joined the Navy. Edna had had to sign a paper. “At first she wouldn’t sign it,” he said. “I was always working odd jobs, see?

Bringing in a little money.” But she’d signed it, finally, one night when she was “good and soused” and he’d gotten the hell out of there. He’d only gone back to Youngstown once since then, and that was to bury her. December of 1945, it was; he remembered because he’d just gotten out of the Navy. Had just bought his black DeSoto.