The Bill from My Father (16 page)

The time had come for me to father my father. The aphoristic chug of this phrase—father my father—gathered steam. I'd simply call Dad up and tell him, as nonchalantly as possible, that I'd pay the bill myself, and that way his phone wouldn't be disconnected. Getting him to go along with the idea might, I realized, require a little coaxing, but sooner or later he'd hand me the baton of responsibility. Never mind that I had plenty of evidence to suggest that he'd hang on to that baton for dear life—
A son doesn't help his father up
—I was intent on repaying a kindness to the man who'd inspired me (in the Greek sense of
breathed life into
) to write about him. Over the years, I've checked and rechecked my motives for coming to his rescue, searching for any traces of self-righteousness on my part, and you'll just have to take my word for it when I say that my motives were absolutely pure. Except, perhaps, for a smudge of martyrdom. A tiny speck of ascendancy. A trapped bubble of unacknowledged guilt. In any case, my sense of parental duty was magnified by the fact that I didn't have children and was frankly pleased with myself for being a person who knows he isn't inclined toward parenthood and therefore doesn't have kids, as opposed to being a person who knows he isn't inclined toward parenthood and propagates anyway. Fathering my father was propagation enough.

“Dad?”

“Hello there!”

“Am I disturbing you?”

“Not at all. I had to get up to answer the phone.”

“Very funny.”

“It's laugh or cry, boychick.”

Thankfully, I'd caught him in a good humor. “There's something we should talk about.”

“It's your dime.”

“The regional supervisor from the phone company called me today and—”

“What!”

“Some guy from the phone company called me today and—”

“What the hell business is it of yours?”

“Calm down. He called
me
.”

“What'd you tell that SOB?”

“I didn't tell him anything. I listened.”

“You think
I
didn't listen? I listened plenty. It's a good thing I'm not allergic to bullshit; if I was, he'd of killed me.”

“Well, how about if I just go ahead and pay for—”

“Pay for calls I didn't make? Don't be an idiot.”

“Technically, the calls were made from your phone, so—”

“Let me ask you something. If you borrowed my Caddy and wrecked it, who should pay the damages, you or me?”

“That example isn't—”

“You?” he shouted. “Or me?”

“This is a totally different situation.”

“You should have to pay, is who!”

“I'm trying to help you!”

“If I want your help, I'll ask for it.”

“I'm not so sure you would. That's why I'm volunteering.”

My father fell silent, proving you can't volunteer in a vacuum.

I took a breath and began again. I'd help him whether he liked it or not. Come hell or high water. “I'm pretty sure Betty made the calls to Texas. One day when I was over at the house she was watching a faith healer from Texas on TV.”

“She's a very religious person. I've met plenty of pious people in my time and they may seem like nuts to the rest of us but they're not
shysters
. It goes against her religion to lie and steal.” It gave me a start when I heard a woman's voice in the background, but it must have been the television; he wouldn't implicate Betty if she was standing right there.

“Did you ask her about the calls to Texas?”

“I don't have to ask her nothing. It's my phone and she's free to use it whenever she wants. She's not a prisoner. She's here of her own free will.”

“I'm glad she's there. I'm glad she's doing whatever it is she does for you. But you're late on your phone bill.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you haven't paid on time.”

“I know what
late
means, for Christ's sake. That thing you said before.
Do whatever she does for me
.”

“Cook. Shop. Make sure you take your medications. Help you up the stairs.”

“What's wrong with her helping me up the stairs?” The stairs led to the bedroom, which led to the bed, on which was heaped insinuation.

“Nothing's wrong with it. She's your nurse. I'm glad she's your nurse.”

“Is that sarcasm?”

“I don't … I didn't …” Here's where logic began to bend. Anything was possible. “Did it sound like sarcasm?”

“If you have to ask, it's sarcasm.”

Spoken in my father's voice, any random statement, any empty maxim—
A frozen steak never fed the hungry; good is the bird who stifles its chirp
—could bear down on me with the weight of unassailable truth.

“I didn't mean to be sarcastic.”

“About what?” The voice belonged to Betty. My father had put her on the phone. Probably thrust it into her hand. Years of disinformation when it came to his women, and now this.

“Betty! Hello!”

“Yelling is bad for your father's blood pressure.”

“Yes. I wish he'd calm—”

“Try not to yell at him. He's a good man, your dad. Not the best patient in the world,” she said loudly enough for him to hear, “but you'll be glad to know I'm doing all I can to watch out for him. In this life and after.”

“That's very above and beyond the call of duty of you to do. His ‘after,' though, isn't what needs watching out for so much as his, you know, toe.” I grew even more flustered when I heard myself speak.
I wanted to make sure Betty wasn't proselytizing my father by acting as his travel agent for the afterlife, yet I also wanted her to like me, especially if I was destined to wake up one morning and discover that she was my stepmother.

“Don't you worry,” she assured me. “I make him stay put. He's been resting his feet and doing some serious thinking. That'll happen to a man when he's incapacitated. Each of us has only so much time to get right with the Lord.”

“I respect your religious beliefs,” I said uncertainly. “But you believe in medicine, too, don't you?”

“Of course I believe in medicine,” she said. “I wouldn't wear these awful white shoes unless I had to!” Her laughter was brief but tonic, and I understood how my father would take pleasure in its sound, would hope to provoke it. “I'm one step ahead of Dr. Graham when it comes to your father's welfare. Just last week I asked the doctor why Ed—I mean, your father—wasn't getting any better. After all, I watch him like a hawk. Got him to throw away the saltshaker and go with low-fat foods. He's lost twelve pounds.”

“Water weight,” my father shouted in the background.

“Thanks to me, he's been drinking eight glasses a day for—what's it been?—two months? Three? I feel so comfortable here I've lost track of time. But the uric acid should have been flushed out of his system by now. Your father relieves himself ten times a day.”

“Twenty!” Dad corrected.

“So I said to doctor Graham, ‘Could you cross-check Mr. Cooper's medicines? Something isn't right.' You can't be too careful, Bernard. I don't need to tell who gets blamed when the patient under a nurse's care doesn't jump right up like Lazarus.”

I pictured the chicken.

“That kind of healing is done by a greater power than me or any other medical professional and it's plain vanity to think any different. You'd be surprised how many doctors take credit for successful treatments, but if the treatment isn't doing what it's supposed to, they pin it on the nearest nurse, or on some poor orderly, or worse, on the patient. So I get Dr. Graham to look up the side effects of
hydrochlorothiazide in his
Physicians' Desk Reference
and he gets this funny look on his face and excuses himself to consult with another doctor in the office. He was gone an awfully long time. Left your father sitting on the examination table in a paper gown.”

“That was no gown,” said my father. “That was a goddamn napkin.”

“Well, Dr. Graham comes back and tells us that medicines with
zide
at the end of them
raise
the levels of uric acid! Not lower, raise! The medication forces the pancreas to produce uric acid even when the Indomethacin works to get rid of it. Your father's pancreas has been fighting itself this whole time! God knows, I made him take his pills, for all the good it did him. But the acid was turning to crystals in his bloodstream. Can you imagine having sharp little crystals in you?”

“Hurt like hell is what it felt like!”

“The blood wasn't cleansed and, oh, did your dad ever suffer.” She was talking on the wall phone in my father's kitchen and her voice resounded off the tile walls. Betty had adopted Benny Hinn's calmly oracular manner; her voice never sped up or ascended to a higher register, yet it teetered on the edge of revelation. “Lord knows we're all flawed merchandise, stubborn and wrongheaded down to a man. Here's where mercy enters the picture. Why waste a single one of us, is how I believe He thinks. If He brings us low He has His reasons. Now, I'm not supposing I know exactly what's on His mind, but it's my personal belief that your father came down with gout so the two of us could meet.”

“Is he off the hydro-whatever?”

“I got him off it right away. Of course, they've had to put him on several other meds to cancel out the meds they put him on before. Don't get me wrong, I've had to care for too many sick Christian Scientists in my time to be antimedication, but you can't just throw pills at an illness. Your poor father didn't fully appreciate his toe until he couldn't take a single step or stand up on his own without agony. Multiply that agony by a couple of months and I think you'll agree that he has every reason to sue.”

“Sue?” I leaned against the wall. “But he's getting better, right?”

“No thanks to Dr. Graham.”

“Maybe it's not Dr. Graham's fault. Maybe—I don't know—the side effects weren't listed on the bottle.”

She repeated this to my father.

“I'll sue the pill people too.”

“Betty, is this the right time for my father to alienate his physician? He's been Dr. Graham's patient for ages. Even if Dr. Graham misjudged the prescription, it's going to be difficult if not impossible to prove negligence. Does my father have the energy for a long, involved lawsuit?” Wait a minute, I said to myself, suing
gives
him energy.

“Don't worry,” said Betty. “I won't let him do anything that isn't in his own interest.”

Let him? Interest? Were my father and Betty hatching a plan to make some extra income from his gout, drawing each other into a ruinous lawsuit? Or were they simply two litigants in love, corroborating an allegation, traveling hand in hand down the road to restitution? In either case, Dad considered this woman—nurse or lover, it didn't matter—a worthy accomplice. Like my father, Betty possessed a certain elasticity in her outlook, which stretched from science to prophecy, from bald self-interest to round-the-clock care. When it came to contradictions, the two of them were as limber as gymnasts.

“You honor your father, don't you?”

I didn't like the sound of that question. Get ready, I said to myself, he's going to sue the universe. “It depends on what you mean by
honor
.”

“What'd he say?” asked my father.

“He said, ‘It depends.' ”

“Betty, please! I'm telling you these things in confidence. You have no idea what my father and I have been through. Our relationship is complicated. I love him in my own way, and vice versa.”

“He loves you, he says, and vice versa.”

My father shouted, “What's the vice versa?” He sounded hurt. Shocked on top of it. His hearing aid squealed.

“Put him on the phone, Betty.”

“What's the vice versa?” he asked again.

“It's that I love you in
my
own way and you love me in
your
own way.”

“Oh. I thought it was …” His voice trailed off.

“You thought it was what?”

“Hate.” He expelled the word like a cough.

“Dad! I don't hate you.”

“You never know,” he said. “Worse things have happened.”

“Worse things have, but I don't.”

“You get checkups?

I was taken aback. “Yes.”

“And you don't have the AIDS?”

I'd taken the test a year ago and waited an endless week for the results, frightened for myself and for Brian, for the friends I'd lost and might lose still. I was about to tell my father I'd tested negative when I heard a clatter on the other end of the line. Then Betty said, “I guess he went to take a nap. Ed?” she called after him. “Ed?” Then into the mouthpiece, “I should probably go. I don't want him climbing those stairs by himself.”

My father had sobbed for each of my brothers, sobbed raggedly, a cataract, his face clenched as tightly as a fist. Beyond shame or consolation, he wailed into the empty air,
It should have been me,
until weeping had siphoned the life from his eyes, the dazed figure sagging in a chair as close as a man had ever come to perishing in place of his son. And now, finding myself on the phone with Betty, beyond shame or consolation myself, I envied my brothers their unenviable deaths—a final sibling rivalry—for death would have been the only way to solicit an emotion from my father as abiding as his grief.

Then again, with three sons dead, what was left within him to solicit? What reserves of emotion remained? That he'd had to hand the phone to Betty, that he'd had to walk away without a word, was a measure not of callousness but love—brusque and evasive, too difficult for him to bear for long, but love nonetheless. He'd rather his question go unanswered than be met with bad news.