The Story of My Father (2 page)

Chapter Two

ON A JUNE morning in 1986, I was sleeping late in the bright sunshine pouring into my bedroom. This gift for sleep has left me in the seventeen years or so since these events took place, but on that day I’d been enjoying it—rising up to consciousness, then diving down again for a little while—when I heard the door to the bedroom open. Someone came in. There was a touch on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. My husband was bending over me. His lower face was covered in shaving foam and I was suddenly engulfed in that lathery scent. There were one or two broad dark stripes in the white on his cheek, marking the path of the razor where he’d started to shave and had been interrupted. He looked strange—partly on that account, of course, but partly because there was fear in his face.

He was speaking to me in a deliberately controlled voice, slowly and carefully, but what he was saying made no sense. It was about my father. The police and my father. The police had him. My father. He was somewhere in western Massachusetts. The police were on the phone; they wanted to talk to me.

I was almost instantly up, grabbing for clothing, incoherently asking questions
—What
do you mean? what police? western Massachusetts?
I thundered down the stairs to the kitchen, where the only phone was; we had none upstairs because Ben, my son, was seventeen then, and his friends could be counted on, several times a week, to call him after eleven, after twelve— long past the time my husband and I went to bed, in any case. The receiver dangled on the cord from its wall base, almost touching the floor. I picked it up and said hello, said my name, and then stood there, staring out at the start of this beautiful sunny day, trying to make some sense of what the man’s voice on the other end of the line was talking about.

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, even 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.