We Are Not Ourselves (71 page)

Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Sonnabend liked to sit in the lounge and talk
by the picture window. Eileen was surprised at how present they were. Watching from a distance, she became convinced, by their facial expressions, laughs, hand gestures, and the way they interrupted one another to make an excited point, that they were gushing over their grandkids. After she’d seen them there enough times, she grew fascinated enough to get up close to listen in. Mrs. Klein said, “My daughter, my daughter, she’s going to come, my daughter, with a hundred dollars,” and Mrs. Sonnabend responded, over and over, with something that sounded like “Gesundheit.”

•  •  •

On December 2, 1997, she made it to her ten-year pension. Before she left for work, she called Connell in Berlin, but he wasn’t home, and she was almost relieved not to get him. She wasn’t sure he’d have appreciated the full significance of the news, and she didn’t want to feel silly or diminished about it, so she left a message for him to call her and figured she’d hear from him in a week or so, when it would be just another curiosity to report. On this day, the actual day of the event, she felt too raw to mention anything about it and risk not hearing back from him. It meant more to her than she would ever have guessed it would. She hadn’t always been sure she’d get to this day, and it wasn’t even about health insurance anymore so much as having something to strive for, something that allowed her life to hang together.

She went to the home after work with a half bottle of champagne. A drum circle had been organized in the community room; Kacey the social director was standing in the center, her own drum suspended from a strap around her neck. Eileen stopped in the doorway to watch. Kacey was slapping at her drum, which was fancier than the others, and looking at the patients with a manic grin, trying to get them to imitate her. The gathering was mostly women, though a few men were scattered throughout. Eileen was glad Ed’s physical infirmity kept him out of activities like this. She watched long enough to hear the haphazard drumming peter out. Kacey slapped each hand down once in quick succession, generating a popping sound like that of a plastic cup hitting a hardwood floor. “Now you!” Kacey said, earnestly, casting about with imploring eyes. An old woman sighed and said, “Oh, come
on
,” and Eileen wanted to hug her in gratitude.

She found him in his room. The popping cork startled him; his eyes widened, though he didn’t move. She had to pour the champagne slowly into his mouth to keep him from dribbling it all out, but once he could feel the bubbles on his tongue he lapped it up. She could have sworn she detected a smile on his lips when she told him her news.

For years she had imagined she might be moved to retire the day she’d secured the pension, but as she sat there finishing off the little bottle, she realized that even if her financial situation had worked out better, and even if the cost of the nursing home didn’t go up every six months, to almost seven thousand a month now, she wouldn’t be giving a passing thought to quitting. If she retired she would have nothing to do but spend all day at the home, and she still had some life left to give. One of the inescapable facts of her existence was that she was good at her job. She had spent her life thinking of all the other things she might have been—a lawyer, she’d often concluded, or a politician, which was probably the best career for any child of Big Mike Tumulty’s, even if that child didn’t happen to be male—but now it struck her that she was doing what she did best. Her profession had been becoming hers the whole time she’d been looking away from it. The point wasn’t always to do what you want. The point was to do what you did and to do it well. She had worked hard for years, and if she had nothing to show for it but her house and her son’s education, there was still the fact of its having happened, which no one could erase from the record of human lives, even if no one was keeping one.

91

T
he morning after Thanksgiving of 1998, Connell went up to the home alone. After his visit, he got halfway down the hall before he headed back to his father’s room and stood in the doorway looking in; then he left again. When he was about to turn the key in the car, he went back in again, but this time he entered the room. He sat in the chair next to his father’s bed and took his father’s hand as though he’d just arrived.

At noon, they went to lunch. The lunchroom was noisy with women calling for help or screaming incoherently, which pierced the fog in which his father was generally lost and caused him to tremble and start in his wheelchair. Connell attributed this to his father’s chivalrous nature. The men’s screams didn’t have the same effect.

After lunch, in his father’s room, Connell quickly came to the end of everything he could think to say. He told him about how the Mets barely missed the wild card after collapsing in the final week of the season, losing five straight, and about how the Yankees won the World Series again after winning the most games in regular season history. He told him how his last year of college was going. There was no way to tell whether his father understood anything. When his mother was there it was easier. She spoke as if he might answer her at any moment. She would tell him something that had gone wrong at the house and say, “You always told us not to do that,” or “You knew that already, didn’t you?” But he couldn’t bring himself to speak rhetorically to his father. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief that his father would answer, and he felt like he was disrespecting him if he phrased his sentences as questions. He sat with him in silence instead or put music on.

The room was quiet, peaceful. A small piano on Mr. Huggins’s side was the resting place for a flowerpot and a pair of framed pictures. He had never seen Mr. Huggins sit down at it, but then Mr. Huggins was almost never in the room. He walked the halls endlessly, pushing his walker as though trying to wear himself out.

“You know Mr. Huggins is German? I know I’ve told you about Berlin, but let me tell you about it again. Berlin is great. The art, the culture, the literature. The whole city is a construction site. They’re making everything new. They’re also trying not to make
anything
new, in the sense that they’re unwilling to paper over anything in the past without tremendous deliberation. They’re trying to deal with the legacy of the past in a thoughtful way. It’s not perfect, and they know they’ll never live down the atrocities of the Nazi era, but they’re trying to be the world’s historian, or at least the world’s agonized conscience. They look relentlessly inward. They guard ruthlessly against historical revisionism or sentimentality about the old ways of life or anything that smacks of even the slightest hint of the kind of thinking that led them down the road to hell. Sure, there are some neo-Nazis there, just as there are racists and xenophobes anywhere, but as a culture, at least the intellectual culture, they are tremendously deliberate about quashing that sort of thing before it gains a foothold. You can’t accuse the Germans, or at least Berliners, or at least intellectuals in Berlin, or at least the intellectuals at the Freie Universität that I came to know—you see? I learned from them to qualify my statements down to the point of the granite and the unassailable—of trying to pretend the Nazis never happened. They even guard against the idea of getting angry at having to be so thoughtful and conscience-stricken all the time. There’s a kind of unwavering discipline about their watchfulness about conscience fatigue. Consciousness fatigue. Conscientiousness—no; they wouldn’t say conscientiousness; that suggests something of ‘good manners.’ They’re almost brutal to themselves in their unwillingness to feel good about the fact that they remember to feel bad about the evils committed in the past, before they were born. They admit their lack of discipline and prosecute it even when it’s not there. We could learn a thing or two from them about how to address the legacy of slavery, or the treatment of Native Americans, or the Japanese internment
camps, or Jim Crow, or the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, or any number of atrocious episodes that leave a stain on the soul of America.”

They sat in silence again until he put on some Mozart from the boxed set he had bought his father as an early Christmas present. He had decided not to fly back for Christmas that year, though he hadn’t told his mother yet. He figured it would force her to accept the invitation to the Coakleys’ instead of spending another depressing Christmas Eve at Maple Grove, as she had the previous year, when he’d been in Germany. If he came home she’d want the three of them to spend it together, and he didn’t want to do that to her, so he was going to force her hand, make her let someone—Cindy, whoever—take care of her for a change.

His father began to clap and cheer in the middle of a movement, and Connell clapped along, which reminded him of sitting next to his father in Carnegie Hall as a kid, when he would watch for his father’s hands to come together with authority to know when he himself should clap.

At the end of one movement—a check of the liner notes revealed the symphony to be Mozart’s fortieth—his father smiled deliriously and then started sobbing deeply enough that it was impossible to hear the music. Connell couldn’t tell if it was the symphony making him react so strongly or else something bubbling up from his unconscious mind. He began to get unaccountably angry. Rather than let that feeling come to the fore and allow the visit to turn ugly, he wheeled his father out to the television room and left, this time for good.

92

F
or weeks, she had seen the end coming. His color was ashen, his breath sulfuric. His gaze was vacant, without any bouts of clarity. His head was stuck in a permanent loll, as if the muscles in his neck had stopped working. The clonic twitches almost flung him out of his seat.

A month before he died, he did something that she turned over in her mind later whenever she wondered how much he was aware of in his last days. He often exhibited what looked like glimmers of awareness, but she knew they were more likely her own projections. It was less painful to believe he couldn’t remember all he’d lost, but another part of her—she knew it was selfish—wanted him to know who she was.

A few days before Valentine’s Day, she was wheeling him down the hall to his room. The home was decorated with pink streamers and heart-shaped cardboard cutouts, as though it were not a facilitator of human expirations but a middle school full of yearning adolescents. She had to walk close to the wall to avoid someone being wheeled in the other direction, and in that instant, Ed had reached out to one of the hearts on the wall and plucked it off.
Reached
was too strong a word; likely it brushed against him and his hand closed around it reflexively. He clutched it the whole way down the hall and into the room. It was only when she wheeled him into place and sat beside him that he dropped it and it fell on the floor between them. His hand twitched after it; he could almost have been pointing. She picked it up. She was on the verge of asking if it was for her when she realized she didn’t want to hear the lack of an answer, so she just placed it on the nightstand.

Glue pooled in the corners of his mouth and a pasty spackle of plaque sat on his teeth, which could no longer be cleaned effectively and which had darkened so considerably that they had gone past yellow to a necrotic shade of blue.

She wet a paper towel and wiped his face. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said, and when she kissed him on the mouth for the first time in longer than she liked to remember, she was surprised at how sweet he tasted.

93

S
omething in his mother’s message compelled him to return her call right away and not merely resolve to do so before the weekend was over. She would never have delivered bad news on an answering machine, but there must have been a hint, a subtle quaver, and a hint was all he needed. For years, he had been tuned to the peculiar frequency of disaster. It was irrational, he knew; his father’s disease augured no sudden change in fortune, only a long decline; nevertheless, whenever the phone rang in his sleep, he awoke with a start and sprang to his feet.

“Your father is sick,” she said when he reached her.

He looked around at his apartment. Papers were strewn everywhere; a thick layer of dust had settled on every surface. Neither he nor his roommate had done any cleaning in weeks. It was their last stretch in college, and each of them was responsible for wringing as much as he could out of the dwindling days. He considered the smells: the faint ammonia reek of dirty clothes, the mildew musk that drifted out from dishes in the murky sink, which only got washed when his roommate’s girlfriend complained.

“He’s not going to make it through the night,” his mother said, with none of the bluster that entered her voice when she knew she was right. She sounded vulnerable. It might have been the first time he’d ever heard her sound that way.

“Are you sure?” he asked, but it was an idle question; she’d watched hundreds of people die.

“He has pneumonia,” she said calmly. “That’s bad for someone in his situation.”

“Why didn’t you call sooner?”

“I was waiting to see if he’d make it through. I didn’t want to pull you away unnecessarily. Anyway, I’m calling now.”

“How is he?” It was a dumb question, but he hoped, even half expected, that his mother’s answer would be different this time—modulated, hedging.

“Everything’s quiet,” she said. “I’m by the bed. I’m trying to make him comfortable.”

He could see the nursing home shrouded in darkness, the hallway dark but for the sliver of light shining out under his father’s door. He could see his mother’s hand on his father’s chest, the labored breathing, the terror in his father’s eyes.

“We’ll have to hope he lasts until you get here,” she said. “Call JetBlue. Put it on the American Express.”

He didn’t have a credit card of his own. His mother had given him the Amex the day he left for college. It listed his name in full caps,
CONNELL J. LEARY
, and above it, Member Since 67. “In case of emergencies,” she’d said as she handed it over before she headed to work that morning. The very last thing she’d said, as always, was “Be careful.”