Years later, during the several days preceding her death, in her delirium caused by a stroke, Roy’s mother imagined that her father, whom Roy had called Pops, was with her. Pops, of course, had died fifty years before, but Kitty believed that he was now looking after her and that they were dining together in a great restaurant. In reality, it was Roy’s sister who sat by their mother’s bedside in a hospital, listening to Kitty talk about her father, whom Roy’s sister had never known.
When his sister told Roy about this on the phone, before Roy got on an airplane to see his mother for the last time, he told his sister it was a good thing because Kitty had long felt guilty about having acted coldly, even cruelly, to Pops in the years prior to his own death, believing that he had been entirely to blame for the divorce from her mother when Kitty was ten. Nanny, Roy’s grandmother, had died when Roy was eight, so his sister, who was not born until four years later, had not known Nanny, either. This visitation from Kitty’s father on her deathbed was a miracle of reconciliation, a touching resolution to Kitty’s conflict. How wonderful, Roy told his sister, for their mother to release herself from what clearly had been her most profound regret.
“Well, after all,” said Roy’s sister, “she was raised a Catholic.”
“Pops forgave her,” Roy said, “not a priest.”
As Roy stood in line waiting to board the plane, he remembered Pops standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel he lived in in Chicago, waiting for his daughter to pick him up to go to lunch with her and Roy, who was then nine years old. It was a cold, blustery, overcast Sunday afternoon, and Roy felt sorry for his grandfather, who was almost eighty, waiting there alone in the bad weather, a black woollen scarf wrapped around his neck underneath a long, gray overcoat. Pops always dressed well and Roy had wondered that day why he was not wearing his signature Homburg hat.
After his mother had pulled her car to the curb and stopped, leaving the motor running, Roy, who was sitting in the back seat, opened the right rear passenger door of the midnight blue 4-door Oldsmobile Holiday and got out to greet his grandfather.
“Pops,” Roy said, “it’s really windy. Why aren’t your wearing your hat?”
Pops smiled at Roy and gave him a kiss on the top of his head. Roy loved his grandfather more than any other person in his family. It always disturbed him when his mother spoke harshly to Pops.
“You know what the banker said to the poor farmer who’d come to see him about a loan?” Pops asked.
“No, what?”
“Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”
After they’d gotten into the back seat of the Oldsmobile and Roy closed the door, Kitty looked at her father in the rear view mirror and said to him, “Where’s your hat?”
Pops put an arm around his grandson and said, “I must have left it in the bank.”
Then he and Roy laughed.
Roy’s sister told him not to expect that their mother would recognize him.
“She’s lost at least thirty years of her memory,” his sister said.
When Roy saw his mother on her deathbed, he asked her if she knew who he was.
Kitty opened her eyes, looked into his and said, “You’re Roy. You run faster than anybody.”