CHAPTER 44

More visitors started coming to the hospital. We must have both understood it was to say goodbye, although we didn’t speak that way, we didn’t speak of death, not since that one night at Sinai. No results were back yet from the esophagus biopsy, but all of us knew, as Aunt Vivian knew months ago, it was over. Shep continued to visit often, my father’s most devoted friend. Darleen came to rub Lubriderm on his shoulders. Fred sweetly brought Mozart and Puccini CDs, my father’s favorites, and a Walkman, but my father could listen only for seconds. Uncle Alvin and Aunt Gladys dragged bags of deli sandwiches down the antiseptic hallway. Liz Stone came hesitantly at first and then got down on one knee and hugged him in his chair. He asked me to get them each a Coke, not from the machine, from the cafeteria in paper cups with crushed ice. The walk back to the room was slow with the soda crashing in the cups like surf. They looked up when I came in. He was asking about Nola Swenson. She was divorced, Liz said. She had a kid and taught yoga in Boulder. She changed her name to Supritha.

“Was it my fault?” my father said. “Supritha?”

“I don’t think so, Clyde,” said Liz. “Nola had plenty of other demons.”

Back in 1971, he confided in me when Nola broke his heart. How sick was that? But I knew her. If he talked about Nola to me, she came to life.

The big sky was streaked pink on Route 29. I was riding shotgun with my long hair blowing out the window when he said out of the blue, “I loved her, you know.”

“Why are you using the past tense?” I said.

He smiled a closed, pained smile. “Some kid who rides a Harley Davidson. She’s going away with him.”

I was sixteen, almost seventeen by then. If I were younger, I might have been overjoyed at the news. I might have believed Nola Swenson riding away on the back of a chopper meant my parents were going to live happily ever after, and that I would go back to being as confident as I was when I was seven. But I knew better. We would keep moving forward.

“I’m sorry you’re sad.”

“It’s OK,” he said. “What is, is. You understand me. You’re a chip off the old block.”

Susan came to the hospital and once again I was awed by her buoyant presence. She wore her hair in a ponytail, which alone seemed amazing, since I had my hair chopped off like Joan of Arc. The swinging ponytail was full of a girlishness I knew my father would warm to. He’d approve of her painted nails and designer handbag too, signs of a healthy materialism. She was thriving. They spoke brightly about her flight, how he didn’t understand people who flew at night, he only traveled in the daytime because you could see the whole country spread out beneath you, and how he remembered when everyone, not just children, would stop in their tracks and crane their necks to look up at an airplane.

Later in the ladies’ room, I told Susan she cheered him up and Susan said plainly, seemingly without resentment, “No, I did not. He only wants you now.”

Susan was focused on Larry and her kids anyway. “She’s rejected her family of origin,” my mother-the-therapist said. It was a surprise. They expected me to be the one who bolted. When we were growing up, Susan, being the oldest, was closer to our parents. She and I didn’t play together as much as I wanted since she didn’t like games or the outdoors. She preferred our parents’ company, and was fiercely protective of her superior position in the family. Our friendship was shaky, never more so than when we were teenagers. I was a freak, she was a sorority girl and not cool in my hippie universe. We clung to each other in small ways, though. When I started high school and Susan was already in twelfth grade, we agreed to share a locker because the school was overcrowded. We were opposites, but we had the same weird family—a father who went “out,” a commie mother, and a grandfather who disappeared under the bed. On the metal shelf in the locker, I leaned my algebra book against her Spanish book. She was once the confident big sister who said go back to sleep, everything will be fine in the morning. But in the parking lot at Hopkins, Susan crumpled and I had to hold her up.

The year we shared the locker was the year of Nola. The year of “out” and our parents’ separate vacations. They slammed doors, shouted obscenities, and sometimes broke down in giggling fits. On weekends, my father disappeared. For the first half-hour after his car squealed away, I felt the air knocked out of me. Then I’d notice how happy I was with him gone.

One Monday he came home with a big white box that had a hole cut in the top. A pink nose pressed against the opening. He’d brought us a kitten! An adorable gray kitten with white socks. I knew where it came from the second it climbed out of the box, and I was determined not to love it. I did not tell Susan about the gray cats slinking along the partition at Nola’s apartment. My father wouldn’t let us name the kitten. It was up to him. He called it Larkin for the poet. My father was God and named everything. But he turned out to be the one who didn’t love the cat. When Larkin passed him its body slunk to the ground. He refused to have the cat neutered. “He’s my only boy,” he said. “I’m not cutting off his balls.” Larkin prowled the neighborhood until dawn while boys threw pebbles at my window. I kept expecting my father to go “out” and not return. For five years nothing like that happened, and then it was my mother who left.

Somewhere in England

15 April 1944

Dear Evie,

I’m glad you’re helping out at these canteens and dancing with our boys. Sometimes, when you kiss a lonely boy goodnight, you should think of me, and that I’m lonely too. Sitting in the movies with my arm around a girl, my thoughts are always of you. I’m keeping my hand in at this business of lovemaking so that when I get back to you I won’t be stale at that sort of thing.

Yours forever and always,

Clyde

Uncle Harry flew in from the West Coast and got a room at the Sheraton across the street from Hopkins. He brought twenty-four bags of Pecan Sandies. My father mouthed to me, “He’s a nut.” But he and Harry happily planned a trip together for September, prattling on about driving Uncle Harry’s classic 1932 Buick across Australia. Uncle Harry didn’t think he could live without his big brother and scrambled to give my father reasons to hang on, things to look forward to, and ways to look back. For the last, he tracked down an old friend from the Home and got him on the phone.

“Holy shit,” my father said. He glanced at Uncle Harry. “Hoffman, you son of a gun.” I perked up. I’d seen photos of Jesse Hoffman in Ye Olde Picture Booke. The conversation sounded awkward at first, at least from my father’s end. There was shame in dying, the greatest failure of all. But my father rallied. “You know what I remember? Well, what else do I have to do? So I’m lying here remembering how I got up really early one morning. I’m walking to the farm thinking I’m the only person alive, feeling pretty fucking pleased about it, and then I hear a racket. Who is it, but Hoffman. You were up even earlier than I was, sitting in the middle of the potato field banging on a drum. . . . I know, man. Only way to practice without waking up the whole damn place.”

“Tympanist with the Cleveland Symphony,” my father said when he put the phone down. “A big shot. A few years ago I see an interview in the paper, says he learned to play the drums in Yonkers. Doesn’t mention the HNOH. Not a word about the orphanage, not a word about being Jewish. Where does he come from, they ask him, and he says he’s ‘of German extraction.’ Homeboy doesn’t want to know from his past. Can’t blame him, I guess. The kid made something of himself.”