At a creaky old Catholic college building in Washington, DC, I was about to appear on a panel about essay writing for a book festival when my phone rang. It was my father. I was early—the first one in the room. On the white tablecloth sat my nameplate, my lukewarm coffee, and a few pieces of melon on a sagging paper plate. Outside the window were brochure-worthy trees turning orange and red and yellow. I answered.
“I just heard back about the scan,” he said. “The immunotherapy worked. I’m part of the thirty-five percent!”
I went with my parents to my father’s next Memorial Sloan Kettering appointment.
We were told the tumors had shrunk by more than half. He was not cured, but he probably had extra time now and would likely cough less. The doctor asked how he was feeling.
“Tired. Depressed,” he said. “All I want to do is write and I can’t concentrate.” The pink cloud had dissipated.
“You could retire,” the doctor said, smiling but serious. “People do retire, you know.”
My father shook his head.
“How about therapy?” the doctor asked.
“I suppose it might feel good to rattle away to someone for fifty minutes without feeling like I had to apologize for it,” he said. But it was clear he wouldn’t pursue that course of action.
He weighed 128 pounds. His eyes looked huge behind his glasses. He’d grown a gray beard. Add a ruff collar and he could be in an old masters painting. When he pulled up his shirt to show the doctor his chest, I saw his pale, thin body. He joked that he was playing host to a gang war between the immunotherapy and the cancer, with both living off the land.
My father asked if he could have something for his low energy. The doctor said they could look into steroids at some point.
“Oh!” my father replied, brightening. “I used to love speed. That could be great if—”
“I loved speed, too!” my mother chimed in.
The two began chattering about how in the 1960s they took speed all the time, how they got so much done.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said.
“It made you crazy, though,” my father said to my mother, ignoring me. “When we started dating, I made her throw it out,” he told the doctor.
“And you thought I did!” my mother said, laughing girlishly.
“Will you both please stop talking about how much you love speed!” I said. “Speed is not even on the table here. The doctor is talking about your maybe trying steroids at some point. Steroids are not amphetamines.”
“Oh,” my father said, looking disappointed.
My mother, as she rummaged in her purse for a stick of gum, whispered, “I did love speed, though.”
Afterward, in the waiting room, between the doctor meeting and the immunotherapy infusion, we got an email from my father’s sister Ann. My grandmother was going downhill. She had developed an infection and was having hallucinations.
We discussed Grammy and who should go up to visit her when. Then I mentioned that Oliver had gone on a class trip to Madison Square Garden that day, along with thousands of other public-school students, to see a stage production of To Kill a Mockingbird. I told them that the mayor had come onstage to introduce the event and a ton of kids had booed him. New York!
“Does he like To Kill a Mockingbird?” my father asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Remember, he tried to talk to you about it once and you told him: ‘It’s no Huckleberry Finn’?”
Across the waiting-room chair between us, my father held out his hand for me to hit, like he was a naughty student and I a schoolmarm. His hand looked pale and frail, with long yellow nails. I gently tapped it.
I said that I didn’t want to keep giving him a hard time but that I wondered if maybe he wouldn’t be so depressed about writing if he placed value on other things in his life, too. Maybe he’d want to hang out with his grandson, for instance, or take a trip with my mother. “You keep saying you’re just a writer,” I said. “But it’s not true. Maybe writing is the thing you’re most comfortable doing. Maybe you feel loved best for how well you write. But you have other things.”
“It’s not about getting love,” he said. “I’m just driven.”
“I’m driven,” I snapped. “I’ve written eighteen books in the past ten years. I would still never look at my child and say writing was the only thing I cared about.”