Two months before my father died of prostate cancer, I learned about a secret, but I had always sensed that there was something about my family, or even many things, that I didn’t know. As a child, when I was left alone in the house, I would search through my mother’s file cabinets and my father’s study for elaboration, clarification, some proof...
Of what? I couldn’t exactly say.
My mother kept files on each of us, and I rifled through their contents: my father’s passport, a small cellophane envelope containing a lock of hair, a doctor’s report about my brother’s childhood dyslexia. In my own file, I ran my finger across the raised seal on my birth certificate, read again the story about an escaped tiger that I once recited to a babysitter and a comment I made about a dance performance that my mother jotted down, examined my report cards and class photos. While these artifacts made me understand that, as young as I was, I already had my own history and in some way that I couldn’t articulate was always looking for myself too, they weren’t the evidence I sought.
In my father’s study, I shuffled through the items in the wooden box on his desk: a small red vinyl address book, bills to be paid, scraps of papers and old envelopes with scrawled phone numbers and phrases: “Their joy is a kind of genius.”
I stood on a chair and peered at a cardboard box on the back of a shelf in his closet. The box was square, a little smaller than a cake box, and unadorned. Sometimes I took it into my arms and felt its surprising heft. The mailing label listed a return address for the United States Crematorium, a Prince Street address in Greenwich Village for Anatole Broyard, my father, and a 1950 postmark. Sometime during the year I was twelve, a second cardboard box appeared. This one was a little lighter. Here were my grandparents, whom I never knew.
Neither box had ever been opened. At each seam the original packing tape remained intact. But I knew better than to think I’d find anything useful inside. These boxes held only ashes of answers, and all their presence meant was more mysteries, and a worry that someday something else might explode.
At times I knew what my father was going to say before he said it. I could tell you whether a movie, song, or woman was likely to suit his tastes. When I’d see him crouch for a low forehand playing paddleball on the beach, I could feel in my own body what the movement felt like to him—the crunch-clamp of his stomach, the scoop-snap of his arm. I knew my father like you know a room that you’ve lived in for a long time—his frequencies, scent, and atmosphere were all familiar to me—but I didn’t know anything about him, his history or how he came to be.
And I felt that because I’d come from my mother and father—been made up by their parts—that I had a right to know everything about them. I was them. And they were mine, for better or worse. Not even death could part us.
In August of 1990, my parents, my brother, Todd, and I gathered on Martha’s Vineyard, where my family had a summer home, for the annual Chilmark Road Race, which Todd ran in every year. We were also trying to spend time together, because the rate at which my father was deteriorating from his cancer had suddenly sped up. He’d been diagnosed a year earlier, just after my parents moved from Fairfield, Connecticut, where I was raised, to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The move was supposed to mark a new, carefree phase of their lives. They’d sold their house in Fairfield at a nice profit, so they had money in the bank for the first time. After eighteen years as a daily book critic and editor at the Sunday book review, my father had retired from the New York Times and was happily at work on a memoir about life in the Greenwich Village of the 1940s. My brother and I had just finished college and had jobs at which we were finally making our own livings.
My parents planned trips to Europe, longer stretches on Martha’s Vineyard, leisurely days fixing up their cozy Victorian, which would eventually resemble, in my father’s words, a “perfect doll’s house.” Above all, they would enjoy Cambridge, which, they imagined, offered a comparable atmosphere to the café life and highbrow conversation of Greenwich Village that my father was now recounting.
Twelve months later he was on the verge of becoming someone I didn’t recognize. He weighed about 115 pounds, 40 pounds lighter than the trim figure I’d admired throughout my childhood, running for a Frisbee on a beach or strutting onto a dance floor. His face, which had always appeared youthful, looked even more so. With large staring eyes and a round greedy mouth, his countenance had lost the guise of adulthood, leaving the shocks to his flesh and spirit in plain view. In recent weeks I’d felt compelled to keep him in my sight, as if my constant vigilance and memory of the “old” him might prevent any further transformation.
The last time our family had been together on the Vineyard, two months before, although my dad had been very sick and all the treatment options available through Western medicine had been exhausted, we had felt that there were still things that could be done: a special vitamin cure to try, phone calls about other alternative treatments to make, marijuana to smoke to curb his constant queasiness, the beach to stroll on, friends to come over and distract us from thinking about what was next.
But since then he’d pushed off for more rocky shores. His prostate made him prostrate, a pun that he might have appreciated in better days. Months earlier the cancer had traveled up from that innocent-seeming gland into his bones, where it bit down now with a death grip that knocked him off his feet. He lay on the couch upstairs in the living room and flipped through the television channels. He lay on the couch downstairs while nearby in the kitchen my mother cooked things that he might eat—rye toast, scrambled eggs, chicken broth. “No, no, no.” He’d wave his hand in front of his face. “Even the smell makes me nauseous.” He lay awake in bed, too uncomfortable to read or sleep.
On Sunday, though, the day of the Chilmark Road Race, he got up. Since my brother had begun running competitively, my father seemed to concentrate all his ambitions and concerns for his son on his races, as if life really were a footrace and Todd’s standing in this 5K today could predict how he would fare after our father was gone. In my own life there was no equivalent focus of my father’s attentions. He often said that he didn’t worry about me, which I was meant to take as a compliment.
He insisted that we watch the race from our regular spot: about a third of a mile from the finish line. His theory was that the location was close enough to the end for us to feel the excitement of the finish but far enough away that our encouragement of Todd could still make some difference.
The walk there fatigued him, and while we waited for my brother to appear, he had to sit on a beach chair that I’d brought. The day was hot and still. Across the road, some cows stood motionless in a field. Beyond them, in the distance, the ocean was flat. A motorboat made slow progress across the horizon. I looked down at my father, who was wearing long sleeves and pants to cover his skinny limbs. Behind him, down the hill, some other spectators walked toward us, but the heat trapped any noise they made, and their feet fell silently on the pavement. My father’s dying, I had an urge to yell to them. He’s dying!
Some runners rounded the curve and began the ascent, and then there was Todd, pumping up the hill. His blond curls bounced on his sweaty forehead. I helped my dad to his feet. We cheered and yelled, my mother snapped pictures, and my brother flashed my father a huge grin. The thought passed through my mind that this race was probably the last one my father would see his son run, and I wondered if Todd was thinking the same thing.
My dad was holding on to my arm. The lightness of his weight on my elbow made me tremble.
He turned to me and said, “Did you see the way that Todd smiled at me? He’s not using all of his energy if he has the reserve for that smile.”
Todd ran well, placing ninth overall out of 1,500 runners, but my dad estimated that he had 10 percent of his energy left over and told him so when we met up at the finish.
I hated how my father was changing from the cancer, and at the same time, I wanted to shake him by his bony shoulders and say, Aren’t you ever going to change, for God’s sake? There isn’t much time.
Most of Chilmark turned out for the race, and as we made our way to the car, we kept bumping into people we knew. While he chatted with someone, my father would have to sit down in the beach chair, which he would apologize for, and the friend would sit down too, right there in the dirt or on the roadside. Before my dad lost his strength, he would greet women friends with a bear hug that lifted them off their feet. With his male friends, he’d throw an arm around their shoulder and draw them away a few steps, asking, “How are you?” and “What’s been on your mind?”
Recently he had published a number of articles in the Times on the experience of being ill that mentioned his own prognosis. Most of the people we encountered that day had an idea of how sick my father was, but I could tell from the way they would startle briefly that they were shocked by the sight of him.
If my dad noticed this response, he ignored it. In one of the essays, “Toward a Literature of Illness,” he wrote that for those who are critically ill, “it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.” He reasoned that by developing a style for their illness, a stance that incorporated it into the ongoing narrative of their lives, sick people could “go on being themselves, perhaps even more so than before.” And then their friends and loved ones might put away their expressions of “grotesque lovingness” and other false behaviors and go back to being themselves too.
My father’s energy for these summer friends surprised me. His conversation was witty, vibrant, enthusiastic. “It’s still me,” he seemed to be saying. That seated figure in the baggy clothes was the same Anatole they’d always known. And he was asking them, “Please, still be you.”
When we got home, my mother called us into the family room. She said that we needed to talk. My father lay on his side on the couch. I sat down on one end and put his feet in my lap. My mother and my brother sat in two captain’s chairs facing us. I rubbed my father’s feet and calves, because physical contact helped him to focus on some other sensation than his pain and nausea.
His skin was shiny with illness, luminescent from it, reminding me of the veneer inside a clamshell that, if you touch it too roughly, can flake away in your hands. I’d never before been on such intimate terms with my father’s body, and I was by turns moved and disgusted.
My mother is a psychiatric social worker by profession, and I could see that she was retreating into her therapist mode to get a conversation going. This kind of gathering was out of character for us. We were a family that did things together, played tennis, went dancing, took walks. We knew best how to relate to each other on the move.
She asked Todd what the experience of my father’s illness was like for him.
“It’s tough, of course. But I know you’re tough, Dad.” Todd wasn’t looking at any of us when he answered. He was scratching our Labrador retriever’s back.
“What about Daddy’s pain? Does that scare you?”
“Well, sure. I don’t want to see him in pain.” Todd was still looking down at the dog. He cooed at her, “Good girl, Georgie. Who’s a good dog?”
“What about you, Bliss?” My mother turned to me. “How does the pain make you feel?”
Georgie started her high-pitched whine in response to my brother’s attentions. I can remember the rage boiling up inside me: at Todd for eliciting this noise, at my mother for her stilted effort to get us talking, and, most of all, at the foreignness of this shiny fragile limb, my father’s foot, in my lap.
I mumbled that I was afraid of the pain.
“There are things they can do for the physical pain, but there’s psychological pain too, and that’s harder to deal with.” My mother talked about a family therapist my parents began seeing when my father refused to go along with the vitamin cure. She mentioned the need for a dialogue and getting things out into the open.
My brother, having finally turned his attention away from the dog, was nodding along, but I was wary of this heart-to-heart business. My family made jokes. We suffered privately. We didn’t go around the room and share our feelings. Why wasn’t my father—who loathed the way illness could distort people’s behavior—raising any objections?
“Is there anything you’d like to say to your children, Anatole?”
“Sandy.” There was warning in his voice.
“Anatole,” my mother persisted. “What would you want to say to your children if you were dying?”
My mother’s tone seemed to suggest that my father had something to tell us. I already knew about his two other daughters—one from his first marriage, when he was nineteen, and the other from a short-lived relationship when he was a bachelor—but my dad hadn’t seen either of them in years. I wondered what else it could be. My mother’s elliptical phrasing seemed to catch my father off guard.
“I would say that I hope you’ll be all right, that you will be happy.” He raised himself up on his elbow. “My only regret is that we didn’t confide in each other more.” He looked at my brother. “Especially with you, Todd. I wish I knew better what makes Todd Broyard happy in his life, what gets him excited. My father and I never learned how to talk to each other as friends, and I always wanted that with my own son.”
“I have simple tastes, Dad. You know what makes me happy. We talk.”
It occurred to me that what my father wanted was for my brother to have different tastes, more like his own. Todd’s passions were mostly solitary: running, karate, reading history, drawing, playing the harmonica. He was like my mother in this way, while my dad and I were extroverted. We became restless easily; we liked team sports and parties. We needed a lot of attention from people.
“Well, I wish we could have found an easier way to talk,” my father said. “I suppose I could have shared more of myself too.”
“What would you have wanted the kids to know?” my mother prodded. “You can tell them right now.”
“I don’t want to go into that today.”
Todd and I looked at each other. “Go into what?” I asked.
“Your father has lived with a secret for a long time. Something from his childhood.” My mother gripped the arms of the captain’s chair.
“Goddamn it, Sandy.”
“In some ways this secret is more painful than the cancer.” She looked back and forth from my brother to me. “It will help to explain a lot about your father.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it today.”
“When else are we going to talk about it? We’re all together now. We’re here now.”
“I don’t feel well. I’ve been horribly nauseous all day. A person can’t concentrate when he’s nauseous. It’s like someone is constantly tugging at your sleeve.”
“You don’t need to concentrate, Dad.” I rubbed his leg to reassure him. “Just tell us what you want to tell us.”
“Yeah, Dad.” Todd leaned forward in his chair. “We’re your family.”
“Anatole, talk to your children.”
“We want to know you,” I said. And I did, but of course at twenty-three years old, I was also intensely curious to know myself—as a grown-up, not my parents’ child. I thought, conveniently, of identity as a kind of board game, where solving the mystery of my father would allow me to move forward onto the next level of discovery. Years later I’d understand that a mark of adulthood is the ability to live with uncertainty. But back then I wanted to figure everything out, myself most of all. I hoped to discover that I was a complicated person, which I equated with being an interesting person, and since I was too young to feel I’d earned my own complications, I’d happily take some from my father.
At the moment he appeared all out of defenses. He’d removed his legs from my lap and curled them into his body. Half sitting up, propped on his elbow with a cushion wedged under his arm at the far end of the couch, he looked uncomfortable and cornered. If he were stronger, if he were as he used to be, he would have just gotten up and left the room, saying he wasn’t going to talk about it, end of discussion.
He told us he didn’t believe that we really wanted to know him. If we did, he wondered, why didn’t we read more of his writing?
Todd laughed sourly. “I’m supposed to understand my father by knowing his opinion on the latest Philip Roth novel.”
“I read your writing, Dad,” I broke in. “And you wrote that the most important thing for a dying man is to be understood.” He looked at me and nodded faintly. Yes, he did write that. I continued: “But how can I understand you without knowing where you came from? You’ve never talked about your parents or your sisters. We barely know anything about them.”
All these years later, I can still recall the feeling of control I had over my father as he listened to me, perhaps because it was so unusual. All my life he’d appeared a powerful and assured figure. Of course many children are inclined to see their father as an important man in the world, but my dad’s job as a daily book critic for the Times caused some other people to see him that way too. In Fairfield, or in the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, people would recognize his name and further ratify his authority in my eyes.
“You’ve got to give me something to write about,” I said reflexively to lighten the moment.
Now his expression changed again, flashing with understanding: that I would write about this day on Martha’s Vineyard, that this secret—whatever it was—wouldn’t remain secret forever, that his story would continue after he wasn’t around to narrate it.
“I will tell you, but I’m not going to talk about it today,” he said more firmly. “I need to think about how to present things. I want to order my vulnerabilities so they don’t get magnified during the discussion.”
Todd and I argued that a father shouldn’t need a prepared text to speak to his children, but no amount of cajoling would convince him to change his mind. And he was so beleaguered and exhausted that it began to seem unkind to continue. We set a date a few weeks later to meet at my parents’ house in Cambridge to try the discussion again. Then my mother helped my father upstairs, because he wanted to lie down. I wonder now what he was thinking as he lay in his bed alone. His children said that they wanted to know him. Was he considering what he might say when we met again? Was he worrying about how a single conversation might accomplish what being our father for more than twenty years apparently had not?
At the time, though, I was too occupied with the question of what the secret was to consider my father’s experience of revealing it. Todd and I both guessed that it had something to do with sex or death, but neither of us had any specific ideas. Years later Todd confided that he felt very apprehensive about what we might discover: that our father had been abused as a child or been involved in some horrible crime.
For my part the existence of a secret made me feel strangely elated. My childhood suspicions were confirmed, and I welcomed the new variation in the routine of my father’s illness—the chance to feel something else. For the past twelve months, my family’s life had been filled with decisions about hormone treatments and radiation, midnight trips to the hospital because of huge blood clots in my father’s urine, coffee enemas, incontinence, and diapers. I muddled through this world of corporeal intimacy, feeling embarrassed and clumsy, and fretted that there was never going to be energy or time for a familial closeness of any other type.
Here was at last our chance for true intimacy, the kind that confessions and forgiveness might bring. Besides, I could do secrets much better than I could do scared-daughter-standing-by-her-father’s-hospital-bed. The betrayals and danger they involved, the mix of self-interest, protection, and cowardice at their core—for these dramas, I felt much better equipped.
Before we had our family meeting, another emergency sent my father back to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. Over Labor Day weekend, he was transferred into Dana-Farber Cancer Institute across the street, where, the doctors said, they were better prepared to treat cases like his. What kind were they? I wondered. Hopeless ones?
Any talk of alternative treatments was forgotten. The focus now was on what work my father could accomplish in the time he had left. There was no mention of the secret.
My twenty-fourth birthday was a few days later. My best friend, Chinita, came up from New York, and we had a small celebration in my father’s hospital room. But my dad couldn’t stay awake. My mother kept having to rouse him, saying, “Honey, Blissy’s blowing out the candles now,” and “Look, she’s unwrapping her present.”
On the weekend, Todd came up from Hartford, where he was living at the time, and met my mother and me at Dana-Farber. Michael Vincent Miller—Mike to us—my father’s closest friend, was there too. My dad was particularly energized. This hospital stay was nearing the end of its second week, and he couldn’t get enough news about the outside world. He seemed desperate for distraction, asking us over and over, “What else is going on? Tell me something else.” Then he began to shake.
“Shit, Sandy. Shit. It’s starting again.”
I looked at my mother for a clue about what was happening. My dad only swore blasphemously—goddamn it and Jesus Christ.
“Okay, Anatole, breathe,” my mother said. She explained that he’d been having these waves of pain all morning. “Stay focused on us.”
I was sitting in a chair by the head of his bed. I took his hand and told him to squeeze my fingers.
Todd stood at the end of the bed and began to talk. “I made a big sale this week, Dad.”
“Yes?” My father locked eyes on his son. I could see his jaw muscle trembling.
Todd nodded vigorously. “Yeah, a big sale, so it looks like I’ll make my quota and then I’ll start earning commission on top of my salary.”
“That’s great. Good work. Oh Christ, it’s getting worse. Keep talking.” His fingers tightened around mine.
“And, uh, I’ve got another race coming up on the Vineyard.”
“Shit. Fucking Christ.” Under the blanket, his legs bounced against the mattress.
“This one’s a 10K, about a thousand runners.”
The tremor moved up his body, and his shoulders shook. “Good, Todd. You in shape for it?” The pitch of his voice shot up. “Oh God, please. I can’t stand another one.”
He tried to pull his hand away from mine. “I’m going to hurt you, Bliss.”
“I’m fine. It’s fine.” I put my other hand on top of his and pressed down.
“I’m going to squeeze too hard.” He jerked free of my grasp. His head quivered and his pupils narrowed.
“Hold on, honey.” My mother crouched at my father’s side.
“Come on, Buddy.” Mike reached a hand forward toward the bed.
My father struggled to sit up. He began to yell: “Help! Someone. Help me! Please, help.”
I remember that we all froze for a moment, pinned down into ourselves by the terror of this anguish. Then Todd was moving toward the door, and I thought that he intended to close it, an impulse, it’s strange to admit now, that made sense to me. What was happening in that hospital room felt too raw and private. It seemed wrong for strangers to overhear us.
But Todd was going out the door. He was running down the hallway, calling for a nurse, and he quickly returned with one in tow. My mother’s calm demeanor was rapidly fading. She’d been engaged in an ongoing battle with the hospital staff because they wouldn’t give my father enough painkillers to actually kill his pain for fear that he would become addicted to them. Which forced my mother to point out the obvious: given the imminence of my father’s death, what did it matter? Now she turned on the nurse, spittle gathered in the corners of her mouth. “For God’s sake, can’t you see this level of morphine is not enough? Give him more!”
The nurse mumbled something about needing to get the pain management team back in there, but she fiddled with the morphine drip and upped the dosage. Then, as suddenly as the episode of pain had begun, it stopped. My father lay back in the bed, panting shallow breaths. His face was white, and his eyes were very wide. He seemed to be staring at nothing, or everything. Then he closed his eyes and he was asleep, or more likely the narcotic had knocked him out.
We headed outside to get some fresh air. Mike left for home, and Todd, my mother, and I sat on a stone wall across the street. With my eyes I counted the floors of the building and the windows in from the corner until I located my father’s room. I wondered if other families were engaged in similar dramas behind the drawn curtains of the neighboring windows. During the six weeks that I regularly visited the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I looked for people who were going through the same ordeal as we were. But it always seemed like we were the only ones crying in the hallway, the only ones struggling to talk in calm voices as the doctors asked us to make decisions so vital to another person’s well-being as to feel ludicrous and wrong, the only ones who walked around with shocked and stricken faces because the knowledge that all people must die one day had in no way prepared us for the death of this man. Our spot on the stone wall was in the sunshine, but I was shivering with cold. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms.
“I think I better tell you what this secret is,” my mother said. She was sitting between Todd and me. We caught eyes behind her back. Inexplicably we both began to grin.
“Well.” She took a breath and let it out. “Your father’s part black.”
I burst out with a laugh. “That’s the secret? Daddy’s part black?”
“That’s all?” Todd asked.
“That’s it,” my mother said, allowing herself a smile.
We asked a few questions: How black was he? After all, he didn’t look black. Neither did his sister Lorraine or his mother, whom we’d seen once or twice when we were little. My mother explained that my father had “mixed blood,” and his parents were both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race-mixing had been common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was, or was supposed to be. He was the lightest child out of the three siblings, and the fact that his two sisters lived as black was one of the reasons that we never saw them. My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he’d been ostracized by both white and black kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He’d come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn’t ask what happened. My mother said that he didn’t tell us about his racial background because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did.
“So this means that we’re part black too,” I said, taking in the news. I had always bought into the idea of the American “melting pot,” and now I was an example of it. The idea thrilled me, as though I’d been reading a fascinating history book and then discovered my own name in the index. I felt like I mattered in a way that I hadn’t before.
Todd was pleased too. “What a great pickup line,” he said. “‘I may look white, but I’m really Afro-American where it counts.’ The guys in my office are always giving me such a hard time about being so white-bread.”
“Todd,” my mother said, alarmed. “This isn’t something you should be telling everyone. Anyway, you kids aren’t black. You’re white.”
Two days later a tumor burst through the wall of my father’s bladder, although the doctors didn’t realize it until they got him into the operating room. All my mother understood when she called me at work was that there was an unexpected crisis and the nurses told her to tell her children to come to the hospital as quickly as they could.
I was at Scudder, Stevens & Clark, a mutual funds company, where I worked answering letters from shareholders with complaints or questions. I sat in an open room the size of a football field, lined with rows and rows of low-walled cubicles filled with hundreds of other customer service representatives, also answering calls and letters from shareholders. It took me a moment to understand what my mother was actually saying. After I hung up the phone, I closed out all the documents open on my computer and shut it down. I straightened up the letters and papers on my desk and then gathered together my things and put them in my purse. I got up, put on my sweater, and slowly walked around the row of cubicles to my boss’s cubicle. Sheila looked up and raised her eyebrows.
“Hi, uh, I’ve got to go, um, my mother called from the hospital, and—”
Sheila had lost her brother to brain cancer a few years earlier. She knew better than I did what kind of phone call I’d just received. She stood up and took me in her arms briefly. I was shaking. I wasn’t ready for this to happen yet.
She called another customer service rep up to her desk, gave her twenty dollars, and told her to take me in a taxicab over to the hospital. I resisted briefly, saying I could take the subway, I’d be fine on my own. Their fussing underlined the direness of the situation, and I didn’t want to understand, in fact I couldn’t understand, what was happening.
When I arrived at Dana-Farber, my mother was talking with the oncologist and urologist in my father’s room about scheduling an emergency surgery. He’d been moved to the room in front of the nurses’ station reserved for crisis patients. The doctors had some forms for my mother to complete, and as she left with them, I started to follow, but she pointed behind her and told me, “Stay with your father.” I turned and headed back into his room. At the moment, my father was terrifying to me.
He was laid out flat except for his head, which was propped up at an unnatural angle by too many pillows. A blanket covered him completely, pulled up to his chin. But underneath I could see that his body was motionless, rigid, as though he were in shock. His expression looked shocked too. His eyebrows were raised, and his eyes were unblinking. His mouth was opened in a small “O,” and his breath panted in and out fast, like a dog’s. He hadn’t acknowledged me yet.
His gaze was focused on an invisible spot before him. I thought perhaps that he was staring down a tunnel to the end of his life and that I should try to ease his mind by reassuring him that he’d arrived there valiantly. I pulled a chair to the head of his bed and leaned in close and whispered to my father that I loved him, that he’d been a great dad, that because of him, I’d never be able to lead an ordinary life. These words were true, but saying them made me feel uncomfortable, following as I was some borrowed notion of how to act at a loved one’s deathbed. I chose not to mention the secret. It wasn’t a subject we had any history with, and I didn’t want to say anything that might upset him.
His eyes glanced in my direction, which encouraged me to continue. I told him that I was proud of him, of all that he’d accomplished, and that he’d had a successful life. He looked at me again and spoke in a hoarse whisper: “Blissy, enough with your bromides. I’m trying to concentrate. You have no idea how difficult this is.”
Many times since, I’ve chastised myself for resorting to such conventional language. I should have spoken of his favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, or offered an observation about the world—something quirky and funny and true—to wrap him more firmly in humanity’s grip.
Less frequently I’ve wondered how my father could have rebuked me for trying to tell him, as clumsy as it might have been, that I loved him and that he hadn’t lived in vain.
His surgery would take place over at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. While he was transported in an ambulance the short distance between the two buildings, my mother did her best to answer his questions about what was happening. But she didn’t know much beyond what the surgeon told her when they were deciding whether to operate: Your husband’s chances of surviving a lengthy surgery are slim.
Just as he was going into the operating room, my father called out, “What’s happened to my voice? Listen. It’s lost its timbre. What’s happened to my voice?” Then the doors swung closed behind him.
My father did survive to live another month, but for the first time in my life, he didn’t make sense. After he came out of intensive care, he moved in and out of lucidity, and never regained it completely.
In his journal, my father wrote that a sick person needs to guard against the disfigurement of illness because “at the end, you’re posing for eternity.” Throughout my father’s writing ran the theme that a person’s identity was an act of will and style. In a review of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a book that my father greatly admired, he wrote about Becker’s idea that we can defend ourselves against the fear of death “by becoming so insistently and inimitably ourselves, or by producing something so indelibly our own, that we may be said, as a poet put it, to have added forever to the sum of reality.” Achieving this kind of immortality, in Becker and my father’s view, was not a passive act.
After the surgery my dad was stunned to realize, despite his cloudy mind, that he’d almost died. He told my mother in a childlike voice: “I’m not the golden boy anymore. I’m not that beautiful boy. I have to find a new way to think of myself.” With bags to collect his waste hanging from his body, tubes and machinery crowding his bedside, his brain short-circuited and unreliable, he needed to find some aspect of himself to latch onto so that he might remain “insistently and inimitably” Anatole. This was necessary both for him and for those who loved him, because, as he also wrote in his journal, “the final view for survivors, the family and friends, would be, in the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s phrase, ‘love at last sight.’”
There were still flashes of his old self. He would startle us with an observation: “The color of this blanket is institutional yellow,” or “The breadth of that doctor’s shoulders gives him false confidence.” But as the days wore on, these came less and less frequently.
And then the tug of his failing body finally won out. He roamed from stranger to father to man-child to madman. There wasn’t much talking with him, just listening, and deciphering.
He put his hand over his eyes, as if he was staring at something. “I’m standing on the rocks looking out over a promontory. But I can’t see the shoreline. Will I like it there?”
“Yes,” we told him.
“Are you sure?” he asked, grabbing my mother’s arm. “This isn’t a time for lying.”
“I promise,” she said.
“Okay then.” He looked around at the friends and family assembled in his room. “Who wants to join me?” He patted the mattress next to him. “Blissy?”
I lowered the bed’s railing and stretched my body alongside his, resting my head lightly on his shoulder. He draped his thin arm across my back. We could have been home on the couch, watching TV.
“Sandy?” he said, lifting his head. “David?” He called to a friend. “Come join us.” He raised his hands, the magnanimous host. “I invite all of you, anyone who’d care to, to come join me in my bed. Why not?” My mother spread herself out on the other side of my father. He smiled and patted his wife and daughter.
“We’ll go down in history as the family with the least affection for each other,” he said.
“No!” we all protested.
He shook his head, exasperated. “It’s a joke.”
Another time, when I was helping him to eat, he became agitated suddenly and took the fork out of my hand. Then he took my hand and pressed it to his lips several times, kissing it over and over again. “I had to do that because you’re my daughter,” he said.
“And you’re my father,” I answered.
We camped out in that hospital room for days, keeping him company. We ordered in pizza and brought back ice-cream sundaes. A steady stream of people came to say good-bye. On some nights the atmosphere was like a party.
While my father drifted in and out of consciousness, we talked about the story of the secret. Friends visiting shared what details they knew and told of the secrets their own families harbored: Illegitimate children. Adopted children. Jewish ancestry.
It’s said that the hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying. Maybe my father heard us. He beckoned to me one evening: “Lorraine. Lorraine.” His sister’s name. Another time he told me, “You’ve got to listen to more Afro-Cuban music.”
There were no final words that anyone agreed on. The last to me were on the phone one afternoon during a brief flash of clearheadedness. I told him that I’d be at the hospital soon. “Okay, sweetie pie,” he said. “See you then.” My brother remembers a conversation about a road race coming up. My mother didn’t offer what final words she and my father shared, and I’ve never asked.
One day he fell into a coma. And then, a week or so later, very early one morning, he died.
His death certificate indicates that he was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on July 16, 1920, to Edna Miller and Paul Anatole Broyard and that he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 11, 1990, as the husband of Sandy Broyard. His race is identified as white.