Marilyn Horan
Going Home
My
father’s illness came on suddenly at age 59. Not one to visit doctors, Dad’s symptoms could have been
evident for months, but he did not reveal them until they were hard to
ignore: swollen glands, lumps
under his arms, bloated ankles that made it difficult for him to put his shoes
on. He had been admitted to the
Brooklyn Veteran’s hospital and I thought he would be out as soon as some tests
were completed. I went to see him on each of the first two nights after my part
time job at the Dime Savings Bank was over. On his third night there I visited
him as usual and I sat in the visitor’s lounge practicing my sales pitch for
Avon cosmetics, using my father as the customer prototype.
I had him choose a lipstick shade from
the color chart holding it up to his pale skin to see if it was flattering to
his complexion. Next, he picked a
nail polish to match. Finally, I
went on to describe perfumes he might like, having him sniff the three samples
I had in my demo box. He played my
straight man, and I giggled at the mock seriousness that included his nodding
his head, saying, “Hmmm…” as though weighing his choices and taking my expert
advice to heart.
The
silliness of it was heightened by the contrast to the depressing atmosphere of
the hospital, and deepened by the underlying fear that my father, who had never
missed a day of work in his life, was ill enough to be kept in a hospital. Just that afternoon, our long-time
neighbor Elena took me aside and said, “Marilyn your father is sick. I mean very sick.”
Ice shot through my veins.
That was not something my mother had told me, and I was denying that
Elena knew anything, despite that her sister was a nurse’s aide at the V.A. and
knew what was happening.
In
the lounge that third night my father’s voice was a little hoarse, but
otherwise he seemed normal, and was convinced that he would be home soon. My mother sat with us, preoccupied and
worried. When visiting hours were
over, Dad kissed Mom and me as he waited for the elevator doors to open and I
promised to see him the next day after my classes at Brooklyn College were
finished.
When
I got to the hospital the next evening, I was told that my father was very ill,
and that he could not have any visitors.
The duty nurse was not available.
Shaken and
terrified,
I went to sit in the visitors’ lounge where I encountered a man wearing rumpled
brown and tan striped pajamas and a pale blue bathrobe. He was agitated and wet with
sweat. His week-old beard and his
colorless, sparse hair stood up straight in patches and contributed to his wild
look. He saw me and came
over. His eyes, their whites
yellowed, blinked and twitched in his red face as he told me how years ago he
had fallen onto a hot radiator and got wedged and could not get off. He described the smell of his own flesh
burning and the unforgettable pain and torment of lying powerless on that
radiator. At 21, I was
sympathetic and respectful to the level that I felt unable to leave the
lounge, that listening to this
man’s story was a necessary kindness.
He was suffering and I pitied him.
After
listening to his litany of repeated phrases of torture and pain, I excused
myself and asked at the nurses’ station if there was any news about my
father. The head nurse was finally
there and responded to my query.
“Your
father has a temperature of 105 degrees,” she said, avoiding my eyes.
“But
how could that be? I was just here
with him last night and he was fine,” I said.
“You’ll
have to talk to the doctor. I
don’t know what happened. All I
can tell you is that he has taken a turn for the worse. The doctor is with him now and your father
is being put on an ice mattress to help bring down his fever,” she said. “The leukemia has weakened his immune
system and he has a serious infection.
Why don’t you go home?”
Go
home? I felt cold, filled with panic and dread. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe my father had
been used for some medical experiment, or had been mistreated and the hospital
was trying to cover something up.
Powerless, so I went to sit again in the smoking lounge. I noticed with relief that the man in
pajamas had left.
After
a half hour I sneaked down the hall and looked into my father’s room. Through the door’s small rectangle of
glass I saw him, nude and stretched out on his bed, his arms and legs straining
against the grips each of the nurses, orderlies, and a couple of doctors had on
him. He was banging his head into
the mattress in a frenzy. I could only see his mouth open but couldn’t hear his
screams. He was bucking up from
the mattress, his muscles and tendons strained and taut, white and vulnerable, I didn’t know if he was having a
seizure or if he was consciously fighting off these people who were subduing
him. I didn’t want them to hurt my
father, and would have burst into the room to save him if I thought for a
minute that I could, but I wasn’t able to stand there for one more second
witnessing my father’s desperate battle.
My dad had a sad,
fatherless, poor life. His mother,
an immigrant from Ireland was stranded in New York City in 1921 with four
little boys, my father, Charlie, the oldest, Donald, Johnny, and Francis.
Grandma was desperate. Her
31-year-old husband had fallen from a ship while working in New York harbor and
drowned, leaving her and her children little hope—no money, no support, no
relatives. She resorted to
cleaning houses and offices—a job she continued into her 80’s. Grandma took my
father, eight years old, to an orphanage for placement since he was the oldest
and least in need of a mother’s care.
Standing at the director’s desk at the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, and
ready to sign him over, Grandma noticed his hands shaking badly. She changed her mind on the spot. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” she said and walked out holding my father’s hand.
Daddy
and Donald went to school and a Mrs. Mundy cared for the younger children while
their mother went to work as a washerwoman. At the age of three, Francis, the youngest died. After sixth grade, my father dropped
out of school and started getting jobs where he could in the midst of the Great
Depression. The story of my father’s almost being put in an orphanage haunted
me, and no matter his faults or weaknesses, despite his frequent distance and
silence, I could always recall that image of his shaking hands, and I could
pity and love him.
Despite
his knocks in life Daddy had a good sense of humor, much of it
self-deprecating. He loved puns
and riddles. He liked to repeat
stories such as the one in which a dog urinated on his leg as he waited outside
of church, “Minding my own business,” he said, as though if he weren’t minding his
own business the dog had a right to pee on him. He often related the time that his friends’ set him up
on a blind date but when he got to the girl’s house, he found her laid out in a
coffin. He was tall and gaunt and
at wakes he used to say that he had to stand up and move around or the
undertaker would think he was the corpse, escaped from the casket. All my cousins liked my father because
of his amusing,
easy-going
demeanor a direct contrast to their own parents, my mother's people, who spent
so much time arguing among themselves that they had little time to entertain us
children.
In
1969 at 18 I won a local Miss Polonia contest, one I was eligible for since my
mother was of Polish origin. My
father, posted a picture of me from The New York Daily News that he glued onto a piece of cardboard with the
words: “Yes, Sir. That’s My Baby”
under it. The men he worked with
and for whom he was a maintenance man and a sometimes go-fer, laughed at his
posting, refusing to believe the “beauty queen” was his daughter. He came home with the poster that night
and hung it in the furnace room where it remained pinned on the dirty
wall. He also got drunk that night
and cried. We were all so sorry
for him, but short of dressing up in my gown, tiara, and sash and going to his
job, there was nothing we could do except tell him he worked with a bunch of
cruel assholes.
In
order to help improve his working situation, I bought him a workbook to prepare
him for taking the test for the U.S. Post Office hoping he could change jobs
and get one where he made a better salary, and didn’t wear an imaginary “Kick
me” sign on his back. Lest one
think that my father was illiterate or uncultured, relatives on both sides of
the family often said, “Charlie always had his head buried in a book.” He loved movies, literature, opera, and
even radio music of 1972, the year
that he died, and I can’t hear America’s “A Horse with No Name” or Anne
Murray’s “Snowbird” without crying.
He gardened and planted carrots and carnations. He built me a desk from scrap wood for
my portable typewriter that got me through college. He bought me 45s that I liked. Because we were so poor, I felt privileged when he brought
home Bobby Darin’s “Artificial Flowers” or Patti LaBelle’s “I Sold My Heart to
the Junkman.” When I got to college and had to memorize four major pieces of
classical music, Dad went to the library, researched the music, borrowed the
records and taped them for me to listen to at my leisure. We shared coffee and cigarettes in the
mornings during the time he had just gotten home from work and before I left
for school.
Terrified
after the sight of my father’s struggling, I ran down the corridor, back to the
lounge, sorry that I had even looked, knowing that I would never be able to
erase the vision of my naked, struggling father from my mind. After two hours,
I found the courage to go and look again and saw my father sleeping, not
knowing for sure, but suspecting
that he had fallen into a coma. I
spent the rest of the night in the grim visitors’ room waiting.
At
about five in the morning, my brother Bob, then 24, came into the lounge and I
filled him in on the details. He
barely said a word, just hunched his shoulders, and dug his hands into his
woolen coat. The man in the brown
pajamas and blue robe appeared again.
He was talking out loud to himself and gesticulating. Bob and I started giggling and that
soon turned into convulsive laughter that we could not control so we went out
into the corridor to regain our composure. When we exhausted our laughter and achieved calmness, we
resumed our seats. The burn victim
sat across from us. He continued his story of the radiator, repeating many of
the same details, not seeming to mind, or notice, that we had left in the
middle of his story. I smiled at
him, biting the insides of my cheeks to stem the inevitable snickering. I tried to look concerned—affected a
look of intense interest and sympathy—but it didn’t last long. As I began to laugh again, I apologized
to him saying,
“I’m
sorry. We’re really not laughing
at you. I don’t know what’s come
over us. We’ve been up all night
drinking coffee and smoking and our father…”
“Have
you ever smelt human flesh burning?” he said. Can you even imagine what it’s
like, how it feels to lay on a radiator for a full half hour with no one around
to help you? To hear you
screaming?”
“No!”
I said. “No, I’ve never
experienced either.” In an aside
to my brother added, “Yet.” We
both laughed, but the old vet in the blue pajamas did not notice.
It
finally was apparent that this man was stuck in his story and could not get
out. But I was no longer ashamed
of my amusement at his expense. I began to resent his trying to pull us into
his misery, especially when we had our own looming calamity.
I
fled to the window. From where we
were on the eleventh floor, I could see the shimmering Narrows, sparkling and
beautiful in the early morning light.
The Verrazano Bridge was towering and silver against the clear March sky
whose blueness promised warm spring days.
Imagine, I thought, there are people in the cars on that bridge, right
now, who are going about Saturday business—shopping, visiting, running
errands—as though something terrible was not about to take place.
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