9781582430485

Chapter One

At five-thirty on this early October afternoon my ninety-two-year-old father, Able Neel, lies in four-point restraint in Bed Two in a room on the fifth floor of Broward General Hospital, his cancerous left kidney gone as of ten-thirty this morning. Drugged, his eyes settle on me no more frequently, nor with any more interest, than they do on the closed venetian blinds next to the bed or on the small spires of his feet under the loose blanket. Now and then he tries to move a foot toward the center, but the gauze around the ankle says no. The surgeon, Dr. Erg, late thirties, bearded, a head shorter than I, said a half hour ago that he's going to be all right. "Home in a week, maybe ten days 'cause of his age." In the first few moments in the room, I told Able this, his eyes clear and straight ahead as I stood to the side of the bed, and he responded by thumbing the morphine pump in his right hand as if it were a buzzer in a game show. Then his eyes rolled back and the lids came down.

I've been here an hour, sitting in a low chair with wide flat arms, watching him go in and out of sleep. So far I've seen three myoclonic jerks, the first a soft spasm, the other two powerful enough to wake him, his eyes wide and fierce with surprise. The room and hall are quiet after the dinner scurry. Bed One, empty, has stiff fresh sheets and a pillow as smooth as white marble. I asked the nurse who came in just before dinner why Able was restrained and she said he'd thrashed around right after they brought him back from the ICU. She turned his left arm slightly so I could see the inside of the elbow and the patch of black under the skin where he'd torn out the first IV. She said patients as old as Able often get disoriented, that restraint is the best thing for them. She winked and said, "Us, too," then added that this time tomorrow he'd be much better, they'd have him up and sitting where I am.

Quite suddenly he speaks, his voice as clear as years ago, and asks for Lillian, my mother. I take the few steps to the edge of the bed and say everything's fine. Through his teeth he says, "I have to take care of her." Then he raises his hands a few inches, as far as the ties will allow, and looks at them. I tell him he pulled out an IV and his eyes roll back and he says, "Lil?," then goes to sleep again. I step back as the evening nurse swishes through the door and across the room to bend down at the end of the bed and raise the sheet slightly to look at the dangling collection bag for his urine. She turns it in her hand once, then follows the clear tubing up under the sheet. Her face tells me that what she's looking at she doesn't like, and when I ask if there's a problem she says, "There will be if the bag stays empty." His output, she says, is key, and when I say but the right kidney's just fine she says sometimes the one that's left shuts down sympathetically. Then she takes a stethoscope from her pocket and listens to his chest, says, "Bueno," then snaps the ends from her ears and says, "You're the professor, aren't you?" I nod, say my name, Ted, and she tells me that last night when they were prepping him Mr. Neel told her about my brother and me. "At some length," she adds, and I smile and shake my head and softly say I know how he can go on. "You've written three books?" she asks, and I tell her all on Tennyson. Then there comes the familiar vacuum in the conversation when someone not academic kindly mentions my work, about which there is not a shred of general interest. It's the same effect my brother, Benny, gets in conversation when someone asks what he does and he says psychology: one can just about hear the silent Oh in the person's mind. The nurse says how fortunate for my father that I have a sabbatical and can be here.

After she leaves I go out the door and turn in the opposite direction to walk down the hall to the balcony where patients and staff smoke. Outside, the sun is stuck behind a long bank of clouds to the west, a couple with mean thunderheads in them, but a few miles north great shafts of sunlight strike the ocean.

I have not been here to Fort Lauderdale for a year, but when I got to their apartment yesterday about noon it was as if a decade had sped by, as if their telephone voices had been careful facades, what I'd heard at best exaggerations, at worst lies. I knew my mother's short-term memory wasn't good--she'd ask about my daughters, Melissa out of college and working, Rebecca a junior, and ten minutes later would ask again--but otherwise the quality of her voice and her quick laugh was the same. But the real problem, which I discovered two hours after I was in their apartment, is that her vision is in serious decline. I found this out on the eleventh-floor balcony of their U-shaped ocean-side building, a place where over the years as my children grew up my family had spent some very pleasant times. When I remarked that down below by the pool, shuffleboard courts, and putting green I could see Bill and Margaret Nicely, ten years younger and their friends of eighteen years, my mother leaned forward, her bright blue eyes in a sad search, and finally said, "Oh, I believe I do, too." I shot a look at Able and realized he'd ignored the exchange. Although during lunch--cold cuts and macaroni salad bought from O'Donnell's Deli--I hadn't noticed anything, now I realized she could hardly see.

When I mentioned it was getting close to admission time, Able, reclined on the chaise, suddenly looked like a man losing his way, as if in what pillars there'd been in his life he could now hear and feel the sounds of core friction, as if he could actually see cracks wiggling along the surface. His small close-set eyes grew large, as though possibly in his anxiety about the coming surgery he'd had the brief thought that this might be his last afternoon. His hands were folded across his small belly, and his shoulder bones stuck up like two knuckles under the cream-colored sports shirt.

Next to me in the white metal chair with plastic stripping, Lillian let her hand rest along my forearm, and her fingertips lightly, absently pressed into the flesh at the back of my wrist, as though sending a signal she was not aware of. She observed that the Florida weather isn't what it used to be, that it's gray and cloudy now a lot, and when she turned slightly to ask me why I said I didn't know. "Global warming," Able said, watching me.

"I've heard of that," she answered and turned away, her mind as calm and soft as pudding.

When I go back to Able's room I find he now has a roommate, a man in his thirties who doesn't look very sick, but who tells me, along with his name, Danny Ramsay, that he's just come up from detox with pancreatitis. He's a tall man who takes up the whole length of the bed, and whose stubble, unkempt hair, and scabby hands support his history. When I ask how long he was downstairs he says he doesn't know, could have been a couple of days, maybe even a week, then asks if I have a cigarette. I shake my head and say sorry, and then he startles me by turning toward the door and hollering, "Nurse, get in here." I expect her appearance within seconds and when no one comes I turn away to Able to see him deeply asleep. "Your old man?" Danny asks.

"My father," I answer, nodding.

"Is he croaking?" I tell him no, explain what's happened, and he says, "Jesus, I got to have a smoke." I pull the curtain along the space between the beds so there is the feeling of privacy and look at Able. Suddenly, his eyes snap open and he says, "Call your mother." I do on the phone on the small night table next to the curtain, and right away it's pretty bad. Lillian has forgotten where we are and she's nearly weeping she's so glad I've called. When I tell her Able's just fine, he wants to talk to her, she says, "Oh, is he all right?" I say just a second and lay the phone next to Able's head on the pillow. He tells me to take these goddamn ropes off his hand so he can at least talk to his wife. I loosen the slipknot and get the hand free and he takes the phone, all the time his eyes on me like a weight. His pupils are hugely dilated. I'm astonished and scared that right away he tells her to drive down here, he's going home tonight, the place is filled with crazy people. "You can't go home," I tell him, "you just had surgery." I reach for the phone but he turns his head away, his grip on it like steel. Finally, I get the phone from him, his arm drops like it's dead, and I tell Lillian that he's not himself, he's talking through his hat. To this she says if she can find the car keys she'll come and get him, and it's like she hasn't heard a word. "Listen," I say, "it's after six. Watch the news or something. I'll be there." When I hang up, Able's looking straight at me again, his lips in a solid line, and he's almost squinting. "Why are you making this so hard on me?" he says.

"It's for your own good," I tell him. For a second or two he seems to consider what I've said, then turns his head away. I take the gauze loop, slip it over his hand and tighten it loosely around the wrist. Right then a nurse comes in, the third different one I've seen, nods at me, then checks the urine bag. It's still empty. As she makes a note about it, the IV monitor begins to beep, and when I look over I see that blood has begun to back up into the tubing. The nurse sees it, too, takes the few steps to it, flips a small switch, and then walks around past me to the other side of the bed and closely examines the needle in his arm. She says something under her breath and then walks out of the room. I don't know if he hears me when I tell him I've got to go to make certain Lillian's okay, but when I rest a hand on his knee and start to tell him again he says, "Give me that thing." I put the morphine pump in his hand and watch as he presses down on the button as hard as he can.

The drive from Broward General to North Ocean Boulevard was forty minutes in this morning's traffic, but I make it back in twenty-five, park my rental on the north side of the building, hurry through the lobby to the J Tower, and am relieved to find that the elevator's only one floor down in the garage. When it does not respond it's my guess that someone's propped it open to bring groceries from their car. It takes four or five minutes before I hear the door close and the elevator start up. When the door opens, a small, thin couple who look to be in their early eighties stands side by side, two pull carts filled with groceries in front of them. They stare at me. I smile, get in, and press 11. The elevator stops at 10 and they get off, each with the same difficulty with the cart, as if they have to get it over a curb. I have my key out and go in the door almost without stopping. To my great relief I hear the television in the den, but when I get there the room's empty. It doesn't take but a few seconds to realize that Lillian's gone, but even as this registers something makes me call out, "Mother, mother?"

Right away I'm back in the elevator heading for the garage, knowing I'm going to find the old Cadillac gone, and it is. I stand in the space feeling useless and very afraid. God knows where she is, I think, and pictures of her in trouble run through my mind. I go back to the apartment to wait in the den by the phone and the call comes within a half hour: the police tell me Lillian's at the Galleria down on Sunrise, sitting on a bench near a bus stop, the car parked so awkwardly it's taking up two handicapped spaces. When the officer finds out I'm her son he tells me I ought to take better care of my mother. I tell him he's absolutely right and that I'll pick her up as soon as I can get there. I call a taxi and go down to the west entrance to wait for it. The doorman, Joseph, is on evening duty. I've known him for all the years my family and I have visited. He shakes my hand and says it's good to see me and asks how my daughters are. I tell him fine and he frowns and asks how Mrs. Neel's doing. For an instant I wonder how he knows she's lost, but then he says, "With her hip, the therapy." I answer vaguely, feeling my way, that she seems pretty good, and it works when he says, gesturing to the steps outside, that it was a hell of a tumble she took, a wonder she didn't break a leg or something. "Oh, yes," I say, "that."

At the Galleria I thank the cop and he's quick to leave. Lillian doesn't recognize me until I sit next to her on the bench and put an arm around her. She's softly crying, her lips wet and trembling, and when I say things are going to be all right she answers, "Oh, good." In the car on the way back I ask where she was going and she turns and looks at me and says give her a minute, it'll come. "To see Able?" I prompt, and she says, "Yes."

"He's in the hospital, you know," I tell her.

"It's the cancer," she says, eyes once again ahead.

"He's going to be okay," I say. "The doctor said he'll be all right."

"Which hospital?" she asks. I decide to keep the car keys with me from now on.

When we get back to the apartment, Lillian goes straight into the den and sits on the end of the couch to watch television. I tell her I'll make us something for dinner, but when I go into the kitchen I can feel the heat from the oven over the stove. It's set between 425 and 450, and when I open the door there are two Stouffer's frozen dinners, lids still in place, bulged out and so charred that even the pictures are scaly and dark brown. I turn off the oven and take the dinners out, pot holders on both hands, and walk them to the door of the trash chute next to the refrigerator. They make almost no sound as they disappear down the wide, drafty space. Next I turn on the ceiling fan to dissipate the heat that's built up, and then open the freezer door of the refrigerator to see if there's something else to eat. Oh, there is, all right: probably thirty to forty Stouffer's frozen dinners are stacked in five rows, each row a different entrée. I go into the living room and call to Lillian in the den to ask what she wants. Her response is to say Jeopardy! is on and I should come watch. "Tell Able," she adds. For an instant I cannot get my breath, and I think where is my mother, where did she go? I tell her I'm going to make dinner and she calls back, "That's nice."

I see right away when I open the refrigerator why there're so many frozen dinners in the freezer: There is no room on the shelves for anything larger than a thimble. Glass and food containers are stacked side by side, from half-finished Pepsi cans to special nutritional drinks capped with aluminum foil, to GLAD-wrapped saucers of leftovers long forgotten, to small and medium-sized bottles of medicines I've never heard of with expiration dates of nearly a year ago. I go back to the den to ask her what she and Able have been doing with the refrigerator, and if they eat anything but frozen dinners, but my irritation is instantly gone when I see that she's lying back on the couch, feet up, her head resting on a small pillow on the padded arm at the end, sound asleep. Her hair, thin and nearly orange from the beauty-parlor rinses, lies like a cloud of cotton candy high on her forehead, her hands are folded across her middle, and her tiny diamond engagement ring, the stone so dirty that it gives off no light, is held upright by two fingers of the other hand. A tall woman, she takes up most of the couch, the soles of her white oxford walking shoes nearly touching the other arm. It's possible, I think, judging from how worn and rounded the heels are, and the tiny splits along the sides, that she's had these shoes now for eight or nine years. She is, I realize, in the same white blouse and aqua slacks that she wore yesterday and that each has smudges of food and, in places, light fingerprints, as though from picking off crumbs.

Back in the kitchen I order two takeout spaghettis from Nick's, the Italian restaurant a few blocks down on A1A, then get a roll of plastic bags and pull up a chair in front of the refrigerator. The food and medicines go in the bags, the glass containers and the Tupperware onto the counter above the dishwasher. So packed is the refrigerator that it seems as though it's been a careful project over many years. They've been saving food--a last slice of cake, a thin cut of melon, a half-eaten banana tucked down in the skin, a months-old slab of meat loaf, milk with a date from last summer, and on and on it goes until I have eight five-gallon bags on the floor next to me, the dishes and glasses all over the counter. Just as I open the fresh-produce drawers at the bottom and see two heads of brown, shrunken lettuce in decayed plastic wraps, ooze all over the place, the spaghetti arrives from Nick's. I pay the young man, who thanks me in broken English as if I'm royalty for the two-dollar tip, and set the package in the oven and turn it to warm. Then I go back to the den to tell Lillian that dinner's ready. She's awake and staring at a Seinfeld . When I tell her what we're eating she brightens in a way I haven't seen since I got here, gets up too quickly, and for a moment has to steady herself on the end of the couch. When she finally pushes upright and shoves off, she's very unsteady and I have to cup her elbow as we walk. She thanks me and says it must be these old shoes.

At the table she asks where Able is and I tell her he's in the hospital. She turns and looks out the window right next to her, the last of the evening light casting pink reflections in her eyes. I cut the spaghetti and put some on a plate for her, dice the large meatball, and then sit to watch her move the fork through the food, then raise to her mouth what she's been able to catch. About half the time she gets a regular, normal portion, the other half only a few clinging strands. She remarks on how good the spaghetti is, says she hasn't had a meal like this in so long, and then asks not only how my daughters are but where they are. I say they're fine and tell her again. Then there's something about her that relaxes visibly--her shoulders slump, her head goes down as though to stretch out the muscles at the back of her neck, and she says again how good the food is. Her face is slightly flushed. When I say a salad came with the spaghetti she says, "Oh, I'd like that. Italian dressing?"

As I'm pouring the dressing over the lettuce and red onions and mushrooms, Lillian asks if I ever hear from Benny. I answer that from time to time we talk on the phone, and then she says he lives in California now, doesn't he? "Santa Barbara," I tell her, then add, "He's the psychologist to the stars." This is an old, friendly line from years ago when Benny used to joke (or so we thought) that what he wanted from life was wealth, fame, and glamour, and that he was going to the coast to open a practice and become a talk-show celebrity. While he's not a regular for anyone, he has gotten in front of the camera on the Fox psychology half hour four times and has said privately that he did two behind-the-scenes consults for O.J.'s defense. Lillian smiles at the remark and says Benny can do anything he wants, then adds, "You, too." She turns in her chair, her chin propped on her hand, and looks at me about ten feet away at the counter, her eyes as though I'm only a memory, and starts to talk about the times when I had my first teaching job and Elaine and I would bring the girls for a week, how we'd stay a block away at the Villa Caprice and walk over to the apartment along the beach. She asks if I remember how mad Able got when Elaine lost one of the sets of keys he gave us and I answer, "I sure do." Her whole face is alive, and an erectness comes into her posture and she leans back and lets her fingertips rest along the edge of the table. For a moment she looks as though she's going to start to play the piano like she did when I was a kid. Her fingers move a little, as in an involuntary twitch, and then she sets her hands together in her lap.

As we eat our salads she says several times how wonderful this tastes, and when I ask her what she eats beside the Stouffer's in the freezer she says those are just for the nights she and Able don't go to the club. I ask how often that is and she stops jabbing at the lettuce and thinks hard for a moment, then says it's not so regular anymore. The confusion on her face tells me I've done her no service by asking such a question and right away I change the subject to one of our visits years ago when Melissa, then four, accidentally locked herself in the bathroom and Able had to break the lock with a screwdriver. Lillian remembers this like it happened only an hour ago.

Outside, the last of the light has gone, and down by the pool and around the walkways by the putting green there're burnt umber rings on the concrete where the high-security lights have come on. A few couples walk the perimeter of the area, one holding hands, another striding purposefully for the exercise, one with the man some yards ahead as though they've had a dinnertime argument. They are smooth, dark cutouts against the strange light. I remember when Lillian and Able first came here thirty years ago, just after his retirement from Union Carbide, and each evening they did the same as those I now watch, two people more carefree at sixty-two and sixty-one than it's probably possible to tell. I'd just finished my course work and, for my dissertation, I was reading more seriously than I ever had. My first marriage, loveless and childless, had just come apart; I was an eastern intellectual snob in the foreign land of Iowa City, then with a population of less than twelve thousand in a squared-off bunch of blocks set down in an ocean of corn. When I visited to tell them Janet and I were separated they seemed, in their secure bliss, to register only passing concern, as if in their move from White Plains to here something final and difficult to name had been left behind. The aura they had about themselves for their first years here--somersaulting in the surf, joining the Coral Ridge Yacht Club, eating what and where they pleased, sometimes all three meals out at fine places, wallowing in huge chunks of empty leisure time--was immortality. They were entering a stage of life I had no knowledge of.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE FIFTH SEASON by ROBERT C. S. DOWNS. Copyright © 2000 by Robert C. S. Downs. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Fifth Season

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