I'll Be Seeing You Read online

  My mother doesn’t like to go to this home; it depresses her, and of course I understand why. A few short years ago, I spoke to my uncle on the phone about his experiences in World War II. I was writing a novel that takes place during the war years, and I was looking for firsthand accounts of experiences in battle. Frank, who was living independently at the time, was generous in sharing all he could recall, including an incident where he was in the trenches and someone came to bring him dinner. He stood up to receive it, was shot in the chest by a sniper, went to the field hospital for treatment, and then went right back to the trenches. Never even told his fiancée, Ellen, that it happened. Ellen is long dead, but Frank looks for her, waits for her, wonders why she will not come to visit him. My sister tells me that this problem has gotten better since they took down pictures of Ellen, but it seems to me to be a heartbreaking solution, to trade staring at the lovely face of his bride and reliving memories of her for looking out the window at a view that is mostly parking lot. That is where we found him on Thanksgiving afternoon, sitting in his wheelchair and looking outside at the parking lot. He is quite deaf now; you must write on a board to communicate with him. The board and a marker are kept in a pocket on the back of his wheelchair, and there is also a harmonica there. I pulled the harmonica out, showed it to Frank, and he played a tune for his little audience, after which we gave him a round of applause. Then we were finished with that. I inquired after his son, and Frank told me he was fine. I asked if he was going to watch the football games that day and he shrugged in a positive way, as if he were saying, Say, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I reminded him about the three pieces of pecan and pumpkin and burgundy berry pie I’d brought him, and he said he’d eat them later and wasn’t he lucky to have gotten them. When we left, he told us how grateful he was to have had visitors, and that he particularly liked seeing his brother, my dad. I wrote “We love you” on his board and he began to cry and then my dad began to tear up and I did, too. I stood a few feet away from the men as they embraced, and I watched them hold each other and thought about how many long years they’d been in each others’ lives, and then I noticed I was holding my elbows and rocking side to side, as though I had a baby in my arms I was trying to comfort, and I made myself stand still. I looked away from the sight of those two old brothers (Art! Art! Wake up! It’s Christmas!) and over to Frank’s narrow closet door, on which was taped a construction paper ribbon of sorts; the shape of it was something like you might see on a pie at the county fair, and on it was written the fact that Frank was the recipient of two purple hearts. Exclamation point.

  When we got outside, the sun was bright, and after everybody got in the car and put their seatbelt on, we drove off. And this seemed like a miracle all out of proportion to the fact. I know that sometimes when Frank asks my dad how he is, he answers, “Eh, I don’t feel so good.” To which Frank always raises an eyebrow and says, “You can walk around, can’t you?”

  Before we left, I asked the nurse if I might take Frank out to the lobby to watch the football game. “If you stay with him,” she said. I told her we couldn’t stay any longer—my father was anxious to get back home. “Oh, well, then, no,” she said. “You can’t leave him there alone.” I didn’t go back into Frank’s room to tell him I couldn’t set him up in front of the game in the lobby after all. I thought he had probably forgotten about my offer, and I didn’t want to remind him of one more thing he couldn’t do.

  I knew Frank could watch the game on the little TV in his room, if he wanted to. It’s just that I wanted to be fancier than that. In the lobby, you can see people come and go. You can watch them play cards or games, or help themselves to a cup of coffee. It’s like flying first-class: you’re still trapped, but at least there are some diversions. “Can I bring him some coffee?” I asked, and the nurse said no, he choked on liquids. “Oh,” I said. “Good thing I asked you first.” She smiled a little tiredly and I thought of her coming in her own front door after work, then settling herself down on the sofa, next to her hubby. I thought of him asking, “How was work?” and her answering, “Okay,” then throwing an orange and brown afghan over her lap, and offering that same tired smile.

  I had a talk with my dad before I left to go home. I told him he needed to make some effort to help himself, to try to engage in the world around him, to avail himself of some of the services that are there for people like him. The discussion got a little heated at one point, with my father putting up obstacles to virtually everything I suggested, and at one point laughing outright at me for one of those suggestions. And I came to tears over that. “Why are you laughing at me?” I said, which had more to do with old tapes than the situation at hand. (Old tapes: my need for his approval, for wanting always to please him first.) But he angrily threw out the fact that I live in Chicago and his son in Hawaii, we have deserted him, and too much falls to my sister, Vicki, who lives near them. I said something about the fact that he never seemed inclined to visit me in Chicago, despite numerous offers, and then I remembered I was dealing with someone who was compromised. I was picking on someone who could no longer have a rational discussion. So I reined myself in, lowered my voice, and told my father about a regular meeting of a small group of people who are dealing with memory loss. They meet twice a month to have conversations about various things, current events among them. There are speakers who come. There is singing, too, and there are crafts, although I didn’t tell my dad that, because I thought a man who was once so mighty a figure would find it humiliating to be engaged in a sing-along or, oh, say, making a May basket using pipe cleaners woven into a blueberry container. But that’s my own narrow-minded prejudice, my own sorrow at seeing a woman in Frank’s nursing home sitting in the activities room and being helped to make a hand turkey, the kind that preschoolers hang up in their classrooms. Maybe it would be better to see my dad making a hand turkey than staring out the kitchen window at whatever he can still see and sighing.

  “It’s sad,” my mother says. “He was a very intelligent man.” But he asks her the same questions endlessly. Endlessly. “Has the mail come?” “Has the mail come?” “Did you bring in the mail yet?” “Has the mail come?” “Jeanne! Did the mail come?”

  She tells me that every day when she gets up, she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror and asks God to give her patience. I think of their hearts banging in their chests on their wedding day, they way they couldn’t wait to say yes to in sickness and in health.

  About an hour after our discussion, my dad said, “I’m not mad, are you?” No, I said. “Truce?” he asked. “That depends,” I said. “Truce if you promise me you’ll try some things.” “That’s not a truce,” he said.

  But I got my dad to promise that he would try the group. I got him to promise that he would read one or two articles in the paper every day—I cut a few out for him when I was there, because we decided that it wouldn’t be so hard to read a cut-out article under his magnifying machine—he wouldn’t have to manipulate the large pages of the newspaper, or struggle with trying to find the continuation of stories; it would all be there before him.

  My dad used to be an avid stamp collector, and I, like a lot of other people, always thought of it as a dippy hobby. But one day when I was visiting my parents, I looked through some of his albums, and many of the stamps were beautiful, miniature works of art. Others were like reading highly abbreviated synopses of historical events. So many pristine albums, all lined up on the shelves. He used to soak stamps off envelopes in a tiny dish of water. He used to handle them with tweezers. He used to order sheets of new stamps, and they would come in the mail and he would carefully mount them in the appropriate album. A few months ago, he sold a collection—the European one, I think it was—in order to help his grandson buy a house. He was a little unhappy about the price he got; he knew they were worth quite a bit more. This is in stark contrast to what he thinks his house is worth.

  When we sat at the kitchen
table talking about whether he and my mom should move to a place that offered assisted living, he asked, “How could we afford that?” And when I told him that, for starters, his house was worth over $200,000, he just looked at me a little sadly, as though it were a pity I was so out of touch with reality. “What did we pay for this house?” he asked my mother. “Twenty-two thousand,” she said. “Well,” he said, “we’re not going to see much more than $24,000 for it.”

  I raised my hand. “Can I buy it?”

  Sometimes, some things are funny.

  Before I left my parents’ house, I wanted to put a birdfeeder right outside the kitchen window, the kind that uses suction cups to adhere to the glass. But I learned they don’t really work. And anyway, my father, a great bird lover, does still enjoy the parakeets my sister and I bought him. Every night, he says, “Good night, Fritzi. Good night, Frieda.” And every morning, when he takes the towel off their cage, there they are, still alive, and eager to eat whatever gets put into their cup. “Good morning, Fritzi,” he says. “Good morning, Frieda.” Reveille.

  Also, every morning, my father makes sure his hair is combed and the collar of his bathrobe lies flat and neat before he makes an appearance in the kitchen, where he greets my mother and gives her a kiss. (When I was there, he was sitting in the booth and eating breakfast beside my mother one morning, and a look of great concern came over his face. He turned to her and said, “Did I kiss you this morning?” “Yes,” she said. He kissed her again anyway.)

  The other day, I read something about William Blake, about how when he lay on his deathbed, he told his wife to hold very still, he wanted to make a drawing of her, “for you have ever been an angel to me.” He made her portrait, and then he began to sing, and then he died. I read that, and I began to cry. But I am newly home from a visit to the front, and a lot of things are making me cry: a late bud on the hydrangea bush, a rosy dawn, the memory of how, on Thanksgiving night, my father sat alone in the kitchen working to get a battery in his hearing aid. The battery is small and his hands are large. He can’t see well at all, of course. My sister was sitting beside me at the dinner table, and we could see him out in the kitchen and we both watched him for a while. “It’s hard to get those things in,” she said, and we watched a little more, hoping that he could secure for himself this small victory, but then, finally, she went to help him.

  I think of getting up early every day when I was at my parents’ house to sit quietly alone in the living room just to look at how things are arranged: the candy dish on the coffee table, the sheer draperies on the brass rings before the bay window, the lamps positioned perfectly for reading next to chairs, the little desk against the wall, its chair pushed neatly beneath it. I listened those mornings to the grandfather clock ticking and I felt the reverberations of its deep chime right at the center of my chest, like another heart.

  But mostly I try to think of something my father said this last visit: “I had a lot of good times in my life.” He said it twice.

  Yesterday, I mailed him two stamps I got from the envelope of a fan letter a man sent me from Australia. Last night, Bill and I found two articles in the paper to send my father. One was from the business section of The New York Times, a funky story about a woman in Atlanta trying to sell her very successful eight-seat hamburger joint. She sells the best burgers in town, using a secret recipe that she says she’ll share only with the new owner. She wants to sell, she says, so that she can take a nap.

  The other article was about the leader of the free world getting his lip split in a basketball game. I love Obama; my dad hates him. I thought it would cheer him up to see that my hero had been hurt.

  JANUARY 29, 2011

  I came home to a message on my phone from my mother. “Well, I got my book,” she said, referring to the large-print novel I’d sent her. “So at least one good thing happened today.” Then she listed the not-so-good things that had happened: the wife of a cousin of mine had died, after a long battle with cancer during which she complained never. And her sister, Tish, had fallen on the ice and broken her arm, so she would not be able to drive for some time. That meant that she couldn’t take my mother and their other sister, Lala, out for their weekly expeditions: usually, a visit to the dollar store or Unique Thrift Shop or Herberger’s department store. Then they have lunch out at someplace like Snuffy’s Malt Shop. Occasionally they go to a movie, where they hold hands and guide themselves down the dark aisle with a flashlight my mother keeps in her purse, and where my Aunt Lala usually falls asleep—hard to stay interested in a movie when your macular degeneration has progressed to the point where you can’t really see the film.

  The third piece of bad news was that my father, after having agreed to attend a meeting of the group dealing with memory loss, refused to go after all. “Why won’t you go?” my mother asked, and he said, “I don’t feel good.” So he stayed home, and I assume he continued his pattern of following my mother anywhere in the house she went.

  I called her back and there was such weariness in her voice. But she is the daughter of an optimistic Irishman who loved life, and I could hear her trying to rally, even as we spoke. She put me on the phone with my father and I asked him rather sharply why he didn’t go to the group. “Didn’t feel good,” he said. And I said, “Dad.”

  My mother got back on the phone with me before I hung up, and I said, “I yelled at Dad a little bit.” “Oh, that won’t help,” she said, and what was in her voice was compassion for her husband of now sixty-eight years—their anniversary was January 15.

  In January 1943, my mother rode a train from St. Paul, Minnesota, to an Army base in Texas, where she married my father. Her mother did not want her to do it. She didn’t like my dad; she said he had too much hair. Naturally I assume there were other things about him that she didn’t like, but what she told my mom was that my dad had too much hair. My mom wore a yellow dress and a brown velvet hat to get married in. Her maid of honor was a first lieutenant. Their honeymoon cottage was the top floor of a rooming house someone rented out to them, and there were complaints about the, ahem, noise they made at night. My sister was born nine months later.

  Yesterday, that sister called, and when I asked her how things were going with my parents, she sighed and said, “One day at a time.” We talked about how difficult it is for my parents to navigate the stairs in their house—down to the basement, up to the attic. We talked about how transportation to the many (and ever-increasing) doctors’ appointments are a problem, because my parents must scramble around for rides. I bought them a gift certificate for a car service two Christmases ago, but they rarely use it. It’s like the beautiful negligees my father used to give my mother, gossamer things in colors of pale blue or apricot or cream that she would lift partway out of the box and then hastily cover with the tissue paper they lay nestled in. Once, when I was a teenager and my parents were out and I was searching for my as yet unwrapped Christmas gifts, I found the drawer in my mother’s dresser where she kept those negligees. They were neatly folded, still in their tissue paper. I don’t know that she ever wore them. That’s how they treat the car service.

  I told my sister I worried about them eating well, about the way neither one of them is able to get out and socialize, about what would happen if one of them fell. “And you know what?” I said. “All of those things would be taken care of it they’d just move to that place we showed them. A bus would take them to their doctors. A bus would take Mom to church. There are activities every day: field trips, lectures, crafts, movies. If Mom doesn’t want to cook, they could go to the dining room. There are people to talk to. There’s a little library Mom could go to; there’s a breakfast club for the men. There’s a community garden. In the winter, they could come out of their apartment and go for a walk without even having to go outside! And!” I said, practically sputtering in my self-righteous eagerness. “Dad could keep his car in a heated garage!”

 
“I know,” my sister said.

  “I mean, I think we have to get a little tough with them!” I said. “Mom needs a break. If Dad ‘doesn’t feel good,’ let him go sit in a group of people talking about current events and not feel good. I bet he’d feel better just by being around other people!”

  “He says it’s easier to meet people as a couple,” my sister said. “He wants her to come with him.”

  “That group is so she can get a break from being with him all the time,” I said. “And so that Dad can meet someone besides Mom to talk to.”

  “I was going to talk to them tomorrow,” my sister said. “I was going to sit them down and say, ‘Look. You’re going to have to make some decisions. You aren’t safe here anymore.’ I was going to tell Dad that Mom is stressed to the max; she can’t keep caring for him this way.”

  “Right!” I said. “If he loves her so much, he needs to make things a little easier for her, even if it makes him uncomfortable. Do you want me to drive up and talk to them with you?”

  “No,” she said. “Let me see how this goes.”

  “Call me if you need me,” I said, and she said okay.

  I sat fuming for a while, thinking of how at this point it’s just selfish of my dad not to try to help himself. My mother makes the calls, she has people come over to evaluate my dad, she gets everything all set up, and then he won’t go. When he says, “I don’t feel good,” what he’s saying is, “You come, too.” Selfish!

  I worked myself into a nice state of anger, and had fantasies of putting my dad in my car and driving him over to the assisted living place, shoving him into a nice little apartment, then throwing his things in the door after him, his grandfather clock and his cardigan sweaters and his hearing aids and his wire basket full of golf balls. And then I felt a guilty rush of sorrow, because I know it’s hard for them to leave their home with its arched doorways and cozy kitchen, with its history of so many Christmas and Easter dinners, with memories of grandchildren who first came to that house as infants and now have children of their own. My mother’s mother lived in the room that is now the TV room; my brother had a room in the basement, complete with a pretty well-stocked bar. My parents are deeply familiar with their house; if the lights went out, they could find their way around. The beautiful bay window, the little backyard in which my mother loves to putter with her flowers, the nearness to Como Park, my father’s workbench and watchmaker’s cabinet and stack of National Geographics in the basement.