I was astonished when he agreed to come. “Barring unforeseen difficulties at the hospital,” he’d said over the phone. I didn’t know yet that the hospital had closed; that he sometimes forgot.
“You always say that.” It was true, that was his standard disclaimer on every promise to Hallie or me, but it was uncharacteristic for me to tease him. Truthfully, after such an ice age, there was no such thing as characteristic. I tried out joking, more or less to see if it would work. “You’ll say that at your own funeral, Pop,” I’d said boldly into the receiver. Later, after he told me, I could have bitten my tongue off for that.
We met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, just for a couple of drinks since he said he had to get back to Grace that night. The bar was done up in this madly cheerful south-of-the-border décor, with a blue tile fountain and silk bougainvillaeas climbing out of clay pots shaped like pigs. It was somebody’s idea of what Old Mexico would look like if you didn’t have to take poverty into account. The waitresses wore swishy miniskirts with ruffles in contrasting primary colors. In this setting my father told me he had a terminal disorder of the brain.
All I kept thinking was that he must be wrong. I doubted he’d had a CAT scan. The thing to do would be to check into the University Hospital in Tucson and get a neurological workup, to rule out other things, but I didn’t try to talk him into it. The nature of my relationship with Doc Homer, which had eluded me over the phone, came back instantly when I saw him. There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing-the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not. It had settled heavily over our table and I could hardly breathe. I knew this man. He wouldn’t seek out a second opinion to stack up against his own. He’d suffer his own doubts but never anyone else’s. The waitress swished over and brought us fresh margaritas. The trickle of the fountain put me on edge, the way a running toilet will, or any sound of water going to waste. “What are you going to do?” I asked Doc Homer.
“I don’t see a need to do anything special, for the time being. I’ll make arrangements when the time comes.”
My stomach was tight. I felt perversely annoyed with the smiling clay pigs. I touched my lips to the coarse salt on the rim of the margarita glass, and the crystals felt like sand in my mouth, or broken glass. I thought of walls I’d seen in Mexico-high brick hacienda walls topped with a crest of broken bottles imbedded in cement, to keep people on their correct sides of the fence. If they want to provide an authentic Mexican flavor they should have something like that in here, I thought.
“Nobody else knows,” he said. “And I’d like for you not to mention it to your sister.”
I stared at him. I knew it wouldn’t matter what came next, whether I said “Okay,” or “Why?” or “That’s not fair,” which is what I mainly felt. Dr. Homer Noline had stopped talking, there being nothing more to say, in his opinion. I imagined him going back to Grace on the bus and lying that night in his bed, tired but wide awake, recalling the events of his day and wondering what pathways of thought in his brain might be slipping off track. Trying to remember what vegetable he’d cooked for dinner or what tie he’d worn. He might be confronting these thoughts with fear, or only clinical interest. I really didn’t know.
For the first time in my life then, and just for a few seconds, I was able to see Doc Homer as someone I felt sorry for. It was a turning point for me, one of those instants of freakishly clear sight when you understand that your parent might have taken entirely the wrong road in life, even if that road includes your own existence. I pitied Doc Homer for his slavish self-sufficiency. For standing Hallie and me in the kitchen and inspecting us like a general, not for crooked hems so much as for signs of the weakness of our age: the lipstick hidden in a book satchel, the smoldering wish to be like everyone else. Being like no one else, being alone, was the central ethic of his life. Mine too, to some extent, not by choice but by default. My father, the only real candidate for center of my universe, was content to sail his private sea and leave me on my own. I still held that against him. I hadn’t thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness. The captain was going down with his ship. He was just a man, becoming a child. It became possible for me to go back to Grace.
I arrived at the house, nervous, ludicrously armed with Uda’s squash pie. But he was in his darkroom. Not waiting. He called it his workroom, I think to try to legitimize his hobby to himself. Doc Homer made pictures. Specifically, he made photographs of things that didn’t look like what they actually were. He had hundreds: clouds that looked like animals, landscapes that looked like clouds. They were pressed between slabs of cardboard, in closets. Only one was framed. The matting and framing were my present to him one Christmas when I was in high school, after I’d started making my own money. It had cost me a lot, and was a mistake. His hobby was a private thing, too frivolous in his opinion to be put on public display. I should have foreseen this, but didn’t.
Nevertheless, he’d hung it in the kitchen, God only knows why because the man was far from sentimental, and there it still hung. It was the first thing I noticed when I knocked on the screen door and walked in. The photo was my favorite, a hand on a white table. And of course it wasn’t a hand, but a clump of five saguaro cacti, oddly curved and bumpy, shot against a clear sky. All turned sideways. Odd as it seemed, this thing he did, there was a great deal of art to it.
I put the pie in the refrigerator and nosed around a little, telling myself it’s what a good daughter would do. I pictured these good daughters-wifely and practical, wearing perms and loafers and Peter Pan collars. I didn’t remotely look the part. As I crept around the house it felt to me like a great, sad, recently disclosed secret. The kitchen seemed smaller than when I was a girl, standing on a bucket to reach the sink, but that’s natural. It was also crowded with odds and ends you wouldn’t expect in a kitchen: a pair of Piper forceps, for example, washed with the day’s dishes and sitting amongst them on the drainboard. This didn’t signify any new eccentricity on his part. He’d always had a bizarre sense of utility. I could picture him using the forceps to deliver a head of cabbage from a pot of boiling water. Holding it up. Not in a show-off way, but proud he’d thought of it, as if he were part of a very small club of people who had the brains to put obstetrical instruments to use in the kitchen.
The rooms were cool and stale although it was hot outside. I stepped through the living room, over the old Turkish carpet, which looked malnourished, its bare white threads exposed like ribs. Doc Homer could afford better, I heard somebody say in my mind, a voice I couldn’t identify. “All the money he’s got up there.” Which of course wasn’t true, we never had much, that was just what people thought because we were standoffish. Beyond the living room was the parlor where he used to see patients who’d come to the house, embarrassed, it seems to me now, at night when the office was closed. At present the parlor was shockingly cramped. The door to the outside porch was blocked by furniture I didn’t remember: two sofas and something that looked like a cobbler’s bench. Folded on a sofa was one thing I remembered well, a black crocheted afghan with red flowers. Hallie and I used to drag that thing around everywhere, our totem against disaster. It looked cleaner now than I’d ever seen it.
Magazines and journals were everywhere. His American Journal of Genetics was still organized chronologically on the shelf. That was his pet interest; they’d once published his article on the greatly inbred gene pool of Grace, with its marble-eyed babies. (He’d even rigged up a system for photographing the newborns’ eyes, for documentation.) The trait first began showing up in the fifties, when third-cousin descendants of the Gracela sisters started marrying each other. Emelina would have been one of his subjects. You needed to get the gene from both sides; it was recessive. That’s about what I knew. For me it was enough to understand that everyone in Grace was somehow related except us Nolines, the fish out of water. Our gene pool was back in Illinois.