After lunch was done and the Colonel had retired to his room for some light R &R, the three of them began to divvy up the belongings, prepping to make an easy sweep of it between the day they moved the old man out and the scheduled demolition of the house, quick work for the condo development ahead. Claire had brought small circular stickers to help with the division. Each of them would simply mark the items they wanted to take. “Pop will appreciate the patriotic touch,” Dwight said, holding up a package of red stickers and leaving blue and white for his sisters. Unmarked items would be slated for donation to the Salvation Army. “And a military nod again,” Dwight said, already beginning to stake down his claims.
When the three of them ended up squabbling about an autographed photo of Eisenhower standing with the Colonel and his late wife, Keri felt like she saw the three of them most clearly. Beatrice, the eldest, argued that the photo was hers because she was actually in the picture, cradled in their mother’s arms. Dwight, now the baby of the bunch, pointed out that he’d been named after the president, “which ought to give me dibs.” Meanwhile Claire-caretaker-turned-peacemaker-tried as best she could to keep the simmer from becoming a boil.
“So doesn’t that give you claim to all of this, Bea?” Dwight demanded. “You saw it first, you were there first? It’s all yours?” And then trying to recruit Claire to the cause: “Isn’t that how it’s always been?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Beatrice said. “I’m saying I’m in the damn picture. It’s a picture of me.”
“Let’s leave it for father, for his room at the nursing home,” Claire said. “He always loved it so.”
“He wouldn’t even know it’s there,” Dwight said.
“Let’s leave it unmarked then,” Claire went on. “No one will take it. We can donate it somewhere. A tribute that-”
“Stick it up in some museum?” Dwight said. “Hell no. That sucker’s worth something.”
“Is that what you’re planning?” Beatrice flashed with rage. “Selling it somewhere?”
“Please keep your voices down,” Claire said, and Keri could sense something stretched thin in her own voice. “He’ll hear us.”
“If he does wake up,” Dwight told Keri, “just keep him in the room for a while.”
“How should I do that?” Keri asked, startled by the sound of her own voice.
“Tell him,” Dwight began. “Tell him the base is on lockdown.” He seemed to be thinking. He grinned broadly, something cruel behind it. “There’s a sniper. Delta Force is handling it. Tell him, ‘Orders from the general.’”
“General.” Beatrice snorted. “Is that how you picture yourself in all this?”
Bickering spun out of selfishness, anger where there should have been empathy, lies built high on the Colonel’s dementia-Keri hated it all.
But later, she reflected that she wasn’t much better, at least in one regard.
When the real estate agents, surveyors, and repairmen had made their rounds, Keri had dutifully pretended to the Colonel that they were visiting dignitaries, military attaches, envoys from D.C. And when the Colonel woke from his nap and asked what all the dots were for-on the lamps, on the furniture, everywhere-Keri told him “inventory” and then “supply room,” trying to think of the right term, build another lie he might believe.
“Midnight requisitions,” the Colonel said vaguely, with a sigh of contempt, and something about a “five-fingered discount,” and then, grinning himself, just like Dwight had, “Oh, well, Sergeant, we’ll just have to requisition it all back,” like he knew the game.
“Lear,” Pete said when Keri told him all about it. “The grasping, the selfishness. Siblings showing their true colors. Claire sounds like the best of them: ‘You have brought me up and loved me, and I return you those duties back as are right and fit, obey you, love you, and most honor you.’” Pete performed the last part with a stagy British lilt.
“It didn’t feel like honor,” Keri said. “Or love either.”
“That’s what Lear thought, too.” Pete raised his eyebrow. “And you know how that turned out. So who got the photo?”
“Beatrice,” Keri said. “She traded Dwight the dining room table for it, but he said it didn’t matter, he’d get it back someday. Told her that since she was older, she’d go first. ‘I’ll keep these handy,’ he said, and he waved his extra stickers in the air.”
“Charming,” Pete said. “Sorry I missed it.” Keri had hoped for a little more empathy, but Pete was already moving on: “You know, I think I’ll add Lear to the syllabus. Sub it in instead of Othello-that’s done too much in high school anyway, don’t you think? And Lear-”
“But what should we do?” Keri insisted. “What’s our role in all this?”
She doesn’t entirely remember his answer-several possibilities, comparing them to the Earl of Kent or the Fool. Did Keri have a touch of Cordelia herself? Little of substance, nothing practical, no solace. Instead, it’s more of Margaret’s words that have persisted: “Not a word of thanks, unless you demand it. Not a single token of appreciation, unless you take it yourself. I’m telling you: You’ve already been bought and paid for.”
The Colonel dresses and undresses himself, handles all of his own bathroom duties, but Keri follows up with him each morning and each night. This evening, as usual, he’s had trouble with his nightclothes-his “old man jammies,” Pete calls them. One side of his top hangs low, unfastened, while the skipped button bunches out on the other side, the fabric opening to reveal the aged flesh of his belly, a thin tangle of gray hairs. “He does it on purpose,” Pete has joked, “just so you can fluff him up.” She tries not to think about that as she straightens the buttoning, a complicated dance of discretion and helpfulness.
The Colonel always apologizes to one version or another of who he thinks she is. “Aging is an indignity, Sergeant,” he’s said before. And other times: “In all our many years together, my darling, did you ever believe it would come to this?” These seem his only flashes of awareness about time and his place in it, but even those moments are dim with confusion.
“I’ve not been a good husband, dear,” he tells her tonight. “A good father, either, to-” He stops, he catches himself. Some small reality intrudes. “Thank you for looking after me,” he says. He strokes her cheek.
She puts him to bed, she tucks him in, she turns out his light. Nearly always, he’s staring at the ceiling when she leaves him. Tonight, he watches the window.
“The guards,” he says. “The duty roster.”
“Yes, yes,” she tells him, and she closes the door.
Back in her own room, she tries to go to bed, but finds herself restless, irritable, waiting once more for Pete, angry a little at him this time-and even more of each emotion tonight because of whatever’s gotten into the Colonel. She lies in the darkness for a while, staring at the shadows playing outside her own window, at that full moon raging, and then she turns on the light once more to read. She wants to keep up with what Pete’s doing, give them more to talk about, so she’d been following his syllabus. The class has already reached Lear, and she takes down the bulky Riverside Shakespeare from the nightstand, reminds herself again to get a more readable copy, then picks up mid-scene where she’d fallen asleep the night before:
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,-often the surfeit of our own behavior,-we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!