“We went to the funeral,” she says.
My father takes the news hard. He stares at his hands. They’re folded on his belly. Barbara and I are at cross-purposes. She needs him to meet her in the present, and I am happy for him to remain deep in the past.
His mouth slackens and he falls asleep again.
“You know, Daley,” Barbara says quietly, “your father lost a lot of friends by marrying me. They all sided with Ben against us. It was very unpleasant. We were alone. Totally alone. Hatch was about the only person who would visit. And Virginia Utley was the worst of them all. But when Chad died, your father was the first one over to her house that afternoon. And she has never stopped thanking him for it. I know you two have had your difficulties, but I don’t think you have any idea what a good man he is.”
I can see her assembling another vignette, so I ask about her needlepoint.
“It’s the ship your father and I took to France when we were first married. It was honestly the most romantic trip. We danced every night. They had a wonderful band.”
“What kind of music did they play?” I have to speak loudly. My father is making a racket in his sleep.
“Oh, all stuff before your time. Our song was ‘It’s Like Reaching for the Moon.’ They played it every night, the last song. Out on the deck. Beneath all the stars.”
“I don’t know it.”
“You don’t? It’s lovely.”
“How does it go?”
You never know, from someone’s speaking voice, if they will be able to sing or not. Barbara has never had a mellifluous way of talking, but she sings beautifully, surprisingly low and rich.
It’s like reaching for the moon,
It’s like reaching for the sun,
It’s like reaching for the stars—
Reaching for you.
At first she sings down to her needlepoint, but soon she lifts her face to me. I do not hide my pleasure from her. Then she looks at my father and she stops short. “Oh, sweetie, oh, sweetie, don’t do that.” She leaps up and goes to the other side of the bed to wipe the tears from my father’s face with her hand, but her own fall on them both. She holds my father’s hands. “That was our song, wasn’t it?”
My father nods. His face is red and wet.
“It’s strange,” I say to Jonathan that night in the hotel room. “They’ve had a life together. I always thought it was such a desperate act, but I think he grew to really love her. And she has many stories in which he’s the hero.”
“How was she to you?”
“Very kind, appreciative that I came.”
“I’m glad.”
We’re on the big bed in our hotel room. Lena and Jeremy are on the floor in front of the TV, hair wet from swimming, surfing the two hundred and eighty channels. I’ve got an eye on the screen, unsure what might flash on next.
Jonathan tips my face toward him with a finger, away from the TV. “It’s okay,” he says. My overprotectiveness is something we struggle with.
“My father is so entirely himself, that’s the weird thing. You can strip someone of so much, but he’s still there. Just the way his hands rest on the mattress.”
“It must be hard to see him like that.”
“I know it should be. But it feels so much safer with him in that bed. I never thought he could be felled.”
“I didn’t really either,” Jonathan says.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and kiss the hollow below his ear. “Thank you for being here with me.” I feel the defenselessness of my love for him, an utter vulnerability, all my guards down and gone.
It took me several years to agree to marriage. Julie listened to all my fears and said, “You seem to think that once you get married your love for each other is going to start draining out like it’s in a bucket with a leak, like you get this one tank of gas and can’t stop for more. You aren’t allowing for the possibility that love doesn’t always start dying, that it can actually grow.” I thought she was delusionally optimistic.
“You’re gooey,” Jonathan says. It’s Lena’s word for when she feels all floppy with affection.
“I am.”
“Stop hugging!” Jeremy says, his head popping up at the foot of the bed. And when we don’t move away from each other, he climbs up and tries to pry us apart. But he can’t budge us.
I have no memory of ever seeing my parents touch. I suppose it is a luxury, his aversion to our affection with each other. I hope someday he will see it differently.
Lena clicks on CNN. The primaries don’t start for four more months, but they’re playing clips of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigning in different parts of Iowa, as if the caucuses were next week. Jonathan and I look on, but we don’t have our usual argument about them.
“Is your father going to die?” Lena asks after we shut out the light and lie, all four of us, in the king-sized bed. They have no name for him. He is my father, but not their anything.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Are we going to come with you to the hospital tomorrow?” Lena asks.
“Briefly. Daddy will bring you over mid-morning, and if your grandfather is stable you can say hello.”
“Hello and goodbye,” Jeremy says. Death hangs lightly on a six-year-old. Then he thinks more about this. “Do you like your dad?” It’s new to them, me having a dad. They’ve always known that my father lives in Massachusetts and that I haven’t seen him since long before they were born. But he was never real to them until now.
I don’t know how to explain it all to them. “Yes, I like my dad.” I try to think of why, because that’s what they’ll ask next. “He is so familiar to me.”
“Yeah, because he’s your dad,” Jeremy says.
“That’s right.”
But he wants more. “Why is Granny the only grandparent we see?”
“Because Daddy’s dad is dead,” Lena says. “Mom’s mom is dead, and Mom’s dad is dying. That’s why.”
“But he wasn’t always dying.”
I assumed that once I had children I would get in touch with my father. I thought it would feel important to me for them to know their grandfather. But in fact it was just the opposite. “Here come the little pickaninnies,” I could hear him say under his breath as we approached the house. It wasn’t just the possibility that they would overhear a racial slur, or see him drunk and raging. When I became a parent, even moments I had once thought of as tender went rancid: ridiculing Mr. Rogers, pummeling my stuffed animals at night. Once, when the kids were younger, our neighbor, Maya, who was eleven, came over to bake cookies with us. She had a rope bracelet around her wrist, the first hint of breasts beneath her T-shirt. I realized that she was the age I’d been when my parents divorced, and Lena was Elyse’s age. They were both just little girls. My throat squeezed shut and I had to rasp out my instructions. “Why are you talking so funny, Mommy?” Lena asked. Once the cookies were in the oven I went into the bathroom and pressed a washcloth to my face. I had been a little girl, too, with a rope bracelet and breast buds and a father who was reading us Penthouse at night.
The next morning my father is back in restraints. He has had a rough night, hollering and thrashing. A nurse is walking around in a neck brace, and I fear he’s responsible.
Barbara is nearly done with the sea in her square of needle-point. All she has left is the red hull of the ship. My father is sleeping. He has worn himself out.