“Who am I to judge?” she said to Aaron. “If the pope said that about his flock, is it any wonder I feel that way about my flock of artifacts?”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, my love, but you are not the pope.”
Joy wanted to save everything, every scrap, as if it were a soul. A museum was not a warehouse, however, and a conservator was not a hoarder. Collections had priorities, strengths. Every Houdini flyer did not need to be preserved. One Houdini flyer was quite enough. Yet she had been trained to save, not to choose.
A mother of small children with a bachelor’s degree in Art History, she had volunteered at the museum two days a week as soon as Daniel started nursery school. It wasn’t until that first bankruptcy that she’d gone to work there full-time as a secretary, assisting the conservator. Both he and the director of the museum encouraged her to go back to school. She couldn’t give up her job to go full-time, but she managed, working during the morning, going to school in the afternoon, so she could be home to make dinner and put the children to bed. She worked long and hard for that Ph.D. The museum hired her as a conservator even before she finished. She loved the battered pots and pans, the sewing machines, the Yiddish-to-English primers, liked to handle them. She knew others would like to handle them, too, and so she protected them from the loving caresses that would, as in a myth or a fairy tale, eventually destroy them.
The director had a bit of a crush on her, though he had never bothered her after that one time, and even then she had been able to fend him off with a pretense of utter ignorance and innocence, one of her favorite strategies, no hurt feelings or embarrassment. It had been a long time since she’d had to act as though she had no idea what a man meant when he spoke in a husky voice and happened to rest his hand on her knee. That was one piece of the past she’d been only too happy to consign to the garbage.
The conservator who had encouraged her had died years ago. The director had retired. The field of conservation relied more and more on computers and software and technology, or so she read, she could not possibly employ all the new techniques, it was hard enough for her writing emails. The museum was changing with the times, too, growing bigger and more professional, and Joy had begun to identify with her artifacts, out of date, obsolete, left behind.
* * *
Joy had already gotten Aaron dressed. All Molly had to do was bring her father his breakfast and his lunch, and make sure he didn’t wander or fall.
“For once I can relax at the office,” Joy said. “Goodbye, Aaron. Goodbye, Molly. Don’t drive each other crazy. I’m off to the salt mines.”
Aaron poked at the lump in his sweatshirt and asked what it was doing there. Molly explained about the colostomy bag at great length, as if a longer explanation would stay in his head longer, but at a certain point he just waved his hand at her, a dismissal, and she left him in his chair and washed his dishes. By the time she was done, he was calling for her mother.
“She went to work, Daddy,” she said from the doorway.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that is so.”
He called for Joy ten minutes later, and ten minutes after that, until Molly decided to stay in the bedroom with him.
“No wonder Mom is going nuts,” she said to him.
“Who can from Joy refrain,” he sang, “this gay, this pleasing, shining, wond’rous day?”
By two o’clock, the apartment was driving Molly insane, the banging radiators and stifling steam heat, the television’s endless loop of NY1 weather and politics and interviews of off-Broadway dancers. She had to get out.
“You have to get out,” she said to her father. She bundled him in his jacket and herded him and his walker to the door. “Come on. It’s so hot in here. With the TV grinding on and on. I can’t stand it.”
“Well, I can.”
“You need fresh air.”
“You sound like your mother. Where is your mother? Joy! Joy!”
“She went to work.”
“Oh, she did, did she?”
He often took on this joshing tone when he was confused. Molly hustled him into the elevator.
“Well, where’s your mother, anyway?” His voice had gone from joshing to desperation. “Joy? Joy! Where are you? Where’s your mother?”
They made it to the park, and Aaron stared at the evergreen bushes.
Molly sat on a bench beside him. The air was cold and wet. “So,” she said. Before the dementia, he had been a kind of genius at small talk, always able to chat and charm. That gift had been lost, gradually, but even so he had continued to enjoy a good attack on the mayor. She mentioned the mayor now, and he said, “All a bunch of crooks,” but did not elaborate. Molly moved on to the grandchildren. He liked to hear anything at all about them, laughing and calling them spitfires or wisenheimers.
“So Cora and Ruby go to public schools,” she said.
“Imagine that.”
“I hope they’re really good ones.”
Her father nodded. “Yes, indeed,” he said.
“I thought Ruby would go to private school for seventh grade for sure. Not that anyone asked my opinion. Of course no one can afford the tuition anymore. Except Russian oligarchs.”
“Well, now.”
“Are there any good public middle schools?” she soldiered on. “There weren’t when Daniel and I were that age, that’s for sure.”
“Is that so?”
Molly tried a couple of other topics, but none of them, not the state of the CIA or health care or water quality, sparked more than a nod, an all-purpose phrase: You don’t say; imagine that.
Oh, Daddy, Molly thought, and tears came to her eyes. She was a useless, selfish daughter, dragging her father out into the cold against his will so that she could get some fresh air, so that she could breathe, so that she could escape when she knew he could never escape what was happening to him, not if she made him stumble behind his red walker as far as the North Pole. And to top it all off, in these precious moments at what was surely the beginning of the end of his conscious life, she couldn’t even think of anything to say to him. To her own father.
She tried reminiscing. Older people loved to reminisce. “Remember when you had to drive up to Vermont to take me home from camp?”
“You don’t say?”
“Yup. Twice, actually. Because when you got there the first time, I had already changed my mind and wanted to stay. But by the time you got home again, I had changed it again and wanted to leave. I was so bossy. Why did anyone listen to me? I was eleven, for god’s sake.”
But her reminiscences were apparently not his reminiscences. He smiled and patted her gloved hand with his gloved hand, his expression blank.
“Now, look, Daddy,” she said, “you drove all day. I know you remember. You have to. You were so annoyed, but then you just laughed. That got me really upset — that you laughed at me, that my situation was comical and I was just one of a million little girls who did this, just an ordinary, predictable child. You have to remember all that. I got mad when you laughed, and you somehow understood and stopped laughing and pretended to take me very seriously, and then I was happy.”
“Imagine that, imagine that.”
Then another old man with an identical red walker appeared, and Aaron seemed to come alive. He stood up, with great effort, and offered the man his hand. “How do you do?” he said.
The slow determination of his movements, the difficulty and awkwardness of them, lent them a seriousness, almost dignity. Why don’t we revere the elderly? Molly wondered briefly. She knew why. They were difficult and inconvenient. But how brave her father was just by standing up, by insisting on the code of conduct he’d been brought up with, by being, simply, polite. He still tried to open doors for Molly, his hand shaking. At first she told him not to, afraid he’d topple over. But then she saw it mattered. It was what a man did, a man brought up when he was brought up.