Calypso(60)

“We brought you a cup of coffee,” I said.

“Fantastic!”

The living room is the last semi-presentable patch of territory in my father’s house—the only one without a desk in it—so we retired there. “Gosh, you all look terrific,” he said, taking a seat on the sofa. “So tanned and healthy.”

“What happened to your arm?” I asked.

“I fell,” he told me, waving away my concern. “It happens sometimes when I turn around too quickly.”

“So you fall, and then what?”

“I crawl around for a while until I come to a chair or something, and then I lift myself up.

“Hey,” he said to Amy, no doubt eager to change the subject, “I pulled out a few things I thought you might like.” He gestured to a pile on a low table beside the sofa. “There’s a straw hat that belonged to your mother and some pocketbooks.”

“I don’t really wear hats,” Amy told him.

I didn’t want my father to feel bad, so I picked it up. “The only bit that really says ‘woman’ is the bow,” I said, walking into the bathroom to try it on and noticing that both the sinks were filled with stuffed animals. It was like they had planned to take a bath and were just waiting for someone to turn the water on. What on earth? I thought. “I can’t believe that the straw’s still in such good shape,” I called into the other room.

“Isn’t it?” my father called back.

“I’ve got a little something for you too,” he said as I reclaimed my seat, the hat still on my head. “Just a few things I knew you’d like.”

On top of my pile were two Brueghel postcards. Both were in inexpensive plastic frames, bought that way, I assumed.

“He’s someone you like, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

Beneath the postcards were a couple of nature calendars, the first of which had a fox on the cover, nuzzling her kit.

“Isn’t that terrific! I thought maybe you’d want to frame it.”

“Hmmmm,” I said. My father has criticized every gift I’ve ever given him. His disapproval is consistently swift and hard, but for some reason I can never respond in kind. “How nice,” I told him.

The second calendar was devoted to chimps. “I know how much you like them. And these photos, I’m telling you, they’re just outstanding.”

I opened it to March and saw an adult male with his arms crossed, not defiantly but as if he were trying to make up his mind about something: whether to rip off the photographer’s hands or to start with his face, most likely. Then I noticed that the calendar was two years old. “Well,” I announced, looking at my watch, “I guess we’d better get going.”



Amy and I were too shaken up to say much of anything in the car—underpants on Mom’s butcher-block table!—so we just looked out the windows until we reached the airport. There we learned there was “weather” in Washington, DC, where Hugh and I were headed.

“Well, where isn’t there weather?” I whined, looking up at the board. “Can’t they be more specific?”

Amy’s flight to New York had been affected by distant storms as well. It was one of those times when your flights are delayed, and then delayed again. The DC departure time moved from seven to eight, then eventually to nine forty-five. Amy’s flight was canceled altogether, so she wound up catching a taxi and spending the night in a hotel. After sitting around for a while, Hugh and I decided we might as well eat dinner. There weren’t many choices at that hour, so we went to the 42nd St. Oyster Bar.

“This is where my mom and dad were the night Martin Luther King was assassinated,” I said to Hugh after we had ordered. “Not here at the airport, obviously, but at their original location downtown.” I told him how someone had stepped out of the kitchen to announce the news, and how everyone but my parents had applauded. “Our family hadn’t been in the South very long, and that was a real eye-opener.”

“Hmmm,” Hugh said, pulling out his phone. “I’m just going to text Amy and see if she was able to book a flight for tomorrow morning.”

I looked around at our fellow diners, all on their way to somewhere else, but all I could think about was my father, crawling through his house in search of a chair he could use to hoist himself up. He’d said it so matter-of-factly, “What I do…,” as if I’d asked how he makes a sandwich.

There are any number of people who have to live like that when they get to be terribly old, but for him it’s a choice. My father could have a nice place. There could be help at the ready should he fall: a cook, a driver, someone to make the bed every morning. He’s just too cheap to pay for it. “The killer,” I said to Hugh, who had finished texting Amy and was now texting someone else, “is that he’s saving the money to give to his kids, who will spend it wildly without even thinking. Maybe not Lisa, but you’ve seen everyone else in action. A person could live handsomely on the money we waste over the course of a given year, and here’s our father wandering from room to room with a flashlight. He falls and gets banged up, then covers his bruises with cotton balls and masking tape because Band-Aids are too expensive!”

“Why don’t you pay to get him a driver?” Hugh asked.