When he did leave us, he was all alone, in the basement at his workbench on a quiet Saturday afternoon in February. The night before, I had finished editing four or five articles for the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair at midnight. The phone rang at 4 p.m. My aunt Alice called, my mother somewhere in the background. Betty just could not tell me, Alice said. She said Betty could not speak and had gone to her room to lie down. “Please don’t leave her,” I requested, but I knew she would soon be motioning Alice toward the door.
My first instinct was to call the dealer. I didn’t want to feel. But it seemed disrespectful. My life felt disrespectful. For months, I had been struggling to give up drugs. Through a long, uncomfortable autumn of craving and withdrawal, I sat in a recovery group, surrounded by people who were trying to get better too. We came together in a little place with pink walls known as the Miracle Room. I took a few steps up the mountain, then would start to fall back, but someone always appeared to push me along, a little further, through another day to a place where I could feel a little better for a while.
. . .
I flew at 6 a.m. the morning after he died. At home, I felt his presence. The place was filled with him, as it had been, though he was missing and his big chair, where I had last seen him, empty. Near his workbench, I spotted two gifts, handmade, left for me to find: The first was a small cube with photographs glued on every side. To keep the pictures safe, to make them last, a coat of polish had been carefully applied. The photographs, views of our backyard at different times throughout the year, showed the way it looks in snow, in springtime when the trees are in blossom, in summer when all is green, and in the fall when the leaves are colorful. There is a picture of rain falling with the woods behind the house, just greens run together, like in some old painting. There is an image of a foggy morning when the ground is hidden and the bare trees reach out of the mist.
My father’s hands were swollen when he made this memento, all the seasons of home, for me. He was dying. He could barely grip a pencil. Notes and old checks I find from this time in the drawers of his old desk are written in a hand so shaky I can barely recognize it.
In the city, in my apartment, on the bookshelf by the cube of photos, I also keep his second gift, a wooden hand created by tracing his own on a piece of wood. Like the cube, it was carefully polished. At the base where the wrist is, there are three letters carved: GAH, his initials and mine.
I was grateful for these gifts. I had wanted some good-bye and he had left it, without saying anything. My old silent man.
. . .
The night before the funeral, my mother and I talked very little. I think she was shocked by how it felt to lose him. I don’t think she expected to feel so overcome. I had never seen her look so fragile and what I sensed in her strongly was regret, guilt: She should have heard him in the basement; she should have checked on him.
Finally, she began to speak. “You know,” she began, “I didn’t think he was really going to die. I couldn’t believe it was going to happen, though I look back . . . last year . . . I had just gotten my new cornea. They wanted me to wear contact lenses, but I was too nervous to put them in. My hands shook. You remember. Every time I tried, I made a mess of it.”
“Betty, quit your damn fretting.”
“Your father calmed me down. I sat on the edge of the bed. He put them into my eyes in the mornings. He took them out at night. I was too nervous . . . My hands shook. Not long ago, he said I was going to have to learn to do it myself. He looked at me and put his hand on my cheek. I should have known how close it was.”
“Betty, don’t worry so much. Sit down. Please sit down and hold still.”
One detail consoled me a little. Just before it happened, he and Betty were finishing lunch, and before he went to the basement where his heart gave out, my aunt Alice arrived with a slice of warm coconut pie. I told my mother that it was a gift to send a good man off. She just stared back until she said quietly, “I really didn’t do much for him. I wish we could go back.”
Before she headed into the bedroom, she said, “I don’t want to go in there,” so I walked back with her and laid my head on his pillow while she brushed her teeth.
On the day of the funeral, I had taken food up to my aunt and uncle’s. Harry, recently sick himself, was sitting in his recliner, already in his suit, clipping his nails. When he saw me he stood, as if for some sort of salute, and put his hand on my shoulder. His face showed more pain than I had seen in him. Of all of us, he was the one who cried the most at funerals, and he and Big George had worked together almost fifty years, always arriving before the sun came up, whatever the weather.
Harry had aged since Christmas. With his eyes watering, he said, “Your father was a better man than me.” I said no, but he kept on. “Your father kept us going,” he said. “He could make you laugh. Sometimes it bugged the hell out of me. But the customers loved it. Everyone loved George. They came in just to see him. There was no one like him. He helped keep the business going.”