MY FATHER wanted to see me before he died, but I didn’t want to see him. I’d filed G.S.F. away in a box the size of a small bean in the back of my mind and almost never thought of him at all. But I remembered what he said when I’d seen him last: that he had put food on the table, pulled strings to get me into Harvard, and put up with my so-called crappy attitude.
True enough.
So it came down to duty. He asked for me, and I owed him for all the things he’d given his wife’s bastard child.
The Clinton Family Home was a nursing home near the town of Westbrook, in an agricultural plain thirty-five miles north of Boston. The sprawling facility had roofs topped with cupolas, walls of windows and balconies looking over a western view of endless meadows and pasture land.
I entered G.S.F.’s private room as a nurse was leaving with his lunch tray. He was sitting up in bed, looking pale and thin and just as forbidding as ever.
“Dad,” I said.
The word just jumped out of my mouth. I went to his bedside and kissed his cheek, and he said, “Take a seat.”
“Sure.” I dragged a hard-backed chair to his bedside, sat down, and asked, “How are you feeling?”
“They won’t give me my drugs, Brigid. Why not? What’s the difference at this point if it’s heroin or methadone?”
“Heroin is illegal,” I said.
“I think you can get me out of here,” he said, plucking at the tape holding an IV in place in his arm.
The veins in his arm looked like major highways on a map of the Midwest. Must’ve been a nightmare to find a good one.
“Leave that alone,” I said.
He sighed and looked at me with a question in his eyes.
I wondered if he was going to apologize to me for twenty years of tough love without the love. I wondered if he was going to ask for forgiveness.
But he said, “This is it, Brigid. I don’t mind. Take it from the great Franz Kafka: ‘The meaning of life is that it stops.’”
He went into a coughing fit that lasted three or four minutes and must have hurt like hell.
I stood and put my hand on his back, keeping my eyes on the IV line, making sure that he didn’t yank it out, and finally he pulled himself together.
He sipped water, then launched another lofty quote from the dead writers’ and philosophers’ society. “As Socrates so wisely said, ‘The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.’”
“You’re thinking of God? Would you like to pray?”
“Hell, no.”
He tried to laugh and was overcome with a coughing fit, spitting blood into tissues, and the chest spasms kept on coming.
A buzzer dangled from the side rail. I thumbed it hard.
A nurse came in, took a look at George, and left. She returned a minute later and gave him a shot.
“You need anything else?” she asked him.
“What else have you got?”
“I’ll check in on you before I go off duty.”
He waved her off as if he were flicking away a fly.
But he did settle down. I sat beside him, watching blue skies and fluffy clouds through his windows, and tried to call up a good memory of me and G.S.F. watching a movie, or a ballgame, or driving somewhere or dancing to something. I came up with no good memories. But I did remember the harsh criticism, rejection, and unapologetic neglect.
“Dad,” I said. “You wanted to see me?”
“I did?”
“Didn’t you? Kyle said you asked for me.”
“Oh. I don’t remember. I was just thinking of something Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote. ‘Death should take me while I am in the mood.’ And I am in the mood, Brigid. My will is out of date, and I fired my lawyer. But stop off at the house. Take the books and pictures.”
“Okay. Thanks. Feel better.”
He fell asleep then. It was the drugs, not death. I stood looking at him, thinking of him, my mother, our small house on Jackson Street, his inability to forgive my mother for having me or forgive me for being born. And now he couldn’t even say I’m sorry when he was close to death.
I should forgive him, right? But I didn’t feel it. At all.
I waved to the nurse on my way out the door.
Chapter 89
JAMES HAD asked me to go with him up the steep and narrow staircase to watch the sunrise from the bell tower. The air was chilly, but we sat close together on a bench built inside the railing as daybreak lit the distant hills. I liked this little seat with a view so much. Like the rocky outcropping in the woods behind us, where I had opened my heart to James last year, I felt close to God here. I also felt part of this church, this village, and very connected to James.
We were holding hands. James looked deep in thought. I asked him what he was thinking, and I was prepared for him to say that he was rehearsing his homily, or that the tower needed painting, or that he missed Harold Noah, a parishioner who had moved away.