The Story of My Father Read Online Free PDF Page A

Denver, just for a little rest after this exhausting spring. His responses to her as I heard them on my end were much the same as what he’d said to me. Oh, no, that was too much trouble. There was no need. He’d had a lovely rest at Sue’s, wouldn’t head home until he felt really restored. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask her to go to so much trouble.
    I suppose what I hoped was that I could wear him down eventually. In any case, I kept at it on and off through the day. It would have been funny, I think, to anyone overhearing us— each of us being so scrupulously polite to the other, bowing and scraping verbally, but each stubbornly, absolutely persistent.
    “Why don’t you think about . . . ?”
    “No, no, it’s far too much. . . .”
    “Dad, I really think you should. . . .”
    “That’s very kind, but I couldn’t. . . .”
    And so on. We were too temperamentally alike in this regard to make any progress at all.
    It became clear to me that I would need to be honest and forceful or he would never accede to me. That I would need to insist. I had never insisted on anything with my father. I don’t know that anyone had.
    The moment arrived later in the afternoon. My husband had wanted to be around for moral support when I made my move, and he was home. We were all in the kitchen, and Dad began again to say how kind we had been, how much trouble he’d caused, and how he thought certainly the next day he ought to get going.
    I said I didn’t think he ought to go to New Jersey alone. That I didn’t want him to. I thought he should go to Denver.
    My husband concurred.
    Dad pointed out that there was an awful lot to do in New Jersey. He needed to be there. He wanted to get clear of it and get up to New Hampshire for the summer.
    I told him I would handle the details in New Jersey.
    He couldn’t let me, he said.
    The back door was open, and in the silences between us we could hear the music of someone in the apartment building behind us, the voices of people next door, the wind in the trees.
    He brought up the dog again.
    I said I would get the dog; I would find a place for her until he came back east.
    He certainly couldn’t let me do that, he said. He’d been enough of a bother already. Though he was still characteristically polite, there was anger now—very contained, very submerged—in his voice.
    I took a breath. “Dad, I can’t let you go,” I said. My heart was pounding in my ears.
    “I’m afraid you have to.” He smiled a thin smile.
    “No, Dad, I can’t. You’ve been ill, really. You’ve had a kind of breakdown of some sort. . . .”
    There was a terrible silence. My husband ended it, offering his general support of me, making the argument again. Dad, as ever more willing to listen to men, nodded and seemed to consider what he was saying, but he still did not agree, did not say yes.
    He and I were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table. I had been looking sideways while my husband talked, out the window at the blur of leaves in the late-afternoon sun. Now I focused on Dad. I leaned forward toward him. “Dad, listen. Imagine if the positions were reversed,” I said. “If I had shown up at your house, and I was exhausted and seeing things that weren’t there.” Now it was his turn to look away. “You would feel it was your responsibility, your duty, to be sure I was all right, wouldn’t you?” I waited a moment. “You would never, never let me go off alone again right away. Would you?”
    There was another long silence in which I think he saw his position clearly—and I saw it too, for the first time. He understood and we understood: we were taking the first step into his illness, whatever it was, together. We would be in charge of him now.
    It was over in a few seconds. He looked back at me, then down. “No,” he said quietly. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t let you go.”
    The next day, my husband bought him an overnight bag, loaned him a fresh shirt, and we drove him