the brokerage house where he works. I told him what Dr. Padman had said, and immediately a debate emerged: Should the doctor have told me about our father’s prognosis and not have told our father? It was inconsiderate at best, Karl thought, and maybe even unethical.
“It seems odd.” He sounded infuriated: at me, at the doctor, at the diagnosis, at the disease. “The doctor has no right to share information with you that he’s withholding from Dad.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have called him at work, I thought. I should have waited until he got home. There was always so much happening in his office. People were always peeking in; his phone was always ringing. He was probably under pressure. I had sprung this on him out of nowhere, told him too quickly, and he’d had no choice but to respond from the gut, unfiltered.
Of the four of us, my brothers Karl and Bob, who lived only a few blocks away from my parents’ house in East Flatbush, saw my father most often. They, more than anyone, except maybe my mother, were going to have to watch him die.
“Are you going to tell Dad what the doctor said?” Karl asked, his voice firm, terse.
“No,” I said, equally unyielding.
I hadn’t decided until that moment that I wouldn’t have that conversation with my father. Maybe Karl or my other brothers could, or even my mother would, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. I now found myself rallying on Dr. Padman’s side. What would be the use of telling Dad? He would probably become disheartened, heartbroken, depressed. On the other hand, he was a religious man. Maybe he would refute his prognosis outright, call it a lie, and not believe it at all. Still, I didn’t think I’d be able to tell him. Maybe it was cowardly, but I couldn’t.
“We should tell Dad what the doctor said,” Karl insisted. “He should have been told. He has a right to know. Wouldn’t you want to know?”
Of course I’d want to know. I agreed with him in principle. But suddenly I wondered: if my father ever found out some other way, would he interpret both the doctor’s and my not telling him as a sign that things were even more dismal than they actually were?
That afternoon, before my father came home, as my mother prepared his supper I told her a milder version of what Dr. Padman had told me.
“The doctor doesn’t think he’s doing well,” I said as she cut up a small squash and slipped the pieces into a pot of boiling water to make a stew. “The doctor says he might not recover.”
I kept needlessly repeating the word “doctor” as if to stress that I was the messenger and not the source.
Securing the lid on the pot, my mother turned off the burners on the stove, poured herself a glass of water from the leaky faucet over the sink and sat down across from me at the bare kitchen table.
“I knew it was something bad,” she said, massaging the sides of her round face with her fingers. Her voice was soft, slow, almost a whisper. “He just seems to be melting away.”
What she cooked that night was a much simpler version of what she’d originally intended, a thin pumpkin soup rather than a full stew. The soup remained untouched, however. None of us felt like eating.
A few days later, my father’s church’s deacon association hosted its yearly anniversary brunch at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet restaurant on Ralph Avenue in Canarsie, Brooklyn. My father’s ivory suit was so big on him that, as he’d put it on that morning, he’d added two more holes to his belt, which, overstretched, looked like scarred skin.
Dragging his gaunt frame between the tables to greet dozens of longtime friends, he seemed buoyant and jovial, but after each handshake and brief chat he had to lay his hand on someone’s shoulder to rest.
When he was done with his round of greetings, he filled a plate with fried chicken wings he never touched. As he coughed, some of the church members came over and held his hand. Others urged him to go home. They might have meant well, but he felt rejected. As if they didn’t want him near their food.
That same afternoon, my brother Kelly arrived from Massachusetts, so my father decided to hold a family meeting. That meeting, like all my father’s rare previous summits, was a rather formal affair. As we all sat around my parents’ long oak dining room table, framed by my mother’s ornately carved, antique-looking but brand-new china and enlarged photographs of our school graduations, weddings and Christmases, my father went directly to the matter at hand.
“The reason for this gathering,“ he announced, “is to discuss what is going to happen to your mother after I’m gone.”
My father was sitting in his usual seat at the head of the table. My mother was on the other end facing him. I was sitting on his left, her right, with Karl, who, at six foot one, towered over all of us. Kelly and Bob, the middle children, as I liked to call them, were sitting across from us. We were all stunned into silence by my father’s pronouncement, both those among us who thought we should recount to him what the doctor had said (brothers Karl and Kelly) and the rest of us who did not. But maybe the doctor was the wisest of any of us. Of course the patient always knows. My father must have suspected even before the doctor had. After all, he inhabited the body that was failing.
“I’m not getting better.” My father covered his face with his hands, then slowly pulled them apart as though he were opening a book. “And when a person’s sick, either you’re getting better or you’re dying.”
He said this so casually and with so little sorrow that my sadness was momentarily lifted.
“What would you like to happen after I’m gone?” he asked, looking directly at my mother. “Do you want to stay in the house, or sell it and buy an apartment?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” my mother said defiantly.
A line of sweat was growing over her lips as she spoke. I appreciated her unwillingness to embark for such an unknown world, to look toward another life, beyond her husband’s.
“The house might be too big for you to live in by yourself,” my father continued, matter-of-factly. “Someone would have to move in with you.”
I kept my eyes on the sheer plastic sheath that covered my mother’s hibiscus-embroidered tablecloth. Was my father trying to prepare us? Put us at ease? Show us that we shouldn’t worry about him, or was he trying to tell us that he was ready for whatever lay ahead?
“Pop.” Bob rubbed his eyes with his balled fists, then raised his hands to catch my father’s attention. While I’d been staring at the tablecloth, he’d been crying.
“Pop, can I ask you a question?” The tears were flowing down Bob’s face. He was easily the huskiest and the most overtly emotional of my three brothers, Karl being the most levelheaded and Kelly the most reserved.
“What is your question?” my father asked, his own eyes growing moist, though he was doing his best to hold back his tears.
“Have you enjoyed your life?” Bob asked, pausing after each word as if to take in its weight and meaning.
I lowered my head again, absorbing the stillness that also followed this question, the kind of hush that suddenly forces you to pay attention to so many unrelated things around you: the shell of the dead fly trapped in the window screen, the handprints on the plastic over the tablecloth, the ticking of a giant clock in the next room, the pressing desire for anything, including an explosion, to burst forth and disrupt the calm.
“I don’t know what to say about that.” My father drew in his breath, something that required a great deal of effort and thus resulted in a grimace-like contortion of his face. “I don’t-I can’t-remember every moment. But what I can say is this. I haven’t enjoyed myself in the sense of party and glory.
