My father, a stranger
We went up the elevator like that, me with my arm on his shoulders, still feeling like weeping. And at the door to the apartment he strode in ahead of me, and greeted my mother with: “Shosh, you’ll never guess what just happened! I was driving in the car with this guy for two hours before I realized who he was.”
Thus is pathos laid low, on the cutting edge of a laugh. And everyone did laugh — me included. But I knew.
There was the first time he was rude to a stranger. This was a true first: Except when he was provoked by injustice or maybe bad driving, my father had always been the most civil and affable of men. It happened when he was with my mother, and her degree of mortification was a measure of its uniqueness. She’d gone with him to the program he went to each day for people with conditions like his, when one of the other “clients” at the program, a garrulous old guy, sat down beside them at lunch and started bragging about the myriad virtues of his progeny.
“And of course my son,” he said at one point, “has the biggest rice-importing business in Canada.”
My father just looked at him. (“Your father just stared at him,” was how my mother put it, incredulous.) “I couldn’t care less about your son,” he said. “And furthermore, I can’t stand rice.”
A punchline with a horrible price
The perfect putdown, perfectly deserved. What a character! But it came with a price, this punchline, and the price was our knowledge.
There was the first night I got a phone call to come to their place. I’d gotten into the habit of putting a pair of shoes and socks by my bed for a year or so, but the phone ringing at 4 a.m. was still breath-stopping. It was the doorman at their building. My father, unable to sleep for maybe the thousandth time since he’d started to decline, had woken my mother up one too many times, and she’d fled the appartment for the refuge of a nearby Tim Hortons. My father had appeared in the lobby, bereft and in his pyjamas, and given the doorman my number. I asked the doorman if I could speak to him. On the phone he sounded afraid and worried but remarkably clear-headed — as though the moment of crisis had leapfrogged the plaque in his neurons. He and my mother had had a fight, he said, although he couldn’t remember or divine what about. Could I possibly come and help them work it out?
