An intermediary
A half-hour later I was there with my older sister (my younger sister did the Tim Hortons detail with my mother). We had a pleasant enough breakfast with him, although he kept asking about my mother, who, we explained, just needed a day and possibly a night off. Sometimes it happened with married couples. But married couples worked these things out, my father said. Very true, we said, but married couples sometimes needed an intermediary. He calmed down enough to go into the den to sit down, and my sister left to rendezvous with my mother and other sister to decide what would happen that night. Five minutes later my father came out of the den and demanded to see his wife and, in the bargain, to know who I was. I told him I was his son, and he told me I was full of shit (the second time he’d ever sworn at me in my life). He told me he wanted me the hell out of his apartment, and grabbed me by the arm to show me out (the first time he’d ever touched me forcefully in my life). I said I wasn’t going anywhere, feeling weirdly light-headed (what could I do other than lean against him?) and that if he wanted, I’d call my mother, his wife, and she could attest to my identity. I got my mother on my sister’s cellphone and handed it to my father.
“There’s a guy here, a jerk, who claims he’s my son,” he said.
He listened, glaring at me with suspicion. “How can he be my son? He’s half a head taller than I am.” He listened some more. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “If this shmegegge is my son, I’m not having any more children.”
The last phone call
And there was the last time I got a phone call to come to their place. The phone rang at 4:30 a.m. this time, and it wasn’t the doorman on the other end of the line but the police. They’d received a 911 call from my mother — apparently my father had woken up in the middle of the night and started to get dressed to “go to work.” My father’s live-in caregiver, a lovely young woman who was devoted to my dad, had caught him going out the door and suggested that he wear his MedicAlert bracelet. My father, thinking she was trying to stop him, had become violent, threatening her and my mother, and picking up a vase and breaking it. The two women had locked themselves in a bedroom and, as previously instructed, called the police.
When I got to the apartment my sisters were already there, and my father was sitting calmly on a couch in the living room. The police officers (one male, one female, both very young) were basically hiding in the kitchen, so he wouldn’t see them and become agitated. They couldn’t force him to go to the hospital, they told us; the only thing they could do legally was arrest him, which they were dead set against. “The last thing in the world I’m doing,” said the female constable, “is putting my hands on an 85-year-old man.”
