slowly collected in the bag attached to
my father’s catheter. The room was
sweltering.
“Was that dinner O.K., Dad?” Lisa
asked.
He raised a thumb. “Excellent.”
How had she and Paul and Kathy
managed to do this day after day? Con-
versation was pretty much out of the
question, so they mainly offered obser-
vations in louder than normal voices:
“She was nice,” or “It looks like it might
start raining again.”
I was relieved when my father got
drowsy, and we could all leave and go
to dinner. “Do you want me to turn your
TV to Fox News?” Lisa asked, as we
put our coats on.
“Fox News,” my father mumbled.
Lisa picked up the remote, but when
she jabbed it in the direction of the tele-
vision nothing happened. “I can’t figure
out which channel that is, so why don’t
you watch ‘CSI: Miami’ instead?”
A
my arrived from New York at ten
the following morning, wearing a
black-and-white polka-dot coat she’d
bought on our last trip to Tokyo. In-
stead of taking her straight to Spring-
moor, Hugh and I drove her to my fa-
ther’s place, where we met up with Lisa
and Gretchen. Our dad started hoard-
ing in the late eighties: a broken ceil-
ing fan here, an expired can of peaches
there, until eventually the stuff over-
took him and spread into the yard. I
hadn’t been inside the house since be-
fore he was moved to Springmoor, and,
though Lisa had worked hard at clear-
ing it of junk, the over-all effect was
still jaw-dropping. His car, for instance,
looked like the one in “Silence of the
Lambs” that the decapitated head was
found in. You’d think it had been made
by spiders out of dust and old pollen.
It was right outside the front door, and
acted as an introduction to the horrors
that awaited us.
“Whose turd is this on the floor next
to the fireplace?” I called out, a few
minutes after descending the filthy car-
peted stairs into the basement.
Amy looked over my shoulder at
it, as did Hugh and, finally, Lisa, who
said, “It could be my dog’s from a few
months ago.”
I leaned a bit closer. “Or it could
be—”
Before I could finish, Hugh scooped
it up with his bare hands and tossed
it outside. “You people, my God.” Then
he went upstairs to help Gretchen
make lunch.
Continuing through the house, I kept
asking the same question: “Why would
anyone choose to live this way?” It wasn’t
just the falling-down ceilings or the rag-ged spiderwebs draped like bunting over
the doorways. It wasn’t the tools and
appliances he’d found on various curbs—
the vacuum cleaners with frayed cords
or the shorted-out hair dryers he’d prom-
ised himself he would fix—but the sense
of hopelessness they conveyed when
heaped into rooms that used to seem so
normal, no different in size or design
from those of our neighbors, but were
now ruined. “Whoever buys this house
will just have to throw a match on it
and start over,” Gretchen said.
What struck me most were my fa-
ther’s clothes. Hugh gets after me for
having too many, but I’ve got nothing
compared with my dad, who must own
twenty-five suits and twice as many
sports coats. Dozens of them were from
Brooks Brothers, when there was just
the one store in New York and the name
meant something. Others were from
long-gone college shops in Ithaca and
Syracuse, the sort that sold smart jack-
ets and white bucks. There were sweat-
ers in every shade: the cardigans on
hangers, their sleeves folded in a self-
embrace to prevent them from stretch-
ing; the V-necks and turtlenecks folded
in stacks, a few unprotected, but mostly
moth-proofed in plastic bags. There
were polo shirts and dress shirts and
casual shirts from every decade of post-
war America. Some hung like rags—
buttons missing, great tears in the backs,
as if he’d worn them while running too
slowly from bears. Others were still in
their wrapping, likely bought two or
three years ago. I could remember him
wearing most of the older stuff—to the
club, to work, to the parties he’d attend,
always so handsome and stylish.
Though my mother’s clothes had
been disposed of—all those shoulder
pads moldering in some landfill—my
father’s filled seven large closets, one
of them a walk-in, and hung off the
shower-curtain rods in all three bath-
rooms. They were crammed into dress-
ers and piled on shelves. Hats and coats
and scarves and gloves. Neckties and
bow ties, too many to count, all owned
by the man who since his retirement
seemed to wear nothing but the same
jeans and same T-shirt with holes in
it he’d worn the day before, and the
day before that; the man who’d always
found an excuse to skimp on others,
but allowed himself only the best. There“We can’t chant ‘Om’ if everybody lip-synchs.”