30 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
college, etc., I’m worthless. Even his job
remains a mystery to me. He was an
engineer, and I like to joke that up until
my late teens I thought that he drove
a train. “I don’t really know all that much
about him,” I said, scooting my chair
closer to his recliner. He looked twenty
years older than he had on my last visit
to Raleigh, six months earlier. One
change was his nose. The skin covering
it was stretched tight, revealing facets
I’d never before noticed. His eyes were
shaped differently, like the diamonds
you’d find on playing cards, and his
mouth looked empty, though it was in
fact filled with his own teeth. He did
this thing now, opening wide and
stretching out his lips, as if pantomim-
ing a scream. I kept thinking it was in
preparation for speech, but then he’d
say nothing.
I was trying to push the obituary
off on Lisa when we heard him call
for water.
Hugh got a cup, filled it from the
tap in the bathroom, and stirred in
some cornstarch to thicken it. My fa-
ther’s oxygen tube had fallen out of his
nose, so we summoned a nurse, who
showed us how to reattach it. When
she left, he half raised his hand, which
was purpled with spots and resembled
a claw.
“What’s on your ... mind?” he asked
Amy, who had always been his favor-
ite, and was seated a few yards away.
His voice couldn’t carry for more than
a foot or two, so Hugh repeated the
question.
“What’s on your mind?”
“You,” Amy answered. “I’m just
thinking of you and wanting you to feel
better.”
My father looked up at the ceiling,
and then at us. “Am I ... real to you
kids?” I had to lean in close to hear him,
especially the last half of his sentences.
After three seconds he’d run out of
steam, and the rest was just breath. Plus
the oxygen machine was loud.
“Are you what?”
“Real.” He gestured to his worn-out
body, and the bag on the floor half filled
with his urine. “I’m in this new ... life
n o w. ”
“It’ll just take some getting used to,”
Hugh said.
My father made a sour face. “I’m a
zombie.”
I don’t know why I insisted on con-
tradicting him. “Not really,” I said.
“Zombies can walk and eat solid food.
You’re actually more like a vegetable.”
“I know you,” my father said to me.
He looked over at Amy, and at the spot
that Gretchen had occupied until she
left. “I know all you kids so well.”
I wanted to say that he knew us su-
perficially at best. It’s how he’d have re-
sponded had I said as much to him:
“You don’t know me.” Surely my sisters
felt the way I did, but something—most
likely fatigue—kept them from men-
tioning it.
As my father struggled to speak, I
noticed his fingernails, which were long
and dirty.
“If I just ... dropped out of the sky
like this ... you’d think I was a freak.”
“No,” I said. “You’d think you were a
freak, or at least a loser.”
Amy nodded in agreement, and I
plowed ahead. “It’s what you’ve been
calling your neighbors here, the ones
parked in the hall who can’t walk or
feed themselves. It’s what you’ve always
called weak people.”
“You’re a hundred per cent right,”
he said.
I didn’t expect him to agree with
me. “You’re vain,” I continued. “Always
were. I was at the house this morning
and couldn’t believe all the clothes you
own. Now you’re this person, trapped
in a chair, but you’re still yourself to us.
You’re like ... like you were a year ago,
but drunk.”
“That’s a very astute ... observa-tion,” my father said. “Still, I’d like to ...
apologize.”
“For being in this condition?” I asked.
He looked over at Amy, as if she had
asked the question, and nodded.
Then he turned to me. “David,” he
said, as if he’d just realized who I was.
“You’ve accomplished so many fantas-
tic things in your life. You’re, well ... I
want to tell you ... you ... you won.”A moment later he asked for more
water, and drifted mid-sip into that nei-
ther-here-nor-there state. Paul arrived,
and I went for a short walk, thinking, of
course, about my father, and about the
writer Russell Baker, who had died a
few weeks earlier. He and I had had the
same agent, a man named Don Cong-
don, who was in his mid-seventies when
I met him, in 1994, and who used a lot
of outdated slang. “The blower,” for in-
stance, was what he called the phone, as
in “Well, let me get off the blower. I’ve
been gassing all morning.”
“Russ Baker’s mother was a tough
old bird,” Don told me one rainy after-
noon, in his office on Fifth Avenue. “A
real gorgon to hear him tell it, always
insisting that her son was a hack and
would never amount to anything. So on
her deathbed he goes to her saying, ‘Ma,
look, I made it. I’m a successful writer
for the New York Times. My last book
won the Pulitzer.’”
“She looked up at him, her expres-
sion blank, and said, ‘Who are you?’”
I’ve been told since then that the
story may not be true, but still it struck
a nerve with me. Seek approval from
the one person you desperately want
it from, and you’re guaranteed not to
get it.
As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he
meant “You won” as in “You won the
game of life,” or “You won over me, your
father, who told you—assured you when
you were small and then kept reassur-
ing you—that you were worthless.”
Whichever way he intended those two
faint words, I will take them, and, in
doing so, throw down this lance I’ve
been hoisting for the past sixty years.
For I am old myself now, and it is so
very, very heavy.I
returned to the room as Kathy was
making dinner reservations at a res-
taurant she’d heard good things about.
The menu was updated Southern: fried
oysters served with pork belly and col-
lard greens—that kind of thing. The
place was full when we arrived, and the
diners were dressed up. I was wearing
the red shirt I’d taken from my father’s
closet, and had grown increasingly
self-conscious about how strongly it
stank of mildew.
“We all smell like Dad’s house,” Amy
noted.