[PAUSE for episode of dyspnea; technician’s application of tracheobronchial suction catheter]
THE FATHER: Never learned to breathe is why. Awful of me to say, yes? And of course yes ironic, given — and she’d have died on the spot to hear me say it. But it is the truth. Some chronic asthma and a tendency to bronchitis, yes, but that is not what I–I mean nasal. Nothing structurally wrong with his nose. Paid several times to have it examined, probed, they all concurred, nose normal, most of the occlusion from simple disuse. Chronic disuse. The truth: he never bothered to learn. Through it. Why bother? Breathed through his mouth, which is of course easier in the short term, requires less effort, maximizes intake, get it all in at once. And does, my son, breathes to this very day through his slack and much-loved adult mouth, which consequently is always partly open, this mouth, slack and wet, and white bits of rancid froth collect at the corners and are of course too much trouble ever to check in a lavatory mirror and attend to discreetly in private and spare others the sight of the pellets of paste at the corners of his mouth, forcing everyone to say nothing and pretend they do not see. The equivalent of long, unclean or long nails on men, which I tirelessly tried to explain were in his own best interest to keep trimmed and clean. When I picture him it is always with his mouth partly open and lower lip wet and hanging and projecting outward far further than a lower lip ought, one eye dull with greed and the other’s palsied bulge. This sounds ugly? It was ugly. Blame the messenger. Do. Silence me. Say the word. Verily, Father, but whose ugliness? For is she — that he was a sickly child as a child who — always in bed with asthma or ears, constant bronchitis and upper flu, slight chronic asthma yes true but bed for days at a time when some sun and fresh air could not poss — ring for, hurts — he had a little silver bell by the rocket’s snout he’d ring, to summon her. Not a normal regular child’s bed but a catalogue bed, battleship gray they called Authentic Silvery Finish plus postage and handling with aerodynamic booster fins and snout, assembly required and the instructions practically Cyrillic and yes and whom do you suppose was expec — the little silver tinkle of the bell and she’d fly, fly to him, bending uncomfortably over the booster fins of the bed, cold iron fins, minist — it rang and rang.
[PAUSE for episode of ophthalmorrhagia; technician’s swab/flush of dextrocular orbit; change of facial bandage]
THE FATHER: Bells of course employed throughout history to summon servants, domestics, an observation I kept to myself when she got him the bell. The official version was that the bell was to be used if he could not breathe, in lieu of calling out. It was to be an emergency bell. But he abused it. Whenever he was ill he continually rang the bell. Sometimes just to force her to come sit next to the bed. Her presence was demanded and off she went. Even in sleep, if the bell rang, however softly, slyly, sounding more like a wish than a ring, but she would hear it and be out of bed and off down the hall without even putting on her robe. The hall often cold. House poorly insulated and ferociously dear to heat. I, when I awoke, would take her her robe, slippers; she never thought of them. To see her arise still asleep at that maddening tinkle was to see mind-control at its most elemental. This was his genius: to
need. The sleep he robbed her of, at will, daily, for years. Watching her face and body fall. Her body never had the chance to recover. Sometimes she looked like an old woman. Ghastly circles under her eyes. Legs swollen. He took years from her. And she’d have sworn she gave them freely. Sworn it. I’m not speaking now of my sleep, my life. He never thought of her except in reference to himself. This is the truth. I know him. If you had seen him at the funeral. As a child he — she’d hear the bell and without even coming fully awake pad off to the lavatory and turn on every faucet and fill the place with steam and sit for hours holding him on the commode in the steam while he slept — that he made her trade her own rest for his, night after — and that not only was all the hot water for all of us for the entire next morning exhausted but the constant steam then would infiltrate upstairs and everything was constantly sodden with his steam and in warm weathers came a rank odor of mold which she would have been appalled had I openly credited to him as its real source, his rocket and tinkle, all wood everywhere warping, wallpaper peeling off in sheets. The gifts he bestowed. That Christmas film — their joke was that he was giving angels wings each time. It was not that he was not sometimes truly ill, it would not be true to accuse him of — but he used it. The bell was only one of the more obvious — and she believed it was all her idea. To orbit him. To alter, cede herself. Vanish as a person. To become an abstraction: The Mother, Down On One Knee. This was life after he came — she orbits him, I chart her movements. That she could call him a blessing, the sun in her sky. She was no more the girl I’d married. And she never knew how I missed that girl, mourned her, how my heart went out to what she’d become. I was weak not to tell her the truth. Despised him. Couldn’t. This was the insidious part, the part I truly despised, that he ruled me, as well, despite my seeing through him. I could not help it. After he came some chasm lay between us. My voice could not carry across it. How often on so many late nights I would lean weakly in the doorway of the lavatory wiping steam from my spectacles with the belt of the robe and was so desperate to say it, to utter it: ‘What about us? Where had our lives gone? Why did this choking sucking thankless thing mean more than we? Who had decided that this should be so?’ Beg her to come out of it, snap out. In despair, weak, not utter — she would not have heard me. That is why not. Afraid that what she would hear would — hear only a bad father, deficient man, uncaring, selfish, and then the last of the freely chosen bonds between us would be severed. That she would choose. Weak. Oh I was doomed, knew it. My self-respect was a plaything in those clammy little hands as well. The genius of his weakness. Nietzsche had no idea. Ballocks all reason for — and this, this was my thank-you — free tickets? A black joke. Free he calls them? And airfare to come and applaud and shape my face’s grin to pretend with the rest of—this is my thank-you? Oh the endless sense of entitlement. Endless. That you understand eternal doom in all the late-night sickly hours forced in a one-buttock hunch on the booster’s bolted fin of the ridiculous rocket-shaped bed he cajoled her — more plaything than bed, impossible instructions on my knees with the wrong tool as he stood in my light — ironized fin no broader than a ham but I’m damned if I’ll kneel by that ill-assembled bed. My job to maintain the vaporizer and administer wet cloths and monitor the breathing and fever as he lay holding the bell while again she was off unrested out in the cold to the all-night druggist to hunch there on the booster-stage fin awash in the odor of mentholate gel and yawning and checking my watch and looking down at him resting with wet mouth agape and watching the chest make its diffident minimal effort of rising and falling while he through the flutter of that right lid staring without expression or making one acknowledgment of — rising then up out of an almost oneiric reverie to realize that I had been wishing it to cease, that chest, to still its sluggish movement under the Gemini comforter he demanded to have upon him at — dreaming of it falling still, stilled, the bell to cease its patrician tinkle, the last rattle of that weak and omnipotent chest, and yes I would then strike my own breast, crosswise thus—