In an upper floor of one of the tall buildings nearby, my mother lay suffering from a rare blood disorder and all the other ills that came one after another because of the treatment itself. We thought she might be dying, though my father seemed to forget this at times, or rather, if she seemed better one day, he cheered up completely and began making jokes again, as though she would certainly get well. The next day he might arrive at the hospital to find one of us crying and his face would fall.
My father grew so impatient for his drink that he stood up on his unsteady legs, bracing himself with his cane. The waiter came. My father ordered his drink. What he wanted so much was a Perfect Rob Roy.
His hearing is not good, and his eyesight is not very good either, and for a while, if I asked him how he was, he would say that except for his eyes and his ears, his balance, his memory, and his teeth, he was doing reasonably well. In order to read certain sizes of print he has to take off his glasses and hold the text within an inch or two of his nose. It used to be that sometimes, when I asked my mother how my father was, she would answer: “He was well enough to go to the Theological Library today.” Then he stopped going to any library because it was so hard for him to see the titles of the books and to bend down to the lower shelves. Then his balance became so bad it was very risky for him to go out by himself at all. Once he fell in the street and hit the back of his head. A stranger passing in a car called an ambulance on his cell phone. It was after that fall that he went into the hospital for physical therapy and after he returned home did not go out by himself anymore. On one of my last visits, at Christmas, he said he needed a magnifying light for the large dictionary in the living room.
He has always enjoyed looking things up in the dictionary, particularly word histories. Now my mother says she is worried about him because he is no longer merely interested in word histories but obsessed by them. He will get up from a conversation with a guest at tea and go look up a word she has used. He will interrupt the conversation to report the etymology. He has always preferred an illustrated dictionary. He likes to study the pictures, particularly the pictures of handsome women. At Christmas, he showed me one of his favorites, the President of Iceland.
I have gone down to look at the furnace again because in a few days it will be removed and new one put in its place. The dust is deep and gray in the old coal bin. The wooden planks that form the sides are rich in color and smoothly fitted together. Tossed in the dust and half buried are the old coal hod and some metal parts of the coal chute. I ask my husband if the men who come to install the new furnace will have to remove the walls of the coal bin and he says he thinks they will not.
After I wrote to my father about my discovery of the boards, he answered my letter with another about his childhood and also another memory of coal men, this one dating from when he was grown up. He said he was out driving with my sister next to him in the car when he happened upon an accident that had just occurred. He said that two men had been delivering coal. The delivery truck had been parked at an angle in a driveway. The driver was talking to the owner of the house, presumably about the delivery. The second man, his assistant, was standing at the end of the driveway with his back to the truck, looking out at the street. The truck’s brakes were apparently faulty and the truck rolled backward down the driveway. Either no one saw this or no one cried out in time, the coal man’s assistant was struck by the truck and run over, and his head was crushed. My father said he drove some distance past the accident, parked his car and, instructing my sister to stay where she was, went back to look. A short way beyond the man’s crushed head, he saw the man’s brains on the pavement.
My father said he knew he was wrong to go and look, he should have driven on. Then he began to talk about the anatomy of the brain, that the incident dramatized a conviction he had always had. He had always believed that consciousness was so dependent on the physical brain that the continuation of consciousness and one’s identity after death was inconceivable. He admitted that this conviction was probably metaphysically naive, but added that it had been strengthened by a lifetime’s observation of many insane and manic-depressive types, some in his own family. Among the manic-depressive types, he said, he included himself. Then he went on to talk about the mind of God, whom he described as a Being with presumably no neurones.
Now the new furnace is installed and working but the house does not seem any warmer. The rooms that were always chilly before are still chilly. There is still a perceptible change in temperature as we go up to the second floor. The only difference is that because this new furnace works with fans, we can hear it while it is on. It is much smaller than the old one, and shiny. It makes a better impression on anyone visiting the basement, which was one reason to get it, I realize now, since we may one day want to sell this house. I have cleaned out the coal bin, at last, preserving the coal hod and the sections of chute and storing them in another wooden stall in a part of the cellar we haven’t touched yet that contains an old pump, among other things.
My correspondence with my father about the furnace seems to have ended, as has our correspondence about his family. His letters, in fact, have shrunk to small scrawled notes attached to more clippings from the local paper.
Twice he has sent my husband and me the same “Ask Marjorie” column, one that discusses the shape of the earth and points out that the ancients knew perfectly well that the earth was round. Both times he wrote a message on the back of the envelope asking my husband and me if we were taught that in ancient times people believed the earth was flat.
He has also sent me more items from the “Crime Beat” section.
“At 10:30 pm a Putnam Avenue resident said an unknown person broke into the home by pushing in the rear door. A dollar bill was taken.”
“At 9:12 am a North Cambridge man from Mass. Ave. said someone had broken in but nothing was missing.”
“A Belmont resident working at a Mass. Ave. address stated that another employee told her that she had been fired and then proceeded to scratch the victim in the neck.” By this one he wrote in the margin: “Why? What is the connection?”
“Friday, March 11. At 11:30 pm, a Concord Avenue woman was walking down Garden Street near Mass. Ave. when a man asked her ‘Are you smiling?’ The woman said yes, so the man punched her in the mouth, causing her lip to bleed and swell. No arrests were made.”
“Three men were arrested for assault and battery on Third Street near Gore Street at 2:50 am. Two men are Cambridge residents, both charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, a shod foot. A Billerica man received the same charge, but with a hammer.” My father put an X in the margin beside the grammar mistake.
“Tuesday, June 13. A Rhode Island resident reported that between 8:45 am and 10 am, at an address on Garden St., an unknown person took her purse with $180 and credit cards. A male was witnessed under the table but the victim believed that it was someone from the power company.”
On my last visit, my father seemed in worse condition than I had seen him before. When I asked him if he was working on anything in particular now, he said, “No,” and then turned his head slowly to my mother and looked at her in bewilderment, his mouth hanging open. There was an expression of pain or agony on his face that seemed habitual. She looked back at him, waited a moment, impassive, and then said: “Yes, you are. You’re writing about the Bible and anti-Semitism.” He continued to stare at her.